As a magazine obsessive growing up in the heyday of print media, I always associated the new year with a publishing-world contradiction: the January issue. The bulk of the glossies’ ad buys were earmarked for often obscenely hefty September and December issues. By contrast, January issues slunk onto the newsstands in a shopped-out post-holiday void — and, as if to compensate for their anemic page count, did so with a deranged perkiness summed up by a phrase that, over decades, was splashed across innumerable fashion-magazine covers: “New Year, New You!”
Magazines, of course, didn’t originate the longstanding trope of a new year as a site of reinvention, clean slates, new leaves. But “New Year, New You!” showed up reliably on the cover of Seventeen, the one magazine I had my very own subscription to; and, like a lot of newly adolescent girls, I wanted to believe its promises even as I recognized, on some level, that they were all versions of the same proposition: This is the year you’ll become prettier! More athletic! More confident! More popular! Buying in — the right lip gloss, the right sneakers, the right acne medication — was all that was required.
