One evening a while ago, I was on the LOVE blog and my darling wife looked at the screen in total disgust. She said something to the effect of: Ew! Get that fat girl off the screen! referring to Beth Ditto who appears naked on the cover of LOVE’s premiere issue.

Certainly not your typical fashion magazine cover,LOVE grabs your attention and packs plenty of shock & awe: the colors are phenomenal; the logo, powerful; the scrawling text, a touch of the personal; and lots and lots of porcelain-smooth flesh, courtesy of Ditto.

The cover hails Ditto as an icon of our generation – and well, perhaps I’m not as in the know as I should be – but I’d never heard of her before. Apparently she’s been named the coolest person in rock by NME, is a lesbian and an outspoken advocate of gay rights, refused to play an in-store concert for Topshop as they don’t make clothing in larger sizes (which I must admit is awesome of her to do), and writes an advice column for British newspaper, The Guadian.

She has also appeared naked on the cover of a magazine before – for On Our Backs, a women-run lesbian erotica magazine with a great name.

Anyway, this issue was release in the UK on Valentine’s Day so why, on March 1st, am I writing about it now? Well, the kids over at Fashionista posted Editor-in-Chief Katie Grand‘s opening editor’s letter that (especially considering my wife’s initial reaction to the cover, which I’m sure is similar to that of millions of other people) I wanted to share with all of you:

Dear You,

In October of last year I did the precise total of no work. Nothing. There was a lot of work to get done; a new magazine to put together, for instance. But I did nothing apart from think. It was time for a reality check. And ‘reality’ became the first watchword of the month, then of the magazine. What, after all, is more real than love?

In the midst of all the endless media reminders of how tough times are, reality bit. Who would want to look at another collection of images and words on women that represented a perceived (and by now old) idea of perfection at an imperfect moment? Did I want to shoot one of the ten actresses or singers that come judiciously built and stripped of their flaws, just because that is what we have come to expect from them to justify their A-list status? Was I, in fact, not completely bored to tears by the modern idea of perfection? My love affair with the perfect woman was over.

I began to think not of redrawing or retouching celebrities, not of grooming them out of their personalities, but to celebrate the things that I love about them in the first place. We are so used to the idea of a certain celebrity on the cover of a certain magazine that the impulse to enjoy these people’s reality has become a memory to be dusted off, a reminder of another time and place. Everything has been Botoxed, lifted sucked and dyed out of the women that represent the absolute aspiration of real women. The life that they lead cannot be traced upon their face any longer. It began to make me feel a little sad. Was it perhaps time to redraw the boundaries? To start again, even.

I remembered meeting and falling a little bit in love with Beth Ditto, as everyone who meets her does. She became a touchstone for all of this. There are certain things I love in women and Beth Ditto has them all in droves. She says the wrong things. She looks the wrong way. But she makes you think about what ‘the right way’ is, anyway.

For a final thought on this first issue of LOVE, I think we should turn to the wisdom of Anjelica: ‘Nobody ever falls in love with you when you look great. It’s a rule. The real ones love you when you are you.’

LOVE, Katie