Tina Fey Emerges From Vogue Cover And Profile Mostly Intact

By Irin Carmon | February 12, 2010 | 3:00pm

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God bless Tina Fey. It is impossible to impinge on her awesomeness, even under the strictures of Vogue.

Unlike in Maureen Dowd’s underminey, “I can’t believe this cow got famous” profile of Fey in Vanity Fair, relatively little (by Vogue standards) is devoted to Fey’s size, preferring to talk about the evolution of her style sense and how she learned about fashion through theater and Saturday Night Life costuming.

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Here’s where it gets a little meta:

People will say, ‘Oh, fashion magazines are so bad, they’re giving girls a negative message’-but we’re also the fattest country in the world, so it’s not like we’re all looking at fashion magazines and not eating. Maybe it just starts a shame cycle: I’m never going to look like that model, so…Chicken McNuggets it is! And conversely, I don’t look at models who are crazy skinny and think I want to look like that, because a lot of them are gigantic, with giant hands and feet. Also, my dad is an artist-a painter by hobby-and I constantly would see realistic nudes. Because we were raised around art and went to museums and the women I grew up around were curvy…there wasn’t this value on skinny, skinny, skinny. Curvy was clearly meant to be the winner. I go up and down a few pounds with a relative amount of kindness to myself. And I have a daughter, and I don’t want her to waste her time on all of that.”

I wonder what Anna Wintour has to say about that shame cycle.

Fey cheerfully discusses her red carpet choices and what works for her taste and her shape. But she says,

“I spend most of my time in my daily life trying to be like a fashion noncombatant. My hands are up! I’m not even trying! That said, to talk about the impact of fashion is really interesting. I think so much of it is tied into feminism. I am a post-baby boomer who has been handed a sort of Spice Girls’ version of feminism. We’re supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that’s not panning out. But you can tell different generations of women by whether or not they wear that Hillary Clinton blue power suit or the reappropriated Playboy-symbol necklace worn ironically. I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria’s Secret. There would be no Dior.”

She also has an astute point on the fallout of her Palin impression:

The weird thing is, when Darrell Hammond or Will Ferrell or Dana Carvey did an impersonation of a president, no one assumed it was personal, but because Sarah Palin and I are both women and people think women are meaner to each other, everyone assumed it was personal.”

As for complaints that post-production distorted Fey: The video from the cover shoot provides a rough comparison, allowing for variations in coloring and processing. ~~A high-resolution version of the cover is not yet available, but we’ll update when we have it.~~

(On the shoot, by the way, Fey says, “”At one point I was posing for [Mario Testino], and he was talking from behind the camera and he was like, ‘You have to fliiiirt, darleeeng. You have to bee-leeve you are wuuuurthy to be on the cover.’ And then at one point he said very quietly, ‘Lift your chin, darling. You are not eighteen.’ I was like, ‘You probably say that to all the 23-year-olds.’ “)

And actually, though something strange seems to have happened to the side flap of the dress, I would argue not that much seems to have changed. (It would be have been more instructive to have video from the inside, full body shots.) I’ll put it to the jury, though.

Here, the video, in which Fey claims to bench-press more than Michelle Obama and crows, “I am almost 40 and I wore a romper.”

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Miss Tina Regrets [Vogue]
Now Playing: Tina Fey [Vogue]

Earlier: Vogue Cover: Still Boring, Photoshopped, Now With More Tina Fey
Vanity Fair: Tina Fey Drops 30 Pounds, Is Scarred For Life