A New Eye for Fashion

Unless she is rich and rangy, a young woman who curls up with Vogue or Harper's Bazaar is often tantalized by the sight of slender models wearing clothes beyond her budget in an opulent milieu that she can only dream of entering. If she bunks down with Rags, a new and determinedly iconoclastic fashion monthly, she will find people with bulges like her own, wearing clothes that she can afford, against backdrops as familiar as a brick wall.

She will also find tips in Rags on where to buy surplus U.S. Navy nurses' uniforms, French navy underwear, Australian army shorts, handmade American Indian buckskin boots, T shirts appliqued with a Flash Gordon thunderbolt, sheets imprinted with "acts of love," and the "perfect confrontation accessory"--imitation police truncheons "in gentle pastel shades."

Rags clearly is not for every young reader. But it is not meant to be. The magazine, explains Publisher Baron Wolman, 33, is aimed at the young who regard fashion as "an opportunity for self-expression, fulfillment of little head trips, a chance to try something different, to break tradition and stereotype." Adds Editor Mary Peacock, 27, a former staffer at Harper's Bazaar: "Fashion is not fashionable any more. The slick magazines are always telling you how you should look. We do it the other way around. We report what people are wearing without trying to change them."

Rags discovers what some young people are wearing simply by sending photographers into the streets. Among its rarer finds: a girl with a shaved head in a bright orange gym suit, a mini-outfit made out of an old valance and a floor-length gown "made out of old curtains that I ripped off of this house from which I was evicted because I was mad at the landlady."

The unexpected is just as evident in Rags' regular features on food and beauty aids. In the June issue, the magazine's first, "Dr. Eatgood's" health column noted: "Parsley juice is a super stimulant, so if you need an 'up,' down some." In July, Rags suggested rinsing hair with Jell-O to give it body and bounce, not to mention the smell of fruit. In the September issue, which went to press last week, the home sewing section tells where to get a pattern for a masculine codpiece to make trousers `a la Bruegel.

As befits its name, Rags eschews the gloss of traditional fashion books. Priced at 40-c-, its 60 newsmagazine-sized pages are printed in black and white on ordinary newsprint. But abundant pictures and a clean layout make it easy to read. Some of the most arresting material pops up in lengthy interviews. The July issue features San Francisco's Alvin Duskin, a social activist and successful manufacturer of knitwear, who says: "There is a growing resistance to buying clothes. The whole idea that 'clothes make a man' is over."

Rags' rock overtones reflect its origins. Publisher Wolman, a freelance San Francisco photographer, is one of the creators of the rock-oriented bi-weekly Rolling Stone. In fact, after Miss Peacock, Contributing Editor Daphne Davis and Columnist Blair Sabol approached him with the idea for a new fashion journal, Wolman tapped several Rolling Stone investors to launch Rags for $54,000. Printed in San Francisco, the first two issues sold 50,000 copies each, mostly through newsstands in California and New York, and August circulation climbed to 60,000. Thanks to a spare budget of $16,000 an issue, Rags has almost reached the break-even point. Wolman is putting the magazine on sale at boutiques and health food stores in addition to newsstands in the U.S. and abroad. That, he hopes, will be the equivalent of giving Rags a shot of parsley juice.

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