Oh Comely - The Official Magazine of Pixie Girls Everywhere

The third edition of Oh Comely is out. I found a copy of the second edition about five weeks ago in one of the many absurdly-well-stocked newsagents in Soho and Charlotte Street. (Those newsagents have magazines - mostly fashion, style and design - that you couldn't even find in Borders before it went broke. I'm pretty sure there isn't a newsagent outside that square mile anywhere near as well-stocked. Certainly not W H Smug.) It describes itself as "a magazine about people and their quirks and their creativity, rather than money and what it can buy". If it were any more cute, it would be twee, and it is so girly it could never be gay. It took me a while to understand what it is, but it's the long-awaited official Pixie Girl Magazine.

To understand that, you have to know what a Pixie Girl is. She isn't the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" of the movies, though they may look alike. MPDG's are a male fantasy. Real Pixie Girls are, well, they look like Nadia Dahlawi and Sara Jade, who are not only the record label Young and Lost Club, but also damn near reference PG's.

The PG is feminine without being sexual, and attracted to all things slightly insubstantial (cupcakes, embroidery, folk music, non-corporate careers). Confident without being assertive, she yet has an air of uncertainty, and while she isn't a Material Girl she does like the trinkets and objects she surrounds herself with. They can be promoted without being ambitious and while they would never admit to husband-hunting, when they grow up, PG's become those self-satisfied well-off suburban wives and mothers (aka "Twickenham Wives") you see during the day in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Guildford, Putney and other such places. No-one was ever a PG at school: it's something that happens to a girl in the summer between the school and university.

The magazine has many nice moments and lots of wistful photographs of pretty girls. The essays and interviews are refreshingly not about successful people, and I could buy it just for the quirky decision tree at the back. The guiding lights / editors are liz bennett and des tan (it's a lower-case kind of magazine) and they seem to have decided that they're tired of the usual editorial tone of modern magazines, which, let's be honest, hasn't changed much since the early 1990's and is of marginal relevance to the 2010's. It's also not about money, just like it says, and that's probably what attracts me to it.

Buy a copy. Really. Enter a gentler world.