trip gabriel speaks!

As part of the NY Times’ sweet and sometimes informative series of “Talk to the Newsroom” Q&A’s, last week Styles editor Trip Gabriel answered readers’ loaded queries about wedding announcements, miniskirts and the permissiveness of pleated trousers for men (Gabriel sheepishly passed these last two onto fashion writer Eric Wilson). He also allowed a rare glimpse into the thought process behind this section of the newspaper of record.

Re: “Thurs-gay Styles”…

Sunday Styles has no overarching thesis or agenda about gayness or straightness, but it’s clear the issues around sexual orientation in our society are evolving very rapidly, and often play out in the worlds of style. So we cover them.

Re: drooling over ludicrously expensive products…

…give us a break. It’s a bum rap that we fawn over the rich or equate being “stylish” with the consumption of luxury goods that are out of reach of most people. If anything, the tone of these sections is irreverent when looking at the lifestyles of the wealthy -- just as it is when looking at bohemians, artists, celebrities and others whose tastes often filter down, or up, to shape mass taste in America.

And in response to a reader who wrote in asking for a justification of why a story about the straight “re-education” of a gay teenager ran in the Styles section instead of somewhere more “serious”…

“Styles’’ is not just lip gloss and dress shops; it is how we live our lives today, including new perspectives on dating and mating (see the “Modern Love’’ column), workplace trends, the culture of online behavior, parenting, socializing (and social climbing!), changing attitudes about the roles of men and women and, yes, changing attitudes about sexual orientation. Because our country's accommodation of its gay minority is unfolding so quickly, in ways that are as much social as political, we look at the subject regularly. The July 2005 story you referred to seemed right for Styles in part because the teenager sent to a "re-education" camp posted a diary of his ordeal on a new social networking site few had heard of, called MySpace.

A stack of every Styles section since September 2005 takes up precious space in my apartment. I keep them around from week to week because the section is fascinating…it offers both the most frustrating, distorted (and sometimes contradictory) coverage of sex and gender issues of any part of the paper, and also the most earnest and in-depth examinations of those same things.

The Styles section can be sly. It contains some expected things, like the wedding announcements (a certain kind of porn, some have observed), but it is also the home for stories that may not fit or belong anywhere else in the paper. So although this section is where you’re likely to find irritating content about women and gender (say, a piece about Roberto Cavalli’s redesign of the Playboy bunny outfit) it may also be the section where you’re especially likely to find feminism.

Not that it’s off the hook. Gabriel mentions that “a piece last year asking if America is ready to elect a woman president got a lot of angry mail, not because of the story but because it ran in Sunday Styles -- and because it was illustrated with a pink handbag with a presidential seal.” He doesn’t mention (or isn’t asked about) a piece that ran around the same time that looked at the experiences of black nannies, which was interesting and important, but also in no way Style-ish.