It seems that New York Magazine has taken Gawker‘s scientifically-precise criticism of its covers to heart, and decided to create a concept cover this week that harkens back to its Felker/New Journalism era. By using the image of an enormous woman towering over a man, it simultaneously evokes dread, feminist backlash, recession anxiety, and kinky fetishism: a deft combination of rapid-succession signifiers that would’ve done Esquire‘s George Lois proud.
You gotta hand it to New York, it’s not bad. Sadly, it’s been done before. In 1995.
Submitted for your approval is the cover of The Nose, issue 26. For those who missed its brief—but great—run, The Nose was a satirical news and entertainment magazine out of San Francisco. It was sort of like a West Coast version of SPY Magazine, or The Onion, were it more obsessed with conspiracies, porn, cable access shows, and comedians. There’s really almost no legacy of The Nose on the Web, but you can check out founding editor Jack Boulware’s book, Sex, American Style: An Illustrated Romp Through the Golden Age of Heterosexuality. Oh, and in case you’re wondering: smushed under the pump of that amazon woman is the comedian Patton Oswalt, who also wrote the accompanying article about the “giant woman” fetish.
I’ll leave it to other, more skilled writers to critique the actual article accompanying the New York cover.
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