Women who understand how men look at them will spend their whole life sipping champagne on sunny terraces.
• Elle magazine showed women how to become a fantasy creature
o That woman that men want to meet
• The magazine creator Helene identified with readers to a point where she never worried about what they wanted
o She was convinced that what was right for her was also right for them
• In 1952 she hired Francoise Giroud, a dedicated feminist, who became a prominent political figure
• Gorden-Lazareff published many articles by controversial female writers such as Colette and Simone de Beauvoir.
• She was intelligent, in touch with events and people and a great judge of talent.
• She knew that Swiss graphic design would be a good style for the magazine
• By the 1960s one French woman out of six was a regular ELLE reader.
• Art director, Kapp’s smart, cutting edge design masked the sublte sexist subtext of the editorial message.
• “How to attract and please a man” was the main idea behind many of the articles
• The magazine seemed to avoid political topics
• Today there are 16 international editions of ELLE.
o They have all adapted the original French graphic format as defined by Knapp almost 50 years ago.
• In the history of magazines, few founding editors have had such a lasting influence on their publications.
• Today no one seems to know who Gordon-Lazareff is anymore.
• She had a privileged upbringing, which leads her to believe that women were equal, if not superior to men.
• She wasn’t much of a feminist as she didn’t understand why women wanted to fight for something they already had.
• During the war she escaped to New York and found work at Harper’s Bazaar.
• Her time in New York allowed her to become familiar with colour photography, which was not available in Europe.
• ELLE magazine has retained the clean graphic style of the early days, but the message in not what Helene would have called feminine.
French Elle Magazine
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