Vogue’s First Annual Soul Issue!

By Margy Thomas Horton, Ph.D

[alert type=”warning”]The following is an exclusive feature that has been shared with you but is otherwise available only in Volume 2, Issue 8 of the Christ and Pop Culture Magazine. For more features like this, download our app for iPad and iPhone from Apple’s App Store.  More information here.[/alert]

Letter from the Editor:

Download the entire issue here!

We here at Vogue usually focus on the shapes, sizes, and colors of bodies and on the clothes, accessories, exercise regimens, and products that we recommend using to adorn and beautify said bodies. However, this month, in the wake of our controversial April 2014 Shape Issue—in which we featured a reality TV star and thereby sparked a movement to boycott our eminently relevant publication—we’re offering up something completely different. Welcome to our first-annual Soul Issue!

By “soul,” we mean that immortal, incorporeal part of oneself; the seat of consciousness; the aspect of oneself that reflects God’s image; that spirit which, together with the physical matter of the body, forms a single human whole. In short, by “soul,” we mean the aspect of humanness that we here at Vogue tend to elide from our narratives. This month, we’ll atone for that omission with a series of features that focus not on our subjects’ bodies, but on their spirits—on their transcendent joys and their existential sufferings.

So here goes, a brief survey of what we have in store for you this month: a profile of the fashion designer Sisypha Simmons, who experiences the endless cycle of fashion as a sort of exquisite punishment; an interview with Tamika Tweet, the first model truly to master the use of social media to promote her personal brand, although she does so with a sense of existential dread; and finally, a photo spread of celebrity mothers accompanied by an essay that questions whether these mothers are not just apparently, but actually sanctified by the act of bringing babies into the world.

From Loose to Fitted and Back Again: The Sisyphean Cycle of Fashion

Support great illustrations by downloading CaPCMag here!

You know the collection of skintight pants and flowing tops you’ve been amassing for the past seven years? It’s time to purge those outdated garments from your closet, because starting now, it’s all about fitted tops and voluminous bottoms. Ordinarily, such a seismic shift in silhouette would be an occasion for us to tell you all about the latest in tummy-flattening Pilates maneuvers. A shift in sartorial silhouette must inevitably mean a shift in body shape, after all. However, this being the Soul issue, we are instead offering you a profile of top designer Sisypha Simmons, who pioneered the most recent iteration of the “fitted tops/loose bottoms” trend. Sisypha talks candidly about what it feels like to spend her entire life trudging uphill, so to speak, while pushing the ponderous boulder that is her latest fashion collection. Again and again, she reaches the top of the mountain (ie. shows her collection on the runway), only to watch, moments later, as her creations tumble back down the mountain to be consigned to clearance racks. For Sisypha, the only possible happiness in her life as a fashion designer is to feel a brief, futile sense of satisfaction while listening to the applause after each of her fashion shows.

Tameka Tweet: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Social Media

The career of a model today depends upon her ability to cultivate a social media presence. Tameka Tweet, curator of the first and the greatest of supermodel social media presences, usually considers her frantic efforts to document and publish every moment of her life—from morning Trapeze class to late-night disco party—to be a sign that she has a vibrant life and, more importantly, a healthy brand. But in this exclusive interview for the Soul Issue, Tameka reveals that beneath her cheerful air of self-promotion is, of all things, a terror of death. Tameka yearns intensely for life, conscious each moment that every Tweet she transmits into the universe marks another step closer to the grave. Her intense yearning for life drives her to capture every moment as it passes and to post those moments on a variety of social media platforms (strategically selected for their popularity among her target demographics) so that when she is gone, a record of her experiences will outlive her.

Of MILFs and Madonnas: The Sanctity of Celebrity Mothers

The baby has been a de rigeur accessory for the female celebrity for quite awhile now. In recent years, famous moms have been toting their babies along to movie sets and photo shoots, even mentioning their babies in interviews. Actually, we think it was Madonna who, with the birth of her daughter in 1996, first gave other stars the idea of, themselves, becoming Madonnas–as in, sacred mothers in the style of the virginal mother of Jesus. No doubt about it, young celebrity women in the twenty-first century have been proudly displaying their babies in the public eye and earning worship in return. The whole trend may have started by accident (half of all pregnancies are unplanned, after all), but the side effect is welcome: motherhood redounds a sort of halo effect upon the mother. She is made sacred through the act of mothering a child. This halo effect is in evidence in the photo spread we feature in this issue, photos of women and their babies dressed in white, calmly reposing in scenes of impossible cleanliness and serenity. As the essay accompanying these photographs will show, the halo effect on these mothers may be far more than an optical illusion. If the mothers’ utterances in the interviews are to be trusted, the act of bringing a child into the world can, indeed, usher her into a new and more significant life.

In Closing

Don’t think that these three features are all we’re bringing you this month. Our first (only?) annual Soul Issue is as jam-packed as a church on Easter. Check out our stories on the following:

• A former child star who is in the midst of staging a comeback as a folk singer. These days, she wanders through urban spaces feeling alienated from the workaday world of adults, occasionally taking aimless cab rides, trying to shake her hyper-awareness of the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the artifices of urban life—all while yearning for the lost innocence she never really had.

• An esteemed movie actress who, last year, lost her leg in a horrible incident with a whale while cruising in the South Pacific. Now back in New York, she is drawing rave reviews for her performances in a Broadway revival of Faust, The Musical. And yet, even while she savors the spotlight and revels in the sense of her own grandeur, she is eaten up with the mad desire for revenge against the God who caused her disfigurement.

We hope that, in addition to enjoying our feature articles in this issue, you’ll also notice just how special the advertisements are this month. In keeping with the Soul theme, we have required our advertisers to design materials that appeal to the soul, not just to the senses. For example, you’ll find a perfume ad the smell of which will actually transport your soul, through a complicated transmigration process, into a realm of sun-drenched flowered fields where nothing bad can ever happen. You’ll also find an ad for face cream that comes complete with a sample that, if you apply it properly, will assuage all your feelings of anxiety and insecurity.

If all this talk of souls is wearing you out, please forgive our presumption in choosing such a metaphysical theme this month. Kindly set this anomalous issue aside and wait for our next issue, when we will be back with more of our usual offerings on physical bodies, material adornments, and temporal pleasures. In the meantime, let’s shake off what has proven to be a discomfiting theme with the words of that amiable lightweight, Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”

Warmest regards,

Your Editor

Margy Thomas Horton, Ph.D., is an academic writing consultant and editor. She blogs at ScholarShape.com/blog.

Illustration courtesy of Seth T. Hahne. Check out Seth’s graphic novel and comic review site, Good Ok Bad.