FORMER MOUSEBURGERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.(Cosmopolitan magazine)(Brief Article)

Thirty-five editors of the international editions of Cosmopolitan were in New York last week for a conference, and if you had stopped by the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where they were staying, you would have been able to identify members of their party at a glance. You could tell they were Cosmo because of the preponderance of smart career-girl suits paired with high heels, and you could tell they were international because so many of them were taking advantage of the hotel's please-smoke-all-you-like policy in the lobby. Hearst, which owns Cosmopolitan, brings its foreign editors together every two years in some desirable location--last time it was the Bahamas--to exchange editorial ideas and to bond as disseminators of the Cosmo creed, which holds that a woman is entitled to have a job she cares about, a wardrobe filled with cute clothes, and one or more of what American Cosmo refers to as "hunks" or "hotties" available to accommodate her considerable sexual appetites.

There are now editions of Cosmo in forty-seven countries, the newest being in Latvia, and they are all edited by women. The elder stateswoman of the bunch was Marcia Villela Neder, who has been running the Brazilian edition for more than a decade, and whose magazine is generally regarded as the sexiest. (Of Brazilian Cosmo, one Hearst executive said, "I dare you to find a dress on those covers.") Others, however, were so new that the ink was barely dry on their business cards. Silvana Mendusic took over at Croatian Cosmo only a month ago, having previously been a war correspondent on Croatian television; of her switch in journalistic focus she said, "The adrenaline is the same."

On Monday morning, the editors were addressed by Helen Gurley Brown, the creator of Cosmo as we know it, and by Kate White, the current editor of the American edition. Afterward, they filed into the hotel's restaurant for a lunch of seared tuna and salad, and, for those who had been in the Cosmo sorority for some years, for reconnection with old friends.

"It's a bit like a cross between the U.N. and Miss World," explained the representative of Australia, Mia Freedman. "First, we exchange baby photos. Then we talk about who's got married and who's got divorced. Then we talk about what we've worn, where we've shopped. It really is a sisterhood." A certain amount of cliquishness is inevitable: the editors from Hong Kong, ...