We hate to see any magazines fold, but Condé Nast’s announcement that the company is shuttering Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride leaves us saddest about Gourmet, and not only because the Ruth Reichl-edited mag is so much classier than its surviving sister, Bon Appétit. We can’t remember clipping a single recipe from Gourmet’s pages and never even opened the 69-year-old title on some busy months, but it’s remained on our ever-shortening subscription list for one reason alone: those ethereal covers.
So crisp, so eerily timeless, so reminiscent of an era when magazines mattered, when a wasp-waisted gal might curl up on the avocado tweed couch with a Tab and a Winston and plan a lamb dinner with little paper crowns for her middle-manager husband’s boss, because back then middle management might lead somewhere. While the inside pages didn’t always have the same visual verve, you’d look at each cover and say, see, this is the reason why magazines might not die—because people want to be transported by their beauty, to be fed dreams along with their blueberry cheesecake bars. But maybe that’s a quaint idea these days. So it’s off to the ever-expanding Museum of Dead Magazines for Gourmet, and Creamsicle sammies for the rest of us. Too bad.
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Say it ain’t so, Faye! I’m with you, on all of it. I think I’m smack in the middle of a 2-year subscription.
Oh no!
But then again, I never clipped a recipe from it either.
Well said, Faye. I agree.
I had the pleasure of going to a mtg at Gourmet in July with a client to discuss the possibility of working with them and their advertisers through their creative marketing efforts.
Let’s just say it was thrilling to walk through the halls of a magazine that I enjoyed so much myself.
Thanks for the nice obit, Faye.