Glossies look out

There are certain habits I just can't kick even though they are patently bad for me.

Fiddling with facial blemishes, smoking and - at the moment at least - buying pleather ballet pumps in every colour known to man - are just some.

But the most sickening of all is my unfathomable dependency on consumer fashion mags.

I've tried steering myself away from the hussies, but whenever I find myself at the newsagent in search of an edifying read The Economist Time magazine? Forget it!) they leer at me like ladies of the night and I fall prey to their charms.

Excuse the quasi-lesbo sexual overtones but you know what I mean... they're so damn seductive! And to mix seedy metaphors into an even more dubious cocktail let me add that after the extreme excitement of first opening their pages I regain consciousness - with that chilling one-night-stand-after-too-many-margaritas feeling - thinking: Why did I go there? It's not that glossy mags are not beautiful... No, in fact that is the problem.

For beautiful is all they are. In their lustrous world, where everything is touted as new and exciting, actually finding something new and exciting is about as likely as stumbling across a pair of thigh-high scarlet stilettos in a Hush Puppies concession.

Thanks to the glossies, it is a truth universally acknowledged that fashion publishing is the fount of mindless, derivative frippery, where airhead celebrities' vagaries dictate the style of the day (who was responsible for making it okay to wear Ugg boots as a fashion statement?). But, while the received wisdom is that all most of us want to do is buy and wear the stuff (endlessly), for a small minority of people fashion is a worthy topic of informed cultural debate.

Two such people are self-appointed Melbourne publishers Gillian Terzis and Jessica Friedman, who recently re-defined the word "oxymoron" by launching an intelligent fashion magazine. With a title like "A cloth-covered button", it's clear this publication marks a seismic shift away from celebrity-grovel-porn, Louis Vuitton drool fests, best-to-less pictorials (the clue to my ballet pump addiction) and ads for sea-algae skin products costing a month's rent. Instead it addresses topics you never envisaged wanting to read about but suddenly can't imagine not being covered, like 'Fashion, art and rock'n'roll' or 'Hipster politics, terrorist style'.

 As Terzis puts it: "Intelligent discussion and debate surrounding fashion cycles and identities seems severely lacking in mainstream magazine circles, so we've come with the goods to fill that niche and then some." Friedman is more poetic, describing the magazine as "a love letter to the intoxicating power of fashion" edged with weighty debate.

With no paeans to Prada in sight, "A cloth-covered button" will never reach the heights of Conde Nast stardom, but clearly the remote tribes of intelligent fashionistas wouldn't have it any other way. In fact, I'm very tempted to join them...

Now, if I could just eBay those ballet pumps I might stump up the subscription...