by JULIET WATERS

BlackBook magazine started in the mid-’90s, around the time that I had a conversation with a friend about whether or not brown really was the new black. “Nothing,” my fashion-conscious friend informed me with the intractable ennui of someone as tired of this conversation as she was of me wearing brown, “is going to replace black.”

In those days, conversations everywhere were full of variations on this pointless theme. And so, for moments at a time, literate, intelligent people sometimes found themselves believing that “shallow” really was “the new deep.” With the arrival of high-speed Internet, who had the will or time anymore for basic logic, let alone thinking.

These days I’m much more like my bored, annoyed friend, when I read editor Aaron Hicklin describe his magazine as “a style magazine with a literary soul.” He does this in the introduction to The Revolution Will be Accessorized, an anthology of essays from BlackBook culled from the 10 years it’s been in circulation. Sigh. If it had the soul of literature, it would be literature. And I wouldn’t describe the essays in this book as literature.

I’ve never actually read a copy of BlackBook, but I’m not surprised by Douglas Coupland’s description of it as “so glossy it drips ink.” Still, I suspect this assessment by Naomi Klein is a tad alarmist: “I see it as a tragic statement about American alienation. You have these editors who commission touching articles about peace, freedom and death by Yoko Ono and Ivy Meeropol (the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). But these little messages are asphyxiated by all the overproduced, over-the-top decadent ads and fashion spreads. It makes the articles feel like Post-it notes in comparison. It’s as if someone’s basement zine had been cut and pasted at random into the pages of Vogue.”

Granted the advantage of reading these articles in anthology form is that the writing has been rescued from “ad asphyxiation.” Judging just from the writing, however, it is possible that BlackBook may be nothing more or less than a style magazine with the soul of a style magazine; and in saying this, I’m comparing it to the average style magazine, which these days usually has the soul of a department store catalogue. Nothing in this anthology is life-changing. But with few exceptions these are intelligent, interesting, entertaining articles on subjects ranging from Iraq to cleaning ladies, and by writers ranging from Irvine Welsh to Joan Didion. It’s very obviously nobody’s basement zine.

It’s hard for our generation to imagine, but according to Didion, in a light, but thought-provoking Q&A about her early career, there actually was a time when style magazines had soul. Didion, arguably one of the most literate American essayists alive, started her career at Vogue. Back then, in the early ’60s, writers worked on what Didion describes as “semi-literature.” Harper’s Bazaar was one of the biggest fiction outlets. Sylvia Plath, after all, started out writing for Mademoiselle.

Vogue was a nurturing environment where “the personnel director of Conde Nast would stop me in the hall to ask me if I’d called my mother.” No Devil Wears Prada editrix, very few ads (if you can believe it, only at the beginning and the end of the magazine), and few concerns about circulation. “At the time I began working at Vogue, there was a very clear understanding that it was not a magazine for very many people.” Style was not an all-pervasive religion. It was simply something that existed for people who cared about style. And nobody worried that these people were taking over the world.

People who care about style make up a far larger group of people these days. There are any number of reasons for this, from corporate programming to shopaholic women. This all bears thinking about. But maybe in the fall. In the meantime, if just for one summer you want to indulge in stylish essays about style—ad-free—you could do way, way worse than this little black book.

The Revolution Will Be Accessorized,
ed. Aaron Hicklin, 215pp, $18.95