The History Of The New York Times' Style Section
November 14, 2014 9:25 AM   Subscribe

"Despite its youth, the section has a much longer history, one that encompasses the long effort of women in journalism to be taken seriously as reporters and as readers, the development of New Journalism, large-scale social changes that have brought gay culture into the mainstream, shifts in the way news is delivered and consumed, and economic consolidations and disruptions that the section has, sometimes in spite of itself, thoroughly documented and cataloged. The Styles section may well be pretty stupid sometimes. It’s also a richer and more complex entity than any of us would like to believe." - Bonfire Of The Inanities - Jacqui Shine writes a long, detailed history of the New York Times Style Section.
posted by The Whelk (23 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Metafilter: far fewer stories than I expected about cats (3); fedoras (1); Target (3); yoga (6, though one covered a very serious yoga community debate about the politics of using a mat, so that should probably count twice); Tim Gunn (1); third-wave coffee (1); Facebook (8); kale (1); David Foster Wallace (1, and it was actually about Karen Green); Oakland (1); or Brooklyn as a hipster enclave (1, maybe 2).
posted by zamboni at 9:39 AM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


The problem with the Style section is that the Times, in an effort to stay profitable, is increasingly focused on the styles and interests of the 1%. If it's not yet actually part of the advertising section, it certainly is aesthetically.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:44 AM on November 14, 2014 [4 favorites]


The Styles section may well be pretty stupid sometimes. It’s also a richer and more complex entity than any of us would like to believe.

The Styles section's sociological / anthropological value is a direct *byproduct* of its stupidity. Its wholly uncritical, fatuous, and enthusiastic take on whatever a tiny, fabulously wealthy sliver of the population is consuming for show or anxious about will make it a sort of "Luxury of the Rich in Rome" for historians of the collapse of the American republic.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:52 AM on November 14, 2014 [8 favorites]


The problem with the Style section is that the Times, in an effort to stay profitable, is increasingly focused on the styles and interests of the 1%. If it's not yet actually part of the advertising section, it certainly is aesthetically.

Eponysyterical.
posted by The Michael The at 9:52 AM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Its wholly uncritical, fatuous, and enthusiastic take on whatever a tiny, fabulously wealthy sliver of the population is consuming for show or anxious about will make it a sort of "Luxury of the Rich in Rome" for historians of the collapse of the American republic.

Today's "look at these fucking hipsters with their $20 mason jar arugula salads" are the "behold the orgiastic excess of Caecelia of the Junii's Saturnalia festivities" of yesteryear.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:59 AM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


That seems like an unfair trade.
posted by The Whelk at 10:00 AM on November 14, 2014


That seems like an unfair trade.

...you haven't tried the salad yet.
posted by leotrotsky at 10:08 AM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


Thanks, that was an excellent, nuanced read and has changed the way I think about the section; it's always good to have one's mental laziness challenged. And it doesn't pull its punches: "The impression that the Styles section is for and about the affluent is correct. (Apparently, the impression that the entire paper is for the affluent is basically correct as well.)"
posted by languagehat at 10:28 AM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


I think I may have found it in the humor section of a Barnes & Noble in 1994 and I don't know if it's even in print anymore, but anyone who has the opportunity to find a book called Generation Ecch! will discover--among all the snotty takedowns of Gen X culture and the older generation's response to it--a very satisfying early-'90s evisceration of Styles of the Times.
posted by psoas at 10:36 AM on November 14, 2014 [1 favorite]


An opportunity for indulging one’s schadenfreude or a cause of the paper’s decline? A sociological or anthropological lens on The Way We Live Now, or an elaborate and unselfconscious justification for “the pleasure of rampant consumerism”? The best way to figure that out is to read it.
"Modern Love" is my favorite column. It reliably serves up, week after week, an unreliable narrator afflicted with narcissism spectrum disorder braying contemptuously about themselves. But that's not all, the Styles section is full of nuggets of pure gold. Like last week, a barely two paragraph story about the new head of 'Bill Blass' whose first sentence began with the quotation: "I had been living the pastoral life in Brooklyn..." Styles is the only section of the nytimes i can read with enjoyment.

There must be a German word for deriving pleasure from the contempt you feel for others.

I've never met a peer who didn't "hate read" the Styles section. I'm not sure I get the point of this essay. Yes, the history of Styles goes back to the women's section ghetto for female journalists but so what? She features the Style section making fun of the lace curtain Irish Kennedys and Pat Nixon... uhh what does that say? The writing in Styles is about loathsome people often written by loathsome people. It's not about the fake "trend" stories, those are funny. It's about reading about the corporate mergers on the wedding pages and listening to terrible people talk about themselves without a shred of self-consciousness.
posted by ennui.bz at 10:54 AM on November 14, 2014 [9 favorites]


As I've said before, the NYT's 'target audience' is the segment of the 1% who don't want to be associated with the Wall Street Journal. In other news, the WSJ has announced it's going to stop publishing a Sunday Edition so the NYT has a chance to pick up at least 20-30 more subscribers!
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:17 AM on November 14, 2014 [2 favorites]


ennui.bz, please start a blog.
posted by No Robots at 11:18 AM on November 14, 2014 [3 favorites]


NYT Style section, the funny pages of the 1%
posted by kokaku at 11:45 AM on November 14, 2014


ennui.bz: "It's about reading about the corporate mergers on the wedding pages and listening to terrible people talk about themselves without a shred of self-consciousness."

Come on, they featured Mark Linn-Baker's wedding. Cousin Larry!
posted by Chrysostom at 1:11 PM on November 14, 2014


That was a brilliant essay. Back when I sometimes would buy a copy of the Sunday NYT I always enjoyed the Style section. It seemed a lot defter than most of the stuff I was supposedly purchasing the paper for. The Book Review almost never failed to be a disappointment, for instance.
posted by Kattullus at 1:44 PM on November 14, 2014


Yeah, the Book Review and the Magazine I always *expect* to be good, and they rarely are.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:49 PM on November 14, 2014




I don't think the Sunday Styles section is not long for the world.

It's service journalism very narrowly focused on what 20- and 30-something women of a certain class and geography find interesting, for the specific purpose of getting them to buy the print edition on Sundays and provide audit circulation numbers for the print advertisers. But I have to think that print sales to women in their 20s and 30s is plummeting with little prospect of recovery.

My guess is that Styles of the Times (the occasional glossy Sunday magazine supplement) with its much broader focus will assume the clothes-and-make-up stuff, the weddings pages and their glory will get a nice 2- or 3-page spread elsewhere, and the obnoxiously rich or hip people doing insufferably expensive or cool things stories will wither a bit (some to the local section, some just abandoned for the Huff Post).
posted by MattD at 5:28 PM on November 14, 2014


That Mark Linn-Baker wedding story was sweet and didn't make me want to smack anybody.
posted by Lexica at 8:54 PM on November 15, 2014


> o-kay. suuuuuper-psyched to have found my work on Metafilter for about the first 30 seconds! thanks!

And now "This account is disabled"? What just happened?
posted by languagehat at 8:40 AM on November 16, 2014


I'm surprised you haven't heard of it before. It's called "buttoning," celebratorily closing your account on a social website when your work is posted to it, and it might soon be a big thing among some circles of online longform writers. We were invited to a "buttoning party," a gathering where writers sew actual big red buttons onto each other's clothes in honor of all the online attention they've disdained; rumor has it, if you wear a sweater with two or more of this one rare kind of red lacquer button to the right party, then Arianna Huffington will hire you on the spot.
posted by RogerB at 9:42 AM on November 16, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'm not sure I get the point of this essay.

Seems pretty obvious to me: The Styles section, however it's been named over the years, has been flogged and derided as unnecessary froth even though it contains some of the more salient cultural journalism in the Times. The reflexive wholesale dismissal of the section appears tied to the longstanding undervaluing of women's (and more recently, GLBT) issues, despite the fact that the most noxious parts of it--the descendents of the Society Pages--were originally topics that only men were allowed to report on.

I daresay it's pretty compelling overall.
posted by psoas at 11:36 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]


Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor at The New York Times, posts about Style section silliness on her blog. She also mentions liketitanic's article.
posted by Kattullus at 2:02 PM on November 18, 2014


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