Revolt out of Style

Intriguing piece from Spiked, wondering whether the demise of the style magazine - The Face as the classic example - indicates how low our current social aspirations are, in the bathetic world of Heat magazine and Big Brother. An earlier piece from Andrew Calcutt gets to the nub:

By reading The Face and experimenting with the styles described in it and by it, you too could become a face, a player in an emerging club scene, a legend on your local high street. This could be achieved by your display of universal and authoritative knowledge of life, as distilled into its synonym style, with The Face as your bible. With one hand The Face reduced social reality to the sphere of consumption, while with the other it tried to enable the reader to stand above particular patterns of consumption and to enjoy consumption in general.

Now it's not about ironic cool, but populist heat. I'm ambivalent, though. There's a raw loathing at the heart of the new celebrity media - pathologically flipping with adulation, sure, but at least it's open and unstable. And on the other side, polemicists like Micheal Moore and Naomi Klein serve up equally raw ideology. I was always frustrated by the fastidiousness of the style mags when it came to politics. Thinking about it, this seems like a more honest and dialectical pop-culture now.