The Press: The Girdle Gazette

One advertiser calls it "a consumer magazine with strong trade influence." To others, it is "a trade magazine with strong consumer influence." In either case, it managed to carry more fashion advertising than Vogue or Harper's Bazaar last year even though it missed an entire month's publication. Among cloak-and-suiters it is known—half affectionately and half derisively—as "The Girdle Gazette." It is the New York Times Sunday Magazine, one of the more curious phenomena of U.S. journalism.

Frilly Flavor. In the generally pallid Sunday-magazine field, the Times entry glows with health. The mass-circulation supplements were created to serve an almost unmanageably diffuse national...