Why Cookie Crumbled
The rise and fall of the unattainable and irresistible parenting magazine.
by Amy Wilson
October 9, 2009
This week, amidst the vocal reactions of disbelief at the abrupt shuttering of Gourmet, another women’s title died a quieter death. Cookie magazine, which hit the newsstands less than five years ago, is gone.
It must be said that Cookie had become a publication out of step with its times. The idylls of Cookie’s pages, featuring toddlers in patent leather and cribs lined with flokati, altered not a whit with the collapse of Wall Street and our entire economy with it. Though Cookie's media kit indicated that their readers' median household incom was $80,616, it would have taken five or ten times that amount to live the life depicted in its pages. And even if readers might once have aspired to that kind of lifestyle, when our gilded age came to an abrupt close, Cookie seemed suddenly – and glaringly – irrelevant. Changing with the times may or may not have spared its life, but Cookie had a vision of modern motherhood, and until the end, it stuck with it.
In the Cookie world, that child was willing to just hang out while the New Mom gave her attention to the glamorous adult life she was leading with someone just off-camera.
From its first issue, Cookie magazine made it clear that it would hold its mother-readers to a higher standard than the other parenting titles out there. "All the Best For Your Family," each issue proclaimed, and indeed Cookie called itself "The Stylish Parenting Magazine for the New Mom." By "New Mom," they did not mean a first-time mother of a newborn. They meant an entirely new sort of mother, one interested in parenting fashionably, who was also an up-and-coming celebrity, or at the very least looked like one.
This New Mom, as represented in Cookie’s drool-inducing photo spreads, did not need to dwell exclusively on the undeniable preciousness of her offspring. Sure, her toddler was right next to her, pouting with disarranged mane, standing knock-kneed in her $3,400 leather miniskirt with sheer organza overlay. But in the Cookie world, that child was willing to just hang out while the New Mom gave her attention to the glamorous adult life she was leading with someone just off-camera.
The Cookie home had artfully scattered through the living area no more than three or four toys, all Danish, fashioned of blonde wood. There was no television in the Cookie household. Who had time for such passivity? After school, these children were too busy tending to their rooftop herb garden, nibbling arugula as they picked, before their New Mom cooked dinner with them, hand-cutting egg noodles and whipping up some salmon with minty pea sauce (the two-year old’s favorite).
©2009 Amy Wilson and Babble Media Inc.
About the Author
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Amy Wilson is a contributing editor to Parenting magazine and the author of When Did I Get Like This?, to be published by Harper Collins in the spring of 2010. She is also the creator of the one-woman show Mother Load, which has been touring the United States since its hit engagement off-Broadway in 2007.
As an actress, Amy was a series regular on the sitcoms Norm (ABC) with Norm MacDonald, and Daddio (NBC) with Michael Chiklis.
She blogs regularly at motherloadtheblog.com.
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