Sometimes it takes a new spin on things to make us realize what we’ve been missing all along. Riposte is the only title on the shelves that calls itself “a smart magazine for women.”
Danielle Pender, its editor-in-chief, started the beautifully designed London-based magazine because she had noticed that she couldn’t find what she wanted to read in many women’s magazines.
“I read men’s magazines more often, just because there were different things on the cover,” she explains. As a result, she started a women’s magazine that would go beyond the scope of just beauty, fashion, and relationships.
Looking at the fourth issue of the biannual magazine, Riposte clearly believes that smart women mostly want to read about other smart women. This latest issue features, among others, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, a foreign correspondent who’s been in the business for more than 25 years, a fashion writer, and a stuntwoman. Pender attributes Riposte’s content to the principle of “if you can’t see it, you can’t achieve it.”
“When I was young, I didn’t realize that I could do all these jobs that we have featured in the magazine,” Pender says, “so now we want to show younger girls that these paths are open to them. We want to give them a sense that they’re meeting these women, and getting insights in how they have achieved what they have.”
And Pender has scored a couple of achievements of her own: Riposte was nominated for a design of the year award from the London Design Museum, and won a gold medal from the European Design Awards. It’s also caught on with U.S. audiences, available at bookstores in Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, New York, and Indianapolis.
Every issue features everything from thoughtful essays to profiles of iconic figures, though the backbone consists of various “meetings” with women of achievement. Each of them follows this line of questioning: How did you start out, how did you get to where you are, and what were the little failures you experienced along the way?
Maintaining a feeling of intimacy is an important factor for Pender.
“I wanted the meetings to read like you were sitting on the sofa and having a real conversation,” she says.
However, the failures remain small and formulaic, as if they only serve to further emphasize the awesomeness of the subjects. Fashion writer Susie Bubble’s style is “a madcap collision that is daring, loud, and pulsating with creativity.” Singer Eno Williams is described as “a bird of paradise amongst a flock of sparrows.” In describing Williams’ moments of weakness, the writer was quoted saying, “there have been moments of ups and downs, but I always try to look toward that light at the end of the tunnel.” I wondered how many of these similar profiles of greatness women would actually like to read. The most interesting piece in the latest issue is actually a probing piece on how parents should raise their boys in our current cultural climate.
Every woman should be taken seriously, whether they are or are not smart, brave, and awesome. However, in a time when many women’s magazines have turned into trade journals for the fashion and beauty industry, it is a brave step for Riposte to assume their readers are smarter than that. Women’s voices might still need to be oversold in order to be heard, but at the same time, we also need to cut ourselves some slack.
At the end of our conversation, I ask Pender what her next step is. She replies, “I need to buy some sticky envelopes. And I need to buy some toys for my baby. And work on issue 5.”
Photo credit: Riposte