Vogue and Oreos

(image taken from Tell Andy He's Wrong)

(image taken from Rare Delights)

This evening, while meandering the aisles aimlessly of the grocery store, idly and carefully selecting some produce items to make a salad and some deli meats to make a sandwich, I made two impulse purchases: first, I surrendered to a box of Double Stuff Oreos, and second, I succumbed to the seductive sartorial wiles of the Vogue September issue. To be fair, I will admit that, while still a relatively impulsive buy, I indulge in artificial, high fructose corn syrup laden boxed cookies much more frequently than I actually spend money and time investing in a fashion magazine.

Although seemingly quite incongruous, superficially at odds and of competing ideologies, these two items, one resplendent with chemical sucrose, the other with constructed shimmers and sheens and rich fabrics, and rightfully so, as in almost all cases the models displayed, splayed across pages, and all the various visual and textual creators of the tome appear as though they would deign not touch a mass-produced baked product, let alone eat one, the Oreo and the magazine actually share much in common. Both are massively consumed, icons of obsession and devotion, bastions of our capitalist society and testaments to the advances of global economics, technology, branding. In both the Double Stuff Oreo and the textbook-length fashion guidebook, there can be found masterpieces of human creative and analytical faculties, of progress in industrial technique, manufacturing, design, demand innovation.

And, naturally, between both the chocolate wafer cookies and between the paper-pulp covers, there is certainly a fair amount of fluff, of viscerality without purpose or function, to the pure pragmatic, but indeed, substance that makes life seem more sweet, more pleasurable.