Shop in your own closet? How depressing!

Writer Rebecca Traister writes in Salon on how glossy magazines are responding to the current parlous economic climate. Good, and in spots funny, piece.

[H]ow does an industry built on a meringue of material aspiration adjust to the fast-deflating circumstances of its readers, most of whom are trying to adapt to the new realities of shrunken 401Ks, foreclosed houses and lost jobs? Can magazines that just months ago were advising people about which eyeball-janglingly expensive luxury cruise to go on, or which multimillion-dollar townhouse to buy, or which Alberta Ferretti dress to covet, suddenly begin preaching thrift?

Do they soldier blindly forward, providing economically depressed readers with the printed equivalent of Busby Berkeley movies and the Ziegfeld Follies? Do they break the bad news swiftly, advising readers on how to rearrange their lives? Or do they gingerly attempt a journalistic triple axel: simultaneously delivering dank reality, aspirational fantasy and useful analysis of what it all means?

If the bunch of magazines sitting on newsstands this January is any indication, the initial acrobatics are going to be ... awkward.