Vogue editor slams designers for tiny sizes! Vogue editor
promotes paedophilia! Vogue editor wears same skirt almost twice!
Honestly, sometimes you can’t open a paper or check your tweets without
discovering what Anna Wintour really thinks of Michelle Obama, or whether
French Vogue approves of, say, breathing. For God’s sake, a colleague
inquired, genuinely flummoxed by the recent kerfuffle over sample sizes,
does it still matter what the editors of Vogue say? Why does anyone
care if they write a letter/hold a weekly weigh-in for their staff/ban the
colour pistachio/publish an all-black model issue? Isn’t it all about blogs
and weeklies nowadays?
Well, yes.
And no. If fashion, as has often been observed, is a religion — and it has the
famines, the tablets, the ominous edicts in questionable syntax delivered by
someone wearing something floaty and slightly mad — then it needs its Bible,
Torah, Koran and Tom Cruise, its Armani-sponsored, Swarovski-studded, pop-up
pamplet. Why not one with full-colour illustrations by Mario Testino?
I should state here that I learnt my trade on Vogue (reason enough,
some might think, to blame it for everything) and still write for it.
So I’m probably biased. But I can also see that in one important aspect —
selling fashion — all those weekly fashion-cum-celebrity glossies and
expanded newspaper fashion sections that didn’t exist a decade ago shift far
more product than any of the upmarket monthlies, including Vogue.
It’s not only product. With their familiar cast of characters (Jennifer
Aniston, Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie) and rotating plot-lines (Jen
finds love, Jen loses love, Posh gains weight, Posh loses weight, Angelina
finds child, loses Brad, etc) the weeklies have created a compelling reason
to buy them.
Nor is the job of flinging out high-minded edicts as plain sailing as it once
was, let me tell you. The days when all a fashion editor had to say was
“Think pink” or “Knee length, ladies” for the wealthy elite to get
themselves to their nearest dressmaker with a pair of shears, the days when Vogue
was the uncontested fashion Führer of mini Führers, are long gone. Fashion
is now a mass sport, which is both good for the magazine (British Vogue’s
circulation, at 220,000 a month — up 5 per cent year on year, with an 8 per
cent increase in subscriptions, is higher than ever before). And the masses
are nowhere near as meek and pliable as once they were. Vogue can
float the idea of the jumpsuit and the rest of the industry will take note,
but it can’t guarantee that it will fly.
Additionally, over the past decade, there has been the ascent of a slew of
glossy “alternative” fashion magazines, from the French Numéro
to Condé Nast’s own Love magazine, launched earlier this
year unto the prestigious high ground that was once reserved for Vogue.
Yet somehow, just as the nation turns to the BBC in times of crisis, royal
divorces and Wimbledon, so planet fashion reaches for Vogue when it
needs confirmation that fascinators really are dead.
Fashion craves certainty. It demands clarity. I learnt early on in my career
as a fashion journalist that the last thing anyone who is asking about this
season’s colours/lengths/trends in breast enhancements wants is a benign,
touchy-feely, “these days you can probably wear whatever suits you”
response. When it comes to fashion, women don’t want softly, softly
condescension. They want fascist dictatorship. It makes shopping so much
more linear.
Ultimately, however, even more than its readers, more than the fashion
fraternity at large (which loves, by the way, to bitch that Vogue
isn’t what it was — it was bitching when I started there 20 years ago and
was probably bitching in 1917, a year after the UK launch), it’s the media
at large that happily subscribes to the notion of Vogue as
omniscient, probably because quoting an über source helps the harried news
hack to validate any fashionrelated story that he or she is under the cosh
to run.
And there are a lot of fashion-related stories. When I was a Vogue
rookie it felt as though we were writing for a tiny elite. We’d wax on about
The New Soft and still everyone insisted on wearing The Old Hard.These days
fashion has pollinated with celebrity, big business; even, occasionally,
politics. Fashion issues are part of mainstream culture. Jimmy Choo designs
for H&M and the latest anorexia/Primark furore gets debated on Any
Questions.
Which is why, when Alexandra Shulman writes a letter to designers (as first
reported in The Times) pointing out that their samples — the clothes
that they fit on teeny tiny models to be shot on teeny tiny models — no
longer fit the teeny tiny models, the fashion world takes notice. Or more
notice than it would if any other editor, however respected, wrote to it. It
takes note, too, when Anna Wintour announces that “matchy matchy” is the
work of Satan, even though, at the time, it had to ask its assistant what
“matchy matchy” meant. It goes into a tailspin of existential accessories
doubt if French Vogue’s Carine Roitfeld suggests that handbags might
be bourgeois or decides to dispense with skirts and trousers and do a big
push on knickers or cigarette holders on every single page of her magazine
instead. And if Franca Sozzani, the eternally chic papal envoy in charge of
Italian Vogue, ever decided to put a picture of Grant Bovey and
Anthea Turner on her cover, the entire fashion world would suddenly embrace
flicky feather cuts. Now tell me that’s not power.
French and Italian Vogue have the “edgier” end of the market pretty
much sewn up — not bad, considering how long they’ve been around. American
and British Vogue, with a bigger readership than either, embrace
fashion in a broader sense (as in featuring some clothes that go up to a
size 14) and are thus the Condé Nast cash cows. Much of this revenue comes
from advertising, with the UK edition selling 956 pages in the year to July;
an impressive total, even if it does represent a 32 per cent drop on the
previous year.
Collectively, these four editors have been in charge for aeons: 21 years in
the cases of Wintour and Sozzani; 17 in Shulman’s. Roitfeld, the risky
newcomer, has been in place for eight years. Unlike Bauer Consumer Media
(formerly Emap), which spins its editors into new jobs every three or four
years, Condé Nast prides itself on the longevity of its appointees. This
adds to their aura of inviolability and immutability.
Atheists, agnostics and empiricists will argue that this blind allegiance to
an outmoded belief system, unsupported by any kind of science, is precisely
what’s wrong with organised religion. Strictly speaking, it’s true: the
numbers
don’t stack up. French Vogue’s circulation, at 133,000 a month,
is minuscule compared with that of the fortnightly French Elle.
American Vogue, at 1.2 million a month, is outsold by the brasher,
even breathier and more celebrityencrusted American InStyle (1.7
million). Italian Vogue sells about seven copies, once you discount
all the fashion journalists and buyers who get it on expenses.
But faith works according to mysterious laws, chief among which is that it
categorically shouldn’t have to withstand close scrutiny, or where’s the
faith bit of the equation? It can’t be reduced to something as simplistic as
a set of figures of Man’s own devising, otherwise we’d all be running around
saying, “Ooh, have you seen what OK! (circulation: 508,000) has
to say about The Balmain Shoulder?” Whereas in reality no one gives a stuff
what OK! says about anything.
The fashion industry operates on a strict caste system, since without
hierarchy the whole process of issuing diktats and watching them trickle
down until they reach a level of ubiquity that means that the originators
wouldn’t be seen dead in them becomes meaningless. That’s why designers have
a list of priority publications to which they will lend their clothes, with Vogue
remaining the gold standard approval marker. And it’s why some publications,
despite having circulations of more than half a million, find that their
phone calls mysteriously go unanswered when it comes to requesting clothes
for a shoot (they have the wrong kind of half-million-plus circulations,
stupid).
The most obvious display of caste is at the shows when every single journalist
and buyer is seated according to his or her standing in the industry — talk
about a public stoning — but it’s also evident in daily dealings. The top
models and photographers, for instance, only work with Vogue,
American Harper’s Bazaar and one or two established niche
magazines such as V, Ten or Another Magazine. Although
there are periods, as with the recent one, when top (earning) models are so
anodyne-looking that only the geekiest of readers would recognise any of
them, the prestige that they confer on the magazines they work for has
ripple effects in the industry.
Accordingly, the fashion glossies make most of their money from advertising
sales.
Kudos comes with access and while access comes with strings attached (picture
approval and a tacit understanding that the magazine won’t go in too hard on
the interviewee), a skilful writer and the right subject can still yield
fruit. British Vogue’s interview with Cheryl Cole earlier this year
provided the tabloids with fodder for days, while American Vogue got
Jennifer Aniston to say that Angelina Jolie’s predatory moves on Brad Pitt,
then Aniston’s husband, had been “very uncool” — a quote that ricocheted
round the world.
They may be a slow burn compared with an instant hit about Pixie Geldof’s
traumatic encounter with a smudgy mascara, or Sienna’s latest heartbreak,
but most readers understand that the weeklies don’t have the same
relationship with First Ladies and A-listers that the Vogues do.
There’s a caste system within the Vogue family, too, wouldn’t you
know it? A flotilla of more recently launched Vogues — Greek, Indian,
Chinese — exert not one iota of influence beyond their native countries but
are, to an extent, carried along in the ripples created by the big four.
Together, they create a sort of tidal wave of Vogue-iness around the
world.
But then fashion’s entire ecosystem is a ripple effect. Vogue
probably won’t cause a rush on a specific pair of bondage sandals (its
three-month lead means it has often gone to press before some of the high
street brands have decided when they’re going to launch their killer
pieces), but it still has the power to get the idea of bondage shoes out
there in the first place.
And it can rebrand people, too. After it featured Coleen McLoughlin (now
Rooney), photographing her in its own image, the world mysteriously stopped
baiting her about her tracksuits and began noting her lovely line of Chloé
dresses. And lo, a fashion figure, albeit a mainstream one, was born. Yup,
that’s right. Entire human beings have been reinvented courtesy of Vogue,
and they haven’t even had to come back as a size 0. (Are you listening,
Gordon?)
