Maghound

I have just learned about this website Maghound in the US where you can sign up to what is essentially a bulk magazine delivery. For the absurdly cheap price of $5 you get any three magazines sent to you each month. You can swap which magazines you want whenever you like and there’s lots of packages for different numbers of mags. We need this in the UK! I am good for a lot of magazine purchases in a month. I should really subscribe to them all but it can be a hassle when you move. I would be especially inclined to sign up if there is a decent discount for buying more as I know I will anyway.

Magazines I read most issues of:

• Vogue
• Elle
• Glamour
• Marie Claire
• Look

And ones I will pick up if I’ve read everything else and am on a train journey or something:

• InStyle
• Grazia
• American teen magazine

Then there’s all the music and culture magazines I would consider if they were a tad cheaper. I love Word magazine but often can’t justify the £5 these days even though I know I will get much more reading out of it than three copies of Look would ever provide.

S

New magazines

I know we’re all very excited about the new Dasha Zhukova-edited Pop magazine but frankly, I spent my magazine money on Love a few weeks ago and I am bitter about it, so we will discuss it no further, except to say that I saw a couple of the beautiful Klimt-esque Tavi covers at the Tate Modern shop and I wanted them. But I walked away, and instead Sting’s daughter keeps looking at me from where I have placed her by the bed, ready to tear out all the good pictures when I have time.

Chosen purely for being "intriguing", Coco is undeniably beautiful and as quick-witted and silver-tongued as the average garden snail.

What I really like about Tavi is how eloquent she is. She does all fashion blogs a favour by writing in a coherent way without emoticons, about topics she is passionate about. I think she dresses well according to her own tastes and that’s good enough for me. As well as being photographed in her now trademark standoffish pose, she wrote a little blurb and it was much better written than a lot of the rest of the magazine, much of which was dross in need of a spellcheck.

Tavi in Love.

I had little to no interest in the heirs to the Playboy fortune, and I really didn’t need to hear about how boring lesbians are when they’re not busy being skinny fashion plates. It seems as if whoever wrote that article for Love hadn’t actually read Beth Ditto’s awesome cover story the issue before. The message of this little article was that lesbians should stop conforming to stereotypes or being political. Truly, under this banner slogan from a straight, married person, lesbians of the world can unite. Cats will be left to die in the street and sensationally talented but non-skinny vocalist kd lang will be declared bankrupt.

In other mag news, I actually spotted one I’d never seen before while prowling around WH Smith’s the other day (I spend quite a lot of time hanging out near magazine racks it seems). Why would anyone launch a magazine now unless it’s going to be amazing? The main question that needs to be answered is why anyone would launch this magazine at all, because look at it:

What does the title mean? It is clearly not a home or design magazine, it’s a fashion magazine. I was going to scrawl comments on this picture in MS Paint but they would all have been “?” as I am confused by everything. What are these bumps that lingerie can solve? Were there no better pictures of Cheryl Cole available? Have they been banned from using pleasant fonts?

I’m not averse to a personal makeover magazine. A long, long time ago there was a magazine called Looks that was all about “making the best of yourself” and it actually wasn’t too soul-destroying: as a young teenager I found a lot of the advice in it rather helpful. But then it didn’t look like someone decided a knock-off hybrid between Yours and Look was a brilliant commercial venture.

Saucer of milk for the S-drive today. I’m going to go and have a lie down now.

x S

Glamour

As I mentioned before, I really liked the fashion spreads in this month’s Glamour, and here is how the styled the lovely Malene Birger dress (above). Other chiffon-y, angelic items came from Reiss and Stella McCartney (I thought these knickers were expensive until I saw the ones Natalia Vodianova wore in this month’s Vogue).

I also really liked this shoot revolving around casual items, with the youngest, glossiest-looking model imaginable. Glamour is always about smooth edges and clean styling but I like the look – I’ve always liked primary colours and boxing things up, and hated crinkled textures, raggedness and muddy colours. I’m not really a rock chick sort of person, as my devotion to chiffon makes clear.

S

Hi-end / Lo-end

I bought a stack of magazines yesterday to make up for an aggravating day, and a few things jumped out at me that made me think about the difference between all the types of style inspiration I get.

Reading Glamour’s best dressed list was confusing as I have no idea why Kate Beckinsale is considered as or more well-dressed than Keira Knightley, or any of a host of other seeming contradictions (Leighton Meester is more stylish than Blake Lively, and more fun). It didn’t come as a huge surprise to see Cheryl Cole come tops as hers is probably the most discussed look of the past year, even more than Kate Moss, whose style increasingly feels like more a reflection of what she is comfortable with than a new look – although I do admire that.

Then in contrast to endless pages of Kate Hudsons wearing what Rachel Zoe has instructed them to, there are the looks that come from real life. Vogue referenced a few of my favourite blogs, such as Style Bubble and Sea of Shoes - seeing SoS in Vogue was crazy because reading it still feels personal and under-the-radar. But there it was in a mainstream print format.

Blogs still really appeal because of the instant access, speedy updating and yet the amazingly high quality of a lot of the output. In particular, French blogs provide me with so much inspiration (and envy).

My new favourite blog is Le Blog de Betty. Look how beautiful she is – all the pictures are very nicely put together, and she wears mostly British high street with the odd quirky designer item thrown in – look through her blog for an amazing wing-shouldered jacket from Valentine Gauthier. This is quite a low-key day for Betty, but I love how she manages to make New Look shoes looks like Dior.

So after getting inspiration from the more practical, every-day and yet often beautiful and whimsical world of fashion blogs, I also love looking at the utterly unattainable couture photoshoot in this month’s Vogue, featuring Natalia Vodianova, whose best quality is that she always looks like herself.

S

Fashion week burnout

As the pros get burned out from actually having to attend the shows, bloggers get burned out having to accompany every post with pictures from the catwalk.

Instead, I have been enjoying my batch of magazines brought back from France. I will not even get into Vogue Paris as it is very heavy, dark and in French, whereas Jalouse (“Super”) and Muteen are much slighter and more fun. The cover of Jalouse promises “MODE ONLY”, which I took to mean it contained only fashion. Sign me up! Much as I enjoy a true life story, I really prefer magazines that don’t make me think too much or remind me that I need to maintain human relationships. Instead I wish to be transported to a world where I can buy shoes that cost the same as my rent. Frou frou!

Muteen from very much along the lines of US Elle Girl, very small and slight, much like its models. Brilliantly, an archive of past issues can be found on their website, and you can ever turn pages as if reading a real magazine albeit in a darkened room as the background is black. I recommend it, especially if you speak magazine French (“tres chic”; “demode”; “chapeau”).

These magazines are designed for people who enjoy shopping for actual things as much as for high-art items barely designed to rest on a human body. And having said I won’t discuss any shows today, I have noticed that the collections have been more commercial. Some people will find this a little sad but when I see things I would actually wear, I feel more inspired.

S

Mildly thrilling magazine moment

At the back of the Elle I am guiltily reading, they have torn out what looks like quite a chunky section of advertising. There is a note from the Editor saying that they had to remove it for legal reasons! I can imagine the panic of the editorial and production staff, then the poor printers having to tear out thousands upon thousands of bound-in supplements by hand. What could these legal reasons have been and even more suspectly, which brand has been caught up in the trouble? Was the advertising offensive or could they just not pay their bill for the pages?

This has intrigued me in a minor way, because it has the thrill of something official making a mistake, like when newsreaders get the giggles.

S

Disco news

D.I.S.C.O.

ID has chosen Leona Lewis to be this month’s cover star, adopting its trademark winking pose. The juxtaposition of Disco (the tagline details an attribute of Leona’s for each letter starting with D for “desirable”) meant I had to report this. I won’t repeat them all as ID’s sub-editor’s text also leaves a lot to be desired.

I like to see a popstar get jazzed up in a style different to their usual one so I am mediumly interested to see what ID does with Leona “glittery ballgown” Lewis and earnestly hope they don’t bother running an interview.

S

Disco Nap London

Hello and buenvenido to Disco Nap London, a new joint effort in the world of blogging about fashion, design and style.

Although London is our name, our home and the best place in the world (I never think the grass is greener), I am actually posting my inaugural entry from Washington D.C.  Many miles I have walked today while skiving off the work I was sent here to do, and so far I have turned up little in the way of interesting stuff to buy. But the week is young and the place has 4 Macy’s department stores. It’s appropriate to buy Marc Jacobs while in America.

The wonderful and well-publicised thing about America is how cheap things are here, and so when I say I have $20 worth of trashy magazines to keep me occupied this evening, this represents a major task. US fashion mags tend to have nothing on UK ones as, even if I had $1000 going spare, I would not spend it on looking like Bunny MacDougal from Sex and the City, but as a late convert to downloading, I am now a devoted mooner over Lauren Conrad. I can get my fix while I am here before I return to spend more time knitting my brow over more refined concerns like the leg-width of Uniqlo cords and how much to save into the APC trenchcoat fund (credit crunch thinking!)

S