With Kim and Kanye’s “golden toilet” tower and headless nude statues top of mind, we take a look at the bridal mags as we head into peak wedding season.
The Knot was a Web site first and magazine second. Staff are listed on the masthead along with their Twitter handles, while features such as “10 Biggest Wedding Planning Blunders to Avoid” give it a BuzzFeed feel. Along those lines, there are ads masquerading as content like the “Nest,” a home insert that looks like it was paid for by Bed Bath & Beyond. We like that you could get through your entire year of wedding planning with just this one edition, which runs the gamut from stories on picking out a dress to choosing places to honeymoon — even though one of them is a promotional special with Sandals-sponsored content. The thin paper stock and a lack of decent narrative detract from the $9.99 cover price. Our advice: Look for it at the nail salon.
For six bucks, Bridal Guide is perhaps the title most geared toward the kind of couples — the anti-Kimyes — who don’t buy into the typical spending hysteria that goes with wedded bliss. Most wedding magazines are filled with eye candy and love stories, but Bridal Guide actually has some sensible journalism. The 101 budget tips tell how to cut costs on just about everything. Okay, creating a playlist and using your iPod isn’t going to win any prizes, but there’s also this: “Make sure the wait staff knows absolutely not to pre-open bottles or clear away glasses from the tables that aren’t empty.” We wouldn’t go so far as to close the bar early and start offering coffee, however.
One of Bridal Guide’s honeymoon features offers wallet-friendly alternatives to typical chichi destinations. Want to go to Tuscany? Try Istria (Croatia) instead. Overall, this is a smart magazine with a sensible bride in mind. The cover of Brides boasts it’s from the “publisher of Vogue and Glamour,” a.k.a. Condé Nast. That suggests it’s aimed at girls with dough or marrying it. It opens with a first-person account by Lea Goldman on how a Type-A career girl plans the big day by creating lots of lists and forgetting the fun. Brides chooses socialite Olivia Palermo as its cover girl. She reveals her wedding plans inside (Mr. B., her dog is coming). Elsewhere, Drew Barrymore answers reader questions on juice-cleanse diets. Like all these titles, it has a cover formula based on big numbers: “50 Ways to Save $500,” among them. Saving $500 might be the last thing on a Brides reader’s mind, however.
If you like traditional, this is your title. Inside Weddings offers advice such as how to maximize time spent doing a registry so as not to bore your guy to tears. Surprise, surprise! The top two editors at this magazine are men who offer a decidedly different perspective. The magazine is an interesting mix of wedding styles. There’s the New England nuptials of an HGTV star who went for a modern rustic affair complete with a birch tree-theme cake and a gay wedding at which the couple wore Roman Emperor-style wreaths. One drawback: While Inside Weddings is full of inspirational ideas, its design could use a little refresh.
The New Yorker leads its summer fiction issue with a lively profile of author John Green, whose young-adult blockbuster “The Fault in Our Stars,” about a teen couple with cancer, is getting the movie treatment. “Your writing isn’t that great,” novelist PF Kluge recalls telling Green after rejecting him in an application for his writing class at Kenyon College. Green, who insists he was a “genuinely poor student,” took Kluge’s advice and started writing the stories he told during smoking breaks, and the rest is history. “We’ve almost taken too much power away from ourselves” when it comes to grappling with the meaning of life, Green says of adults.
This kind of talk is way too heavy for New York, which chooses to focus instead on Shailene Woodley, 22, star of “The Fault in Our Stars.” Emblazoning Woodley on its cover with her actor friend Brie Larson, the magazine declares in an impossibly fluffy profile that the duo are “embraced by Hollywood, yet determined to change it.” We had a hard time grasping how their New Age diets and “romantic belief in emotional honesty” are revolutionary or even unusual. Yawn.
Time, meanwhile, attacks the subject of revolution head-on this week, and the battlegrounds are harrowing. A cover story on transgender notes rightly that this demographic represents “America’s civil-rights frontier,” with profiles of transgender professors, military officers and homecoming queens. There’s also a bruising feature on Syria, and the revolution’s devastating toll. “Our revolution was stolen,” says one Syrian youth. “They turned it from a fight for freedom into an Islamic revolution.”