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 meant for ladies on the go, and it was humorous, empowered, candid, and filled with style, magnificence, wellness and intercourse. Its objective was to have fun and uplift girls, and people rules nonetheless information GLAMOUR to at the present time. However what many GLAMOUR readers and followers might not know is that our story didn’t simply start in 2001.
The truth is, 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 e-book charting the journal’s unimaginable historical past crammed with extraordinary photos 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 girls’s empowerment entrance and centre. Whereas launched initially as {a magazine} devoted to recreating the sweetness and fashions of Hollywood, the outbreak of World Struggle II in 1939 modified all the pieces. With males known as to warfare, and ladies to work, GLAMOUR rebranded because the journal “for the girl with a job” – setting the journal, and its employees, on a journey that may outline its entire future.
Even within the early Forties Glamour was resolutely feminist – tackling topics like equal rights, premarital intercourse, the significance of college and schooling, the best way to get a job (two points a 12 months have been devoted to profession girls, and in each concern, the journal’s job division helped a reader with a selected work dilemma), after which the best way to costume for it.
With this new method, GLAMOUR had tapped into a brand new technology of ladies with a totally new mindset: free-thinking, formidable, determined to interrupt via the various obstacles nonetheless holding them again. And the e-book chronicles how, because the many years rolled on, GLAMOUR grew to become a preventing drive for ladies’s freedom – be it monetary, reproductive, sexual, and extra.
GLAMOUR additionally broke obstacles, changing into the primary American style journal to function a Black cowl star, Katiti Kironde, and the primary to place mannequin Beverly Johnson on the duvet (she starred 15 instances). We coated Whitney Houston when she was a younger mannequin with aspirations to develop 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 just lately paid household depart within the US, and image-based abuse within the UK, has contributed to the various prestigious awards GLAMOUR has received through the years.
Now, as a digital publication, we’re capable of meet at present’s girls no matter medium they eat content material on – their telephones, on social media, on movies, movies and podcasts—and wherever they’re on the earth, with GLAMOUR current 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 ladies to have fun and commiserate, a house for service and sexiness, a supply of leisure and enlightenment. It’s all the time been a vacation spot and a group, bringing girls collectively in its pages, on-line and in particular person. And now you possibly can comply with this journey via this stunning espresso desk e-book, that includes beforehand unpublished photos, archival correspondence, and unimaginable tales and style pictures from GLAMOUR’s very first concern to at present.
You should buy Glamour: An Extraordinary Historical past now on Amazon, Bookshop, Waterstones, and from different booksellers close to you.
