The Counter-Culteha Consciousness I in Bellbottoms

SO WHO SAYS you can't take yourself seriously in bellbottoms? Not Baron Wolman, hip-type photographer-entrepreneur, Mary Peacock, 27-year-old refugee from Harper's Bazaar, or Blaire Sabol, fashion columnist for the Village Voice. Man, bellbottoms are about as serious as anything else the counter-culture has dreamt up. Which is also to say that they aren't very serious at all. Or at least not worth serious attention. Which isn't, of course, to say no attention at all . . . Dig? . . .

Anyway. Baron and Mary and Blaire got this idea together last spring, this fantasy of a fashion, or maybe call it anti-fashion, magazine that didn't tell you what to wear in big 9 x 14 glossies, but just let a bunch of people hang it all out, let 'em rap about what they and their friends were wearing. The kind of magazine that would go out into the street and bring street people back into your home. Like it no longer mattered what you wore to the wedding feast and so there was this real need for a magazine that could act as a cultural barometer rather than a social arbiter . . . . Right? . . .

Anyway. The magazine materialized last June. It's called Rags. A cheap number-40c-and a monthly, printed on plain of newsprint, it's unabashedly trying to make it just like a Rolling Stone. "As befits its name, Rags eschews the gloss of traditional fashion books," reports shiny-panted Time. Which is to suggest, perhaps unfairly, that in rejecting the slick road to fashion, Rags and Rolling Stone may have inadvertently established a duller shade of slick themselves.

Anyway. Rags is still trucking along. Circulation is up to 50,000 a month and they're trying to boost that in hopes of someday going biweekly. And since you're not likely to see many copies just floating around by themselves-unless maybe you chance upon one in the waiting room of a free clinic-you might just consider thumbing through a copy down at Nini's yourself.

SO. While it's easy enough to say what Rags isn't-it isn't Vogue or Harper's Bazaar or Gentleman's Quarterly or the fashion pages of Esquire or Mr. Cavett's wardrobe furnished by J. Press or Joan Kennedy showing up at a White House reception in a tie-dyed leather gauche after threatening for a week to appear in hot pants-it's somewhat more difficult to say exactly what it is. As Rags describes itself:

it's an ego boost, it satisfies your vanity, it makes you smile. And smiles is what we're kind of short of lately . . .

Established slick fashion magazines bear about as much relationship to reality as toothpaste does to sex appeal. Today's fashion is something else entirely: it's a fantasy thing, an opportunity for self-expression, fulfillment of little head trips, a chance to break tradition and stereotype. It's beautiful.

But wait, don't turn away yet. (Admit it now, everyone's entitled to one gratuitous beautiful. ) For even Rags knows you can't fill 60 pages with assorted freaks on little head trips. And that's why Rags is also part Boy Scout Handbook. Whole Earth Catalogue, and 1898 Sears Roebuck advertisement.

For example: while an attempt is made in each issue to capture, in photo, people On the Street, there are also sections on cooking (what to-mostly organic-and how-like on a hotplate), camping (what to look for in a sleeping bag-answer: goose down), sewing, washing (hair and face), and just simply making things (like vests made out of beer can pull-tabs). It's easy enough to laugh off such attempts to begin to recapture control of our lives. There is something pathetic in such rudimentary lessons in self-survival. But once you really get into tie-dying jeans and whipping up oatmeal facials, you probably do discover a measure of self-reliance that simply can't be equated with getting through to the Esquire Buying Guide toll-free exchange. In any case, its self-help orientation is really Rags's strongest selling point. The Washington Post's Nicholas Von Hoffman even devoted an entire column to describing Rags as symptomatic of the rise of what he calls "Peppermill People":

With the peppermill's introduction, which we can date from the late '40s or early '50s, a new enzyme of change was loose doing its catalytic work. Peppermill buyers weren't like other consumers. Instead of assuming the best product was the most processed one, packaged to flow most quickly through our distribution system, these people were buying a tool to gain greater control over the quality of their pepper, which they wanted in its natural, unprocessed and unrefined state. This was a new kind of consumer, who desired not only pepper-fine or rough-ground pepper-but most of all, mastery over this little bit of his physical environment.

Which is why Rags is the kind of magazine that even Ralph Nader could freak out over.

SO RAGS has escaped corporate slickness. But it isn't free of pulp sensationalism. Many of its pages-and most of its covers-are given over to the kind of National Enquirer treatments that even in the supposedly anything-goes world of the counter-culture are still meant to be looked upon as something slightly shocking. To be sure, lots of it is played for laughs-like features on 1915 male nudes and turn-of-the-century obscene valentines-but then even prurience can be masked by a smile. Certainly the December cover story on tattoos-including understandably little-known facts like the fact that

The acme of exhibitionism and possibly unconscious homosexual striving is seen in men who have tattoos on their penises. The classic example of this is the sailor who had what appeared to be a small dot of color tattooed on his glans penis, On erection, the dot turned into a full-blown picture of Old Glory unfurled. . .

-is calculated to make its readers sit up and take notice. (Despite the fact that its language is so curiously civil for a pseudo-underground publication.)

As a result, Rags at its second-best, often explores the underbelly of the established culture it resents better than it extols the merits of the counter culture hanging over the Western horizon. Articles on Frederick Mellinger, Hollywood's successful purveyor of sexy underwear; MacFadden-Bartell Publishing, publishers of True Story, Photoplay, and True Confessions; and corporate dress codes, from Bonwit's to United Airlines to California's Jeans West; are often fascinating, despite their sometimes under-researched, often slightly censorious poses. At least Rags has a firm clinch on its enemies. And its rather foolish compulsion to overkill with a succession of such body blows is often fun to watch.

Even Rags itself occasionally succumbs to the temptation to laugh. Photo features on cosmetic-counter saleswomen ("a salute to the painted ladies") and middle-aged, uniformed delicatessen waitresses ("they always seem to accent their service with a gourmet seasoning called soul") are often less cruel than they first appear. For, if anything, the corporation is Rags's enemy and the corporation's victims, especially when cast in the role of cultural or economic underdogs, often become Rags's friends. In fact, the November cover story on girl-watching hardhats even manages, however perversely, to suggest that New York's construction workers may be the only men who really understand fashion. "Only a hardhat can separate the 'B' from the 'S' when it comes to fashion," Blaire Sabol concludes. So, while "you don't have to take a hardhat to lunch, just listen to him for once."

THE UNDERLYING assumption, here and in a lot of what Rags prints, is that bodies, regardless of sex are meant to be sexy. Bodies are to be decorated and adorned and, yes, even treated as objects, for only by individualizing each physical unit do you begin to get at the human potential it possesses. The argument is a refreshing one, particularly after the semi-Puritanical strain that infects certain women liberationists, though hardly the platitude on which one can slide home.

For while the first issues of Rags, by necessity, grope around a good deal in search of their thing, there is a real identity crisis that sends shivers through the magazine's stapled spine. For you don't aspire to be a successful, national monthly without being driven to drink the same polluted waters on which the competition thrives. February's Special Report on Boutiques and Hip Capitalism posed the question quite succinctly:

Can any revolution be financed by $200 leather jackets? Why not? After all, if you believe in the revolution, it shouldn't matter where the money comes from. On the other hand, the moral fabric of such an operation feels a little like chintz. But that's probably middle-class folk-purist inverse snobbism. Or is it?

Well, while you're hassling it, you might also try to figure what you do with advertising layouts like an 8-page spread by Truth and Soul Fashions that puts models aping 7 world famous revolutions, from "Geronimo and the Indian Revolution" to "Carrie Nation and the Revolution for Prohibition," in poor-boy sweaters, mock ammunition belts and knickers? And how do you claim that a cover story on Fashion Fascism, The Politics of the Midi, is any more anti-Establishment than Time magazine's cover attack on John Fairchild of Women's Wear Daily? What about the failure to produce writing and reportage worthy of the movement? (For Rags often follows the meandering, point-of-viewless perspective of Rolling Stone's sprawling, directionless Altamonte coverage. Much of the rest-sentences like "Shoplifting at Macy's is like cunnilingus-illegal but you probably won't get busted for it"-is even more of a calculating attempt to be Where It's At.) And how do you explain dumb little typos like "With a few exceptions, the counter-culture business heads get thrashed along with Cambridge Bank and Trust"?

ESCHEWING ideology for style, Rags has only begun to answer such questions. But the inevitable answers are there to be found. Although refusing to resolve the issue in its Boutique number, Rags reporters do make it clear that individual craftsmanship, even if it embroils you in buying and selling and warding off rip-offs, is pretty cool-as long as you watch where your head is at. And Rags admires those who break corporate rules-whether they be designers on the Lower East Side or secretaries who flaunt the company's dress code. There is a real effort being made throughout Rags's pages to return to a simple era; and despite all those nasty advertisers, by the very nature of its subject, fewer corporate shadows darken Rags than they do Rolling Stone.

More significantly (?), Rags has introduced an advice-to-the-small-businessman column, authored by Philip Freund, himself former business manager for RS. "Like everything else in life, business is neither a good nor an evil," Freund writes. "What makes the business trip a bummer is the same basic number that screws up almost everything that man attempts. The Uglies-greed, competition, false pride. . ." To combat the Uglies, Freund recommends self-discipline: "Don't try to get too big too fast, don't engage in competition for its own sake, dig what you're doing." Wow, man, self-discipline! Some trip.

It's do you own thing, sure, but it's also more than that. Rags's call to revolution is really more of a nostalgic attempt to return to the nineteenth century. It's a clarion call reverberating with notes of simplistic iconoclasm, Emersonian self-reliance, a Thoreauvian communion with the land, and, ironically enough, a championship of the small businessman. Spelt out in those terms, it's just not that revolutionary. More like Consciousness I in bell-bottoms. Which means that where Rags is at may be just about midway between the late Herbert Hoover and the early Yves St. Laurent.