would like more "realistic" fashion and beauty e.g. this is what is really hot (and expensive) - but this is where you get the cheaper and more accessible high st version... what styles to avoid if you're not a supermodel, trinny and susannah style. will dewy, barely there make-up and a hint of nude lip gloss cut it for you if you are a 35 year old smoker with a child who either doesn't sleep or wakes up v. early?
features on "real" people... e.g. used to like livingetc for interiors but got totally fed up with the "real life" sections that focused entirely on how people in the interiors/fashion/media had transformed their homes.
A pastiche - "Tarquin and Jocasta have terribly busy (but deeply fulfilling lives) as a documentary director and fashionable milliner respectively. They have four children under three, but have nevertheless transformed their six bedroomed house in a fashionable part of London, which they picked up for a song, into a white, minimilast paradise (with no plastic tat toys, grubby finger-marks, laundry etc) in less than six months spending only six shillings and fourpence blah blah blah...
but what i do like from there is the "ideas to steal section"
or the feature that really put me off red... "miles and odile live on a farm in the country, but they are not boring and uncool, oh no, they have "real flagstones" in the kitchen and her friends in london (because, let's face it, that's really where we're all at, isn't it?) make sure she is supplied with the latest dr hauschka toiletries..." that one is more of a paraphrase than a pastiche actually! what about the real problems faced by farmers and rural communities? an insult to my intelligence, i thought.
a question, when does aspirational just become, err, "pah!"
the problem from the magazine editor's perspective is how to keep a good balance between the covetable and the achievable, i suppose!
hth and good luck!