The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

in her private bathroom and the collection of miniature shoes all about. The office itself was gloriously green: green walls, green carpet, the chairs were upholstered in green, her English desk was painted green, and there was even a green telephone. And then there was the pink, Mademoiselle’s signature color. The stationery was pink, the parties were pink, and the invitations to the parties were pink.

Her golden rule was that “the staff must get younger every year, even if it kills them in the process.” But even if the directive was meant as a joke, it held a fundamental truth: Mademoiselle’s readership was going to remain young, even as BTB and her staff did not. So she came up with the Mademoiselle College Board. The idea was to have hundreds of female college students throughout the United States relaying back to the New York offices the latest trends and news and consumable desires. In one fell swoop, BTB not only brought in the voices of the young women who were the magazine’s target readers but also, not so incidentally, reaped the enormous financial benefits of having scouts with their ears to the ground who could feed information to BTB. She then held that information hostage over her advertisers, who were desperate for this level of marketing data. No one had ever done anything like it before. After establishing the College Board, she permanently recast the August issue of Mademoiselle as the College Issue, soon nicknamed “the bible” because no college girl would deign to return for her fall semester without consulting it for what to wear, read, and think in the coming school year. What BTB had effectively done was turn “dreadful” August, known for its sluggish advertising and even worse newsstand sales, entirely on its head.

She soon followed with yet another ingenious idea: the guest editor program. She hit upon the idea at a meeting with a very contemporary ring to it: a small group of staff members was discussing what to feature for prom-wear in the upcoming August College Issue. The College Board editor, just three years out of Vassar, said, “Well, I can tell you what I wore to the junior prom.” A nineteen-year-old who was at the meeting turned to the twenty-five-year-old Vassar graduate and, with a sneer, replied, “How could you know what anyone would wear today?” This gave BTB pause: “If the Vassar graduate was on the shelf, what about us? That did it.” Mademoiselle’s guest editor contest was born.

Later, the Los Angeles Times would insist that the famous editor-in-chief Blackwell “took plain young women to New York, where she put them in stylish clothes, restyled their hair and makeup and then put their pictures in her magazine.” But the guest editor contest was far more complex, prestigious, and powerful. The Mademoiselle GE program was the most sought-after launching pad for girls with literary and artistic ambitions. Throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, college dormitory rooms were busy with girls working on essays and short stories and artwork they hoped Mademoiselle would publish or, better yet, would make them a summer guest editor. If you were lucky enough to be one of the chosen twenty, you were brought to New York for the month of June to shadow senior editors at Mademoiselle and to stay—of course!—at the Barbizon Hotel for Women.

The perfect guest editor (much like the perfect reader) was spelled out in the magazine’s tagline: The Magazine for Smart Young Women. The “smart young woman” was ready for both a poetry reading and a college party and needed to know what to wear to both. She liked to dress well but without spending a fortune: Mademoiselle was the first to turn the spotlight away from Paris fashion, to focus on American designers and actually print the prices of the clothes it featured, most of them midrange and accessible. It did so timidly at first—“GADABOUT CARDIGAN. 100% wool and kid mohair… About $4”—but soon enough was defiantly listing the price of clothing down to the last cent. Advertisers went crazy for the College Issue idea, so much so that when BTB was sharing a cab with a fellow editor from another magazine, she asked if they didn’t have some fiction in a bottom drawer to sell her so she could fill up the magazine’s pages now bloated by advertising. But in fact it was not just the August College Issue; each issue of Mademoiselle was hypnotic for the college girl because it was never just about fashion. ABC news reporter Lynn Sherr—herself one of the chosen, in the summer of 1962—summarized its appeal: “If you were young and your head was filled with literary aspirations, you read Mademoiselle.”

The February 1954 Mademoiselle issue would famously have just two headlines on its front cover: “Romantic fashions for spring, for brides, for tall girls” and “Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood.” The publishers originally refused to let Mademoiselle devote twenty pages to the late Dylan Thomas and his verse play, Under Milk Wood, never yet published. But BTB put down her foot and argued that, contrary to what they thought, it would sell fashion, and if they didn’t let her go ahead with it, she would be resigning at 5:30 p.m. that same day. She got her way, and the intellectual value of Mademoiselle surged yet again, along with its profits. It was BTB’s genius in combining the frivolous with the serious that ultimately hooked readers and differentiated the magazine from all others on the newsstand. BTB reasoned that her readers were studying the literary masters in college and so why insult them with anything less in their favorite magazine? Mademoiselle became a prolific publisher of foreign authors such as Alberto Moravia and Eugène Ionesco, as well as creating a space for young avant-garde writers who had nowhere else to go.

But BTB was a businesswoman first and foremost, and taking this intellectual route was also financially expedient: she did not have the budget for bestselling authors, which forced