En Vogue, OUT Vogue.

I went to CVS to get some last minute wrapping paper, and decided to check out some magazines for haircut ideas. As I grabbed the nearest wrapping paper with little skiing snowmen, and a Vogue, I was pleasantly surprised to see a Venice local who's face I knew well on page 98--the cook/co-owner of Gjelina. I had seen him almost every day for years when the restaurant was in its earliest stages, and there he was chopping fish in the form of electric blue hues of a Vogue photograph. Applause applause! I don't know him personally, but I mentally slapped him a high five as a Venice resident myself.

This unexpected spotting kept my fingers turning through the magazine. In this spread, the same model poses with other people rising to stardum-- a classical musician, a pilot, an athlete along with our chef from above, so that Vogue can present their impossibly fancy dresses eight inch stilletoes with real-people doing their thang. Okay, I like this concept. Even though the model looked like a fan/groupie/gold-digger in all of the photos, the spread celebrates fashion while showing a sense of awareness of people that are working hard to get to where they are today ... and it did get me to buy the magazine after all.

However, then I got to the page entitled, "Already Famous," in which a model poses with different bands on the up and up. "Eight music headliners play backup to Sasha Pivovarova." The model smiles and grabs each guy's arm while clutching a million dollar purse. Okay, I understand that this is Vogue Magazine, whose content is all about the A-list of fashion and makeup. However, why couldn't they include a female musician as their model? Music and fashion (worlds that unavoidably rely on or relate to image and presentation) very often go hand-in-hand, and this spread seems to be trying to address that. By adding a sexy female model with all of these boyish musicians just perpetuates the stereotype that music is a male-dominated art, and that women are merely the pretty fashionable fans that help admire it. Of course, I might be equally offended if the magazine added the latest American Idol wanna-be "musician" to represent all female musicians, but either way, keep it real, vogue.

Vogue, mix and match fashion and music, but you don't need to separate the fashion from the music to do so. If you are going to use music to amp up your fashion, keep it real and use some female musicians, who would rock that haut couture fashion just as well, if not better. C'mon. Images of token fans and trophy wives are just out of style.