EDITOR’S LETTER
‘Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do…’
So wrote Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, her first novel, published in 1970; and after the great American author’s recent death at the age of 88, I found myself returning to her words again, and reconsidering their meaning. There are myriad individual interpretations of what is beautiful – and therein lies the magical, mysterious alchemy between author and reader, artist and onlooker – and one’s response to particular stories or images can evolve over a lifetime. (What I believed to be exquisitely romantic as a teenager – in Wuthering Heights, for example – now seems far more disturbing.) But the idea of creating beauty, as well as beholding it, is endlessly intriguing, and remains at the heart of Harper’s Bazaar, just as it has been from the magazine’s launch in 1867.
Hence our varied portfolio of artists and writers exploring the subject in this issue; and their inspiring and moving creative responses. ‘Beauty to me is not about perfection, it’s about awkwardness, strangeness, difference,’ observes the Turner
Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, whose pair of self-portraits that we publish are both concealing and revealing, with her masks and disguises. Alongside is Penny
Slinger, a pioneering feminist who has been challenging the norm since she graduated from the Chelsea College of Arts in 1969. ‘Beauty is hope is the midst of despair,’ she declares. ‘Beauty is petals falling in the snow and a rose that withers in