Twenty-three years in the past, GLAMOUR launched within the UK, with the Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet on the duvet. It was a handbag-sized journal supposed for girls on the go, and it was humorous, empowered, candid, and filled with style, magnificence, wellness and intercourse. Its purpose was to have fun and uplift ladies, and people ideas nonetheless information GLAMOUR to this present day. However what many GLAMOUR readers and followers could not know is that our story didn’t simply start in 2001.
In reality, GLAMOUR first launched in America in March 1939 – 85 years in the past. And to have fun this milestone, GLAMOUR has revealed a brand new ebook charting the journal’s unbelievable historical past full of extraordinary photographs and tales from our archives.
The rationale the journal’s historical past is so compelling? GLAMOUR was one of many first magazines in America – and the world – to place ladies’s empowerment entrance and centre. Whereas launched initially as {a magazine} devoted to recreating the wonder and fashions of Hollywood, the outbreak of World Warfare II in 1939 modified every part. With males known as to conflict, and girls to work, GLAMOUR rebranded because the journal “for the lady with a job” – setting the journal, and its workers, on a journey that will outline its complete future.
Even within the early Nineteen Forties Glamour was resolutely feminist – tackling topics like equal rights, premarital intercourse, the significance of college and schooling, the right way to get a job (two points a 12 months have been devoted to profession ladies, and in each difficulty, the journal’s job division helped a reader with a selected work dilemma), after which the right way to costume for it.
With this new strategy, GLAMOUR had tapped into a brand new technology of ladies with a totally new mindset: free-thinking, bold, determined to interrupt by way of the numerous boundaries nonetheless holding them again. And the ebook chronicles how, because the a long time rolled on, GLAMOUR grew to become a preventing drive for girls’s freedom – be it monetary, reproductive, sexual, and extra.
GLAMOUR additionally broke boundaries, turning into the primary American style journal to characteristic a Black cowl star, Katiti Kironde, and the primary to place mannequin Beverly Johnson on the duvet (she starred 15 instances). We lined Whitney Houston when she was a younger mannequin with aspirations to change into a pop star.
We have been additionally one of many first publications to current Gloria Steinem’s writing (she was a contributing editor for years), and publish Andy Warhol’s illustrations. Presidents Reagan, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and Obama all featured in or contributed to GLAMOUR. And our reporting on reproductive rights, and extra not too long ago paid household depart within the US, and image-based abuse within the UK, has contributed to the numerous prestigious awards GLAMOUR has received through the years.
Now, as a digital publication, we’re in a position to meet right this moment’s ladies no matter medium they devour content material on – their telephones, on social media, on movies, movies and podcasts—and wherever they’re on the earth, with GLAMOUR present within the UK, US, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Latin America, in addition to Brazil, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and South Africa.
GLAMOUR has, in each iteration over the course of its 85 years, been a lot greater than {a magazine}. It’s been a spot for girls to have fun and commiserate, a house for service and sexiness, a supply of leisure and enlightenment. It’s at all times been a vacation spot and a neighborhood, bringing ladies collectively in its pages, on-line and in particular person. And now you possibly can comply with this journey by way of this lovely espresso desk ebook, that includes beforehand unpublished photographs, archival correspondence, and unbelievable tales and style pictures from GLAMOUR’s very first difficulty to right this moment.
You should buy Glamour: An Extraordinary Historical past now on Amazon, Bookshop, Waterstones, and from different booksellers close to you.