Description:
Unlike Seventeen magazine, which soothingly encouraged teenage girls to fixate on zits and the raging controversy over eye shadow versus eye color, 16 focused entirely on the raison d'être for Seventeen's fixation: boys. Here to fan memory's flames is the magazine's 40th-anniversary collection that culls the photos of and interviews with those smooth-chested, coifed teen idols from its first issue in May 1957, which featured Elvis as its cover boy, as well as the bad-boy, shaggy-haired groups of later issues. Gloria Stavers, the personality behind the magazine, discovered a whole new audience in teenage girls. Their fan mail to 16 reminded her that when she was a teen, "the color of his eyes, the color of his hair--what adults would call 'dumb little things'" were all that mattered. She took that wide-eyed, breathless, adoring tone in her interviews with the teen idols that gave the magazine its flavor. Who's Your Fave Rave? proves, in a way, that you can go home again, if just to marvel at the passions that pompadours unleashed in the early '60s, the hysteria induced by '70s hippies, or the euphoria that the feathered bangs of early '80s hunks inspired. This scrapbook--its grainy, cheap papery feel intact--will carry you back to the acne innocence of days gone by.
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