Anna Wintour, American Vogue
“Nuclear Winter”, “Darth Vader in a frock”, whatever you want to call her, the
most tightly controlled, ruthlessly ambitious and iconic of all the Vogue
editors, Wintour (above) continues to rule with an iron fist not just her
own magazine but much of the fashion industry. Clear-sighted and
uncompromising even as a teenager, the daughter of the former Evening
Standard editor Charles Wintour dropped out of school at 16 to pursue
her dream of working in fashion. She was living in the United States by the
time she was 25, having — some say — piggy-backed her way to the top via a
string of well-connected boyfriends, including, perhaps regrettably, Nigel
Dempster. At one point in the 1970s she is said to have “disappeared” for a
week with Bob Marley.
Some time between then and now Anna Wintour the person became “Anna Wintour”:
the helmet- haired, Chanel-wearing, oft-parodied machine who rises at 5am
every morning, plays tennis and is at her desk by 8, where she spends much
of her day scaring the life out of everyone (“Anna happens to be a friend of
mine,” says Barbara Amiel, “a fact which is of absolutely no help in coping
with the cold panic that grips me whenever we meet.”) Her legendary MO is
Mafia-esque; particularly her habit of letting her views be known through
her acolytes, who need only utter the phrase “do you want me to take this to
Anna?” for any dispute to collapse in her favour.”
Before Vogue, Wintour edited American House & Garden, where
she famously threw out £2 million-worth of photographs and articles in her
first week and her tenure was judged to have been a failure, primarily
because of her preoccupation with clothes over furniture.
At Vogue, however, she is in her element, and not afraid to let her
politically incorrect opinions be heard, especially where fur and fat people
are concerned. She made a “gentle suggestion” to Oprah Winfrey that she
should lose weight to appear on the cover of Vogue and recently
returned from a trip to Minnesota, “where I can only kindly describe most of
the people that I saw as little houses”.
Wintour recently explained why she always wears sunglasses, even indoors: “I
can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind, nobody will notice. At
this point, they have become, really, armour.”
Alexandra Shulman, British Vogue
Possibly the least fashion- obsessed Vogue editor ever, Alexandra
Shulman, a fifty-something, Nissan-driving, frequently dishevelled divorcée,
once said that on a bad day she resembled “an awful old fortune teller”.
And yet her ramshackle wardrobe and phlegmatic relationship with fashion (she
edited GQ before she came to British Vogue, and admits to
being baffled by the female preoccupation with expensive handbags) perfectly
sums up the British public’s own “whatever you do, don’t try too hard”
approach to personal appearance. Down to earth, assured and occasionally
moody, Shulman’s sheer normality has shocked those who have interviewed her:
she smokes, drinks and even eats.
However, certainly when compared with some of its equivalents abroad, British Vogue
is very much a consumer-orientated, commercial mainstream product. In recent
years Shulman has given in to this country’s obsession with celebrities by
sticking a succession of famous actresses on her covers (this month:
Julianne Moore). The models inside are often flanked by “intelligent”,
though never particularly intellectual, articles with accessible headlines
such as “Frock swap: can you wear another woman’s clothes?”, and “How old is
your body?” But the mix works (sales are robust) and Vogue
leaves the cutting edge to young magazines such as I-D or POP.
Carine Roitfeld, French Vogue
To Roitfeld, the daughter of a Russian film director, and an uncompromising
aesthete herself, the magazine she edits is emphatically not Vogue
France, but Vogue Paris. The rail-thin, often miniskirted and
bondage-heeled editor is a committed anti-populist and freely admits not
only that “the rest of the country don’t like us”, but that “we don’t know
them”.
Roitfeld has never operated a computer, never wears jeans (“though jeans suit
me”), has banned trainers in her office, makes it her aim to look as much
like a Helmut Newton photograph as is possible and didn’t quite quash
rumours that she weighed the female members of her staff when she said: “All
my girls are very skinny and very chic and very beautiful. And if they are
not beautiful, well, then they are very charming. So people always say that
I weigh them, but no.”
An accomplished stylist — she once dressed Eva Herzigova in a butcher’s apron
and has made André J, a black transvestite with an Afro, giraffe legs and a
chinstrap beard, her cover model — she rarely concerns herself with the
wearability of the clothes (“I do not like comfortable”) and can often be
heard poking amused fun at her more commercially oriented counterparts in
the US, where she has been referred to as the “anti-Anna”.
“I’m not a business girl,” Roitfeld says. “I will never be a business girl,
but I will say, for Anna Wintour, that I respect successful people, I like
things that are success. But this is really American.”
Roitfeld describes her own look as “very sexy, but very woman, and always some
rock and roll, eh?” and often includes pictures of herself on the social
pages of her magazine. She favours a full-immersion approach in her career
and is on best-friend terms with several of the leading names in fashion,
most notably Mario Testino, her long-time collaborator, whom she credits
with having extracted her from an inherited Russian gloominess.
But she often turns her nose up at trends: “Right now I think that fashion in
the world becomes a bit boring. There is so much money, and I feel a bit
when you go to shows they want to sell so many handbags, and for me, well, I
do not like handbags. It is not a nice look to carry a handbag.”
Angelica Cheung, Chinese Vogue
Western fashion snobs tend to deride Chinese Vogue as little more than
a catalogue, and its editor as a “journalist” rather than a natural-born
fashion editor. She is said to lack that elusive, indispensable thing, “an
eye”.
Cheung’s challenge is not only the usual one — of bringing in advertising and
shoots — but explaining to millions of Chinese all the trends that they
missed under communism. Who is Ali McGraw? What were the Swinging Sixties?
These are issues that are likely to preoccupy the readers of Chinese Vogue,
whom Cheung, the former editor of Chinese Elle, says fall into two
main groups: those who can already afford a luxury lifestyle and those who
cannot yet, but dream of it.
“For the second kind of readers, Vogue offers fashion concepts,
and helps to cultivate their taste and vision of fashion,” says Cheung. It
is not unusual for a young Chinese woman to save up three months’ salary to
spend on a Louis Vuitton handbag. Though Cheung stuffs the magazine full of
Chinese models, the desire to emulate Western styles and appearance among
Chinese women is painfully apparent in the number of advertisements for
whitening products that appear in the magazine each month.
Aliona Doletskaya, Russian Vogue
The second most intriguing of all the Vogue editors (after Wintour),
Aliona Doletskaya is also persistently rumoured to pose the fiercest threat
to Wintour’s editorship of the American edition. A linguist at university,
she has a PhD and speaks immaculate English, having worked at the British
Council before she was given the top job at Russian Vogue.
“The full-on extravagance, the red lipstick, the diamonds . . . all that
is passé,” she claims, “Russians are getting much more sophisticated.”
Nevertheless, Doletskaya likes to arrive at fashion shows wrapped in a fur
coat, a plume of cigarette smoke streaming from the window of her chauffeur-
driven car. Her liberal use of the word “darling” further cements the
stereotype of a fashion editor. Like many of her contemporaries in Russia,
Doletskaya has what has been described as a “vague biography” and a
“dark(ish)” past — an ex-boyfriend tried to sue her for financial support
and a woman with her name and address has been reported to have been given a
three-year suspended prison sentence for “causing the death of a woman in a
driving accident”.
Doletskaya’s Vogue devotes almost half its editorial content to
beauty; fake cleavages abound.
Christiane Arp, German Vogue
It can’t be easy editing Vogue Deutschland. Germans are famous
the world over for their total lack of personal style.
Most recently the task has fallen to Christiane Arp. An accomplished stylist
in her forties, Arp is less formidable than her counterparts abroad and also
more casually dressed: brogues and a man’s suit are her thing; she favours
the light, airy style made popular by Jil Sander.
Arp often turns the magazine over to guest editors, either famous Germans
(Heidi Klum, most recently) or photographers such as Mario Testino, who put
together a “Sex issue”.
If only she could bring herself to rid the magazine of its Anglicisms.
Coverlines such as “VERY SEXY” or “Mr Style and Mrs Chic” would be
mortifiying even in an English-speaking country. But say these words with a
German accent and it is easy to see why attempts to turn Germany into a
truly stylish nation continue to be an uphill struggle.
