Word: digestibility
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...never the kind of magazine that Architectural Digest Editor in Chief Paige Rense wanted around the house. It was glossy and expensive ($4 per copy) all right, but it was also depressing. Too many images of death, disease and disaster. "Pictures of animals being slaughtered," she shudders. No dream houses on fantasy islands. All that is about to change. After two years and about $30 million in losses, the German publishers Gruner & Jahr have just peddled the monthly Geo (circ. 256,000) to Los Angeles-based Knapp Communications, which publishes Architectural Digest...
This will be like turning pigs' knuckles into pate, but Rense, 47, has performed similar transmutations in the past. Cleon Knapp's Architectural Digest was a little-mown trade journal with a circulation of less than 50,000 when Rense, an advertising representative for California sportswear and cosmetics firms and a sometime freelancer for Cosmopolitan, applied for a job in 1970. When Knapp asked what she thought of his magazine, Rense replied: "Boring and poorly edited." She was hired on the spot. With a monthly circulation of 558,000, Digest in the past year carried more than...
Still loosely edited, the magazine gushes on ad nauseum about the "intimacy" of luxury home furnishings, and despite its name, it has little to do with architecture. But Architectural Digest aims to dazzle the eye, not challenge the mind. Each issue contains about a dozen lavish photo tours of opulent homes that have been transformed by top interior decorators. Average decorating budget: $200,000. Frequent peeks into celebrity homes add to the vicarious thrills. In recent years Digest readers have visited the likes of Ali MacGraw, Robert Redford, Liza Minnelli and Barbra Streisand. Says Rense: "Digest is an elitist magazine...
Rense selects the 200 or so homes that appear in Digest every year by sorting through some 2,000 portfolios submitted by decorators and then visiting prospects that strike her fancy, squeezing in as many as three in an evening. If they pass her muster, homeowners must endure several days of photo sessions, during which Digest teams may rearrange the furniture or even add plants, paintings and sculpture to dress up the finished product. The competition to appear in Digest has made Rense a powerful figure in decorating and design circles, not to mention a sought-after guest of honor...
...market of its own, as well as beginning to alter the very meaning of work for blue-and white-collar employees alike. Says Jeffrey Ehrlich, a CAD/CAM specialist for General Electric: "An avalanche of technology is heading toward us. The problem is trying to get people to understand and digest...