Just went through the September issue (yes yes...meh) of Vogue US, and I have to say, I'm totally impressed as well as totally not. Wintour's Ed's letter appears on page 218 and the first editorial (about a 9/11 survivor...looking totally incongruous with the high fashion ads killing the flow of its layout) doesn't begin before the late 200s.

Impressed with the number of ads, and not with the cover (totally BLAH...I mean, really? Kate Moss in a garden?)...and definitely not with the content that I had to, literally, search for.

We have a magazine in India called FreeAds that's about just as thick and has thirty times more ads than this edition of Vogue (758 pages) because of its inferior paper quality.

My grouse is...where is Editorial Integrity? Where is Restraint? Or am I an old person from a bygone era trapped inside a young (ish) body? (Ok, that came out a leetle wrong...I sound like a person posessed, no?)

And the quality of the editorial reflects, in inverse proportion, the excitement with which this magazine (advertisement directory, rather) has bunged in all those ads.

Oh, and NOTHING will prepare you for the American-ness of this pull quote from the first fashion story (shot beautifully in China). It reads:

"China Has been confounding foreigners for centuries. Turns out they're not so 'Inscrutable' after all: Just like us, they long for$5,000 handbags covered in tiny logos."

Really? "Just like us"?

Only a writer from a country that hosts a World Cup for a sport played solely on its own soil can have a worldview so narrow and pathetic.

Sometimes, you get points for pretending even, you know?