A Monthly That Speaks Teentalk :...

Sex and death. The stuff of best sellers, tabloids, hit movies and, especially during sweeps week, the 11 o’clock news.

So why not the stuff of a magazine targeted at teen-agers?

With teen pregnancies and suicides at epidemic rates, isn’t there a need for a magazine that talks to young people in their own language about the real world?

For Sassy ($2), a colorful new monthly that appeared on the nation’s newsstands on Tuesday, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Unfortunately, in taking on serious topics in what its editors hope is a candid, nonjudgmental way, Sassy reduces life and death matters to the level of squibs on fashion and grooming.

Karen Catchpole’s “Losing Your Virginity,” for example, answers such questions as “What’s love got to do with it?” (plenty), “Will it hurt?” (maybe), and “Will people be able to tell?” (no). The three monologues that make up the bulk of Catherine Gyson’s “Life After Suicide” trivialize the pain and guilt of families and friends left behind by teen-agers who kill themselves (“For the last week of his life, he was like totally paranoid about his appearance.”).

Complex Emotional Issues

“My main commitment,” declared Sassy’s editor, 25-year-old Jane Pratt, “is to my readers,” who she defines as 14- to 19-year-old girls who have questions about complex emotional issues that other magazines ignore.

According to publisher Helen Barr, Sassy was inspired by an Australian periodical called Dolly, “the most successful teen-age magazine per capita in the world,” as she called it, published by Fairfax Publications, which began its challenge to American publishing last year with the purchase of Ms. magazine. “When one looked at the teen-age market in the U.S.,” Barr added, “one found that only 4 million of 14 million teen-age girls at any time read any teen-age magazines.”

Barr believes that Sassy is sufficiently unlike such rivals as Seventeen and Mademoiselle to find an audience of its own. “Visually, Sassy is very different, more on the cutting edge of fashion,” she said. “The larger format”--inevitably, Sassy is Elle-sized, “high-quality paper, sophisticated design, and the fact that 90% of the book is four-color, make it stand out.” She admits, however, that there is no way of knowing how many new readers will be attracted by Sassy.

Editorially, the debut issue includes, besides the suicide and first sex articles, a look backstage at the Miss U.S.A. contest, a staff seminar on the art of flirting, advice on what to do when people are talking behind your back, and a profile of actor Robert Downey Jr. The first “What He Said” column asks teen-age boys, “Why did you break up with your girlfriend?”

The magazine will strike most readers as more sissy than sassy. The lead articles promise tough, straight talk, but deliver platitudes. The layouts, though less clunky than Mademoiselle’s, are bland and repetitive and don’t stand up to the lively and imaginative art direction of a magazine like Elle. Whether by accident or design, the ad and editorial pages are virtually indistinguishable. The fashions may be on the cutting edge in somewhere like New Hampshire, but won’t raise much interest in Los Angeles.

The writing, with few exceptions, runs to giggly, is either embarrassingly mediocre or odiously condescending: the staff interrupt each other’s articles with cute bracketed asides. The reviews and service pieces read like they were transcribed at a pajama party. The most daring person on the staff is the one composing the cover teasers.

Pratt insisted the tone of the magazine was a reflection “of our personalities.”

“We are pretty much just writing our honest opinions,” she added. “If it sounds young, it’s because we are!”

Sassy promised advertisers 250,000 paid circulation for the first issue, with subscriptions making up 60% of the total. According to Pratt, Fairfax expects to reach 400,000 by March of next year and 1 million within five years. The publisher sent out more than 3 1/2 million pieces of direct mail advertising by publication day. Barr said the magazine is already exceeding early projections.

Upcoming for April is a feature article on a 19-year-old boy who has AIDS, advice for readers on handling parents’ divorce, and “the truth about boys’ bodies.”

“We don’t believe in sugar-coating things,” Pratt said.

Generating His Own Ads

When he was having trouble selling ads for FIT, Anderson began generating his own. In 1982, he ran an ad for mail-order bathing suits, and the response to it was so large that the publisher found himself in the swimsuit business.

By 1984, the entrepreneurially-minded Anderson was manufacturing his Ujena of California swimwear line from offices in Mountain View. It was then he hit upon the concept of disguising his catalogue as a magazine devoted to girls in bikinis.

The idea of making people pay for catalogues is not entirely new. Sears charges for its catalogue. The Sharper Image has a $2 cover price. But, at 225,000 newsstand sales, Swimwear Illustrated is the first catalogue to compete seriously with general circulation magazines. Its title and cover layout pay unabashed homage to Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit edition.

After a few test-run special editions, Swimwear Illustrated began appearing monthly in January, 1987. Discovering that people are less interested in bathing suits late in the year, the magazine cut back to a January-to-August schedule.

Shopping for Right Suit

Swimwear Illustrated looks like a real magazine. Time-sized, it has an index of travel, photography and fashion features. Last month, for example, the magazine visited Spain’s Costa del Sol, showed how to shop for bathing suits if you’re not shaped like an aerobics instructor and included a service feature on new travel gear. But for most of its 112 pages, the focus is on women in mail-order bathing suits, all manufactured by Ujena.

Anderson’s simple idea has generated an empire. There are 30 Ujena stores (up from three a year ago), from San Jose to Saskatoon, making it the largest swimwear chain in North America. The line has been expanded to include lingerie, active wear, leather and men’s bathing suits. Shades of the Playboy channel, a video company is marketing tapes of location swimsuit shoots in Spain, Greece and Maui. Other video spinoffs, How to Break Into Modeling and How to Break Into Fashion Photography, have led to a series of Start Your Own Business tapes beginning with Dry Cleaning. The magazine sponsors an annual nationwide model search ending with a Las Vegas pageant. Inevitably, there is a Ujena Girl Calendar.

Inevitable Imitations

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Anderson’s success has encouraged other swimsuit manufacturers to enter the market with such publications as Swimsuit International and Swimwear USA. Ujena even spawned its own new book, an upscale, Elle-sized, “art and photography” journal called Bikini ($3.95).

As appealing as the imagery may be, there is the nagging sense that ingenuity has gone awry here. Though nobody’s being fooled--Ujena’s name is bannered on the cover--selling the privilege of buying takes consumerism three steps back.

The triumph of hucksterism implicit in the acceptance of periodicals that are pure advertisements leaves the consumer as discriminating and resourceful as a submerged scuba diver trying to drink a glass of water.