I’m not going to pretend I’ve ever cracked open a Vogue magazine, but Madonna is now stuck in my head.

Among being impressed with all of the different subjects to mess around with in the digital humanities, I like that these tools can paint a larger picture (figuratively and literally).  The Vogue production team can take a look at these projects and get different ideas of how their company have evolved throughout their admittedly impressive over-a-century-lifespan.

These compilations tell many stories and reflect on not only the history of Vogue, but history in general.  Today with how controversial the term “political correctness” has become, I was immediately made aware of the realization that almost every woman featured on the cover of Vogue from 1976 to 1977 looked almost all the same.  You can see this picture under the “Vogue colors in Colormetric Space” page.  It was almost 10 years after the civil rights movement and there was only one African-American woman featured.  The rest of the women are white as can be, blonde, and poofy.  Looking at them one by one you can clearly see their individualities, but on a broad scale the taste in who to put on the front cover is blatant.  Seeing how different eras were typecasted can provide the company with ideas of how they want to move forward and see if they are representing themselves the way they want to.

It seems that color also a huge indicator in these compilation projects.  I wouldn’t have expected the dominating shades to emerge from the decade cover compilation pictures.  There are various shades of pink, but also a dominance of aqua blue in the background of the covers in the nineties.  They show some of the overall aesthetics of the magazine.  Aaannndddd….to tell the truth these color palettes aren’t much different from the color palettes you’d typically see shown on other female fashioned oriented magazines.

I guess what I’m overall trying to say here is that while I possess no interest in Vogue and like how these tools can give me, a disinterested viewer, something interesting to look at, I’m more interested in how these tools can give a somewhat vague historical overview of certain subjects.

GIF (with a G sound) is brought to you in part by GIPHY.com as part as a well-balanced breakfast.