Posted by Rachel Balik to findingDulcinea
Fewer people are buying magazines, but the 435,000 people who purchased Vanity Fair’s June issue prove that sex will always sell.
The June issue of Vanity Fair had Robert Kennedy on the cover, but it also contained the controversial photo spread of teen star Miley Cyrus. In one photo, she is covered only by a sheet, her bare back exposed, and in another, she is lying across her father in a Lolita-esque manner. The young star endured chastisement from the media and from the Disney Company after the photos leaked in April.
However, the photos have dramatically upped sales for Vanity Fair. The magazine sold 435,000 copies of its June issue, the most copies of any issue since last November. The numbers are unsurprising, given that a popular response to the photos in April was, “Sex Sells.” The high numbers couldn’t come at a better time for Vanity Fair, as the entire industry is suffering from dwindling ad sales. Magazine ad sales dropped 8.2 percent in the second quarter of 2008, reports Bloomberg.
After boosting Vanity Fair’s sales with her bare shoulders, Cyrus is working to maintain her own sales by protecting her good-girl image. Her latest album, “Breakout,” has a distinctly tween tone and is sure to evoke “a sigh of parental relief,” Entertainment Weekly says. But despite Cyrus’s best efforts to seem squeaky clean, a hacker was able to access her cell phone’s memory and recently posted provocative pictures of the teen star online.
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