As today is Thursday I awoke and pulled the Style section from the New York Times before the paper disappeared with my husband. There it was, the logo of Rags magazine in all its '70s glory, announcing a feature story inside, "The Bay Area magazine that invented street style." Little Nellie, famous at last.
I had 7 copies of Rags for years and years until I sold them to the San Francisco Museum of Art. I'm still not sorry I did, although it wasn't for a fortune ($100). So funny to think that until this month Vanessa Friedman, the Times' Fashion Editor, had never heard of Rags. Age does have its privileges.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/style/rags-magazine-street-style.html?searchResultPosition=1
I've written about Rags before, here:
And here:
Vanessa describes Rags as being "tabloid size", which would have made it 11" x 17". Not so. They were more 8 1/2" x 11", the size of an issue of Time magazine. Not very impressive in a day when many fashion magazines were still oversized and printed on glossy paper.
I agree on the possibility of one point she mentions. Rags called out the fashion industry for creating the maxi style in order to sell more clothes using more fabric. While the flower-child long cotton dress had been popular since the Monterey Pop festival in 1967, suddenly we were seeing wool maxi skirts and winter coats. I bought a maxi coat and remember dragging it along the slushy winter streets of New York City. It was quite the workout.
In case you're curious about the book Vanessa mentions, the deluxe edition costs $4,500.00 On thing I notice is the reprints seem to be printed on nice white paper. Rags was originally printed on—of course—newsprint rag.
Too much? There are also bites of the apple from $75 to $995.
