There’s a New ‘Zine in Town by Victoria Moran

Fashion magazines . . . Ah, the guilty pleasure! I first fell in love with them when I was ten. I was in Italy and picked up a copy of Mademoiselle because it was the only thing I could find to read in English. The hotel’s elevator operator, a dashing young Frenchman, said to me, “Mademoiselle. C’est française, n’est-ce pas?” That was enough. I planned to read those magazines every month forever – and I pretty much have.

They’ve given my life beauty, fantasy, and some benign escape. They also trained my eye for fashion and it’s been a lifelong love. (I remember talking with a friend years ago about how skilled she was at home décor, and she told me that she’d spent her allowance as a kid on Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. It seems that the education we choose for ourselves early on has a way of sticking.)

Unfortunately, however, the bloom is somewhat off the fashion magazine rose for me because the fashion industry itself can be so cruel. I suppose that happens on a lot of levels – implying, for example, that only certain body types are acceptable, or that anyone who won’t (or can’t) spend money on designer labels is somehow deficient. Then, of course, there are human rights abuses in the garment trade in many parts of the world. But for me the cruelty that hits closest to home is the use and abuse of animals in those magazines – at times tolerated, at others celebrated. I’ve seen fur go out of favor, even on those glossy pages, twice in my life – the 1970s and the 1990s – and both times I thought it was the death knell for that awful industry. But it rallied – and the last time that happened, Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, was seen as the savior of fur coats and collars and cuffs, and the people who profit from them.

I realize that leather is more difficult for people to transition away from than fur. My leather epiphany came during the day I spent in a slaughterhouse and saw the skins sliced in a single piece off cows who moments before had been as alive as me, creating a growing “leather pile,” another source of income for the animal ag cartel. Sure, the shoes in those magazines are artfully designed, but as Emerson said of meat, “…however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”

Even the ads for cosmetics, the pacifying promise of becoming more “beautiful” and “radiant,” are more often than not promoting jars and bottles filled with the suffering and torment of animal experimentation.

You can imagine my elation, then, when Main Street Vegan Academy graduate Adrienne Borgersen, a New York City image consultant and fashion designer Lois Eastlund teamed up to create an entirely vegan and cruelty-free publication, La Fashionista Compassionista – LAFC for short. When they asked if I’d be in the premier issue, I was over the moon. And when they said I’d be on the cover, I could hardly believe it.

I’m sixty-four years old, and I’m being asked to do a fashion shoot – something I’d daydreamed about as a fashion student myself at eighteen. Well, if you wait long enough . . . .

So, on a most memorable Saturday a few weeks back, Borgersen and Eastlund came to my apartment with their gifted photographer, Chris Pearce, and the dreams of my former life came true. The equipment was set up, and my erstwhile living room became the backdrop for holiday season wonders and LAFC’s holiday issue. The Lois Eastlund dresses were such fun to wear (and, I was to learn, affordable for regular folks). The photographer even had an English accent (all fashion photographers had English accents when I was eighteen!). And my fabulously photogenic dog, Forbes, got in on the act.

This publication has the potential to change things for the better for animals, and I hope you’ll help it get off to a rousing start. Whether you see yourself as a fashionista or not, I’ve learned from fashion academician Joshua Katcher in his engrossing classes for Main Street Vegan Academy that we’re all influenced by this industry. It subliminally tells us what’s attractive, what’s expected, what’s appropriate. La Fashionista Compassionista is dedicated to setting the record straight: Cruelty-free is attractive. Kindness is expected. The innovation that sets trends without harming animals is appropriate.

Subscriptions to this online magazine are absolutely free, and you can subscribe right now at www.lafcnyc.com. Every subscriber will help this fledgling venture show potential advertisers and backers that they mean business. Please subscribe today and tell your friends, your Facebook friends, your Twitter followers, and everybody you know, vegan or not, who gets a kick out of clothing and style. The magazine debuts today, November 3^rd, 2014. Join the fun – and the groundswell intent on informing a powerful industry that cruelty tops the “What’s Out” list every season, and that plenty of us are putting our clothing dollars toward vegan c-h-i-c: compassion, honesty, integrity, and caring. Kudos to this new publication, and thanks to all of you for helping it reach millions of readers and save millions of lives.

Victoria Moran is the author of Main Street Vegan and, coming in April 2015, her 12^th book, The Good Karma Diet: Eat Gently, Feel Amazing, Age in Slow Motion. She is the director of Main Street Vegan Academy and the feature story in the premier issue of La Fashionista Compassionista, a new online publication to which you can subscribe at no charge at www.lafcnyc.org.

Credits:

Photography by Chris Pearce  www.snappernyc.com

Dress by Lois Eastlund Designs  www.loiseastlund.com

Styling by Lois Eastlund and Adrienne Borgersen for It Factor Image Consulting www.itfactorimage.com