The September Issue: My Childhood DIY Vogues

Last time I was home for Christmas, my mom had me clean my old junk boxes out of her attic. I found a lot of amazing stuff, including love letters, my grandmother’s scarab beetle bracelet (which I had been shopping for among Etsy vintage listings), my old Kik-Wear raver pants, my Archie comics collection, an extremely special cassette tape and a bunch of horrible pottery, including a heart-shaped box in honor of Kurt Cobain’s death. None of that stuff I expected to find. Something I had thought about over the years and feared were lost are these vintage DIY Vogue issues. Made in 1988 and ’89 by myself and neighborhood friends, including (drumroll) a September Issue! In case ya missed it.

Obviously we simply cut up existing Vogue‘s and copied the format, but there must have been something satisfying about renaming the models–we christened Cindy Crawford “Lily Mikeals”–writing product copy, setting prices and giving credit to all the hard-working MUA and hairstylists. Especially “Stan.”

We had no concept of price. The “Ezcada” dress above is “about 30$” but here we have some bracelets for just one dollar each!

“Bigtime disco dancing.” The prices are more right on this spread, and on Robin Wright’s page we gave Stan a salon name: “Brights, Inc.”

It’s charming to see that I thought of myself as a writer at age 7. My mother always thought I was but I sort of pooh-pooh’d the idea as a career until it just happened naturally. “Well, that’s our short storie thanks for reading”!