Twenty-three years ago, GLAMOUR launched in the UK, with the Oscar-winning actor Kate Winslet on the cover. It was a handbag-sized magazine intended for women on the go, and it was funny, empowered, candid, and full of fashion, beauty, wellness and sex. Its goal was to celebrate and uplift women, and those principles still guide GLAMOUR to this day. But what many GLAMOUR readers and fans may not know is that our story didn’t just begin in 2001.
In fact, GLAMOUR first launched in America in March 1939 – 85 years ago. And to celebrate this milestone, GLAMOUR has published a new book charting the magazine’s incredible history filled with extraordinary images and stories from our archives.
The reason the magazine’s history is so compelling? GLAMOUR was one of the first magazines in America – and the world – to put women’s empowerment front and centre. While launched originally as a magazine dedicated to recreating the beauty and fashions of Hollywood, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 changed everything. With men called to war, and women to work, GLAMOUR rebranded as the magazine “for the girl with a job” – setting the magazine, and its staff, on a journey that would define its whole future.
Even in the early 1940s Glamour was resolutely feminist – tackling subjects like equal rights, premarital sex, the importance of university and education, how to get a job (two issues a year were dedicated to career women, and in every issue, the magazine’s job department helped a reader with a specific work dilemma), and then how to dress for it.
With this new approach, GLAMOUR had tapped into a new generation of women with a completely new mindset: free-thinking, ambitious, desperate to break through the many barriers still holding them back. And the book chronicles how, as the decades rolled on, GLAMOUR became a fighting force for women’s freedom – be it financial, reproductive, sexual, and more.
GLAMOUR also broke barriers, becoming the first American fashion magazine to feature a Black cover star, Katiti Kironde, and the first to put model Beverly Johnson on the cover (she starred 15 times). We covered Whitney Houston when she was a young model with aspirations to become a pop star.
We were also one of the first publications to present Gloria Steinem’s writing (she was a contributing editor for years), and publish Andy Warhol’s illustrations. Presidents Reagan, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Bush, and Obama all featured in or contributed to GLAMOUR. And our reporting on reproductive rights, and more recently paid family leave in the US, and image-based abuse in the UK, has contributed to the many prestigious awards GLAMOUR has won over the years.
Now, as a digital publication, we are able to meet today’s women whatever medium they consume content on – their phones, on social media, on films, videos and podcasts—and wherever they are in the world, with GLAMOUR existing in the UK, US, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Latin America, as well as Brazil, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania and South Africa.
GLAMOUR has, in every iteration over the course of its 85 years, been so much more than a magazine. It’s been a place for women to celebrate and commiserate, a home for service and sexiness, a source of entertainment and enlightenment. It’s always been a destination and a community, bringing women together in its pages, online and in person. And now you can follow this journey through this beautiful coffee table book, featuring previously unpublished images, archival correspondence, and incredible stories and fashion photography from GLAMOUR’s very first issue to today.
You can buy Glamour: An Extraordinary History now on Amazon, Bookshop, Waterstones, and from other booksellers near you.
