ABSTRACT
This article stemmed from our realization that a lifetime s commitment to reading fashion magazines was neither a solitary nor an un-lesbian activity. Not only were lots of other lesbians doing it, but we all seemed to like the same spreads. A straw poll of who had cut out what to stick on or in which wall/desk/wallet revealed a commonality of visual pleasures. This led us to explore what it was about these particular images which attracted lesbian viewers. We should be clear from the start that this ‘survey’ is highly selective, based on our own readings and on opinions gathered from friends and responses to conference papers. The magazines we sampled were all mainstream high fashion magazines from the 1990s—Vogue, Vogue Italia, Elle and Marie Claire—since we were interested to analyse the possible lesbian visual pleasures offered by fashion imagery in a field of cultural production that is understood to be aimed at an exclusively female (and overtly heterosexual) audience. We have not, therefore, entered into the realm of the more avant-garde ‘lifestyle’ magazines, such as The Face and iD, since these address a mixed audience and are often deliberately provocative in content and imagery.
