[angel222]

Diana Vreeland in the 50s, 60s and 70s gave vogue the unlimited budget to create cutting edge images of implausibly beautiful clothes and models. Late 70s to 80s Grace Mirabella made vogue more practical, but maintained the hard edge and sexiness of the photography layouts, and the exotic white and non-white models. The early 90s brought the faux supermodels Cindy, Christy, Linda, Naomi and it became tiring. By mid 1995 to present the magazine became very conservative with the models who are plainer, homogenous, and the GOD AWFUL airbrused covers by Meisel of models sitting in the outside. Then there are the covers of mostly B List actresses that just won't end!!! I don't know about you guys but writing this has made me sick, much less having to read it.

[papa_levante]

Quote:

The best way for Anna to improve / revamp the US Vogue? Resignation!

Makes me think a lot of The Devil Wears Prada, trying to kick Miranda out.

I could've sworn the movie was about her.

[moussemaker]

Anna is the biggest loser (almost):


Jul 29 2008 5:00AM EDT
'Oprah,' 'Vogue' Among Major Newsstand Losers

The official semi-annual magazine circulation report won't be out until next month, but thanks to the Audit Bureau of Circulations' new Rapid Report system, this year we'll get an early look at how top monthly titles sold in the first half. And the answer is...not well, for the most part.


full article at www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/mixed-media/2008/07/29/oprah-vogue-among-major-newsstand-losers

[SnejanaIsMyMuse]

Resignation for Anna would be a good thing.Another good step would be to remove the severe mood of austerity and just have fun with fashion.Vogue is rich enough that it can stand to make changes and be more cutting edge ,while still maintaining a chic magazine.

[JustABoy]

Interesting article by Cathy Horyn on this topic.

What's wrong with Vogue?
Cathy Horyn - NYT - via fashionista

Quote:

NO one at Vogue, least of all its editor in chief, Anna Wintour, could have been seriously stung by a recent letter from a reader complaining that the magazine was in a rut. After all, Ms. Wintour chose to publish the letter, which chided the magazine for featuring the same women — “Gwyneth Paltrow, Caroline Trentini, Gisele Bündchen, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, blah, blah, blah,” as the reader, Kathryn Williams of San Diego, said. “I could make a calendar of your cover girls, and it would probably repeat year after year.” She added: “Let’s face it: Vogue is getting a bit stale. It is a pity, too — because the magazine is still much better than the others.” TIME OUT In January, deep into a recession, models are portrayed on an outing in ’50s suburban garb. What is remarkable — given the rumors last month that Ms. Wintour was going to be replaced by the French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld — is that she was able to include not merely a critical view but one that accurately identifies the problem with the magazine. Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business. And it has happened in spite of a leader who “only cares what readers care about,” according to a long-time staff member.

Quote:

The New York Times January 1, 2009 Critic’s Notebook What’s Wrong With Vogue? By Cathy Horyn No one at Vogue, least of all its editor in chief, Anna Wintour could have been seriously stung by a recent letter from a reader complaining that the magazine was in a rut. After all, Ms. Wintour chose to publish the letter, which chided the magazine for featuring the same women — Gwyneth Paltrow, Caroline Trentini, Gisele Bündchen, Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller, blah, blah, blah,” as the reader, Kathryn Williams of San Diego, said. “I could make a calendar of your cover girls, and it would probably repeat year after year.” She added: “Let’s face it: Vogue is getting a bit stale. It is a pity, too — because the magazine is still much better than the others.” What is remarkable — given the rumors last month that Ms. Wintour was going to be replaced by the French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld — is that she was able to include not merely a critical view but one that accurately identifies the problem with the magazine. Vogue has become stale and predictable, and it has happened in spite of some of the best editors, writers and photographers in the business. And it has happened in spite of a leader who “only cares what readers care about,” according to a long-time staff member. Because of her intimidating presence, heightened by an almost unvarying personal style — the bob, the sunglasses, the extra armor of her Cheeverish clothes — Ms. Wintour, 59, is considered the ultimate fashion editor. In fact, her instincts are really those of a journalist. She has periodically updated Vogue over the last 20 years to reflect changes in the world and in women’s lives. She has introduced new photographers, beginning in the late 1980s with Peter Lindbergh and Steven Meisel. At the same time she has a deep respect for the work of Irving Penn, as if she knows that Mr. Penn, however contemporary his pictures, is part of the mysterious link to Vogue’s — and fashion’s — past. “That’s the main reason I keep looking in the magazine, to see a photograph by Penn,” said Magnus Berger, an editor in his 30s who, with Tenzin Wild, recently started a publication called The Last Magazine, an oversize journal that is a blend of art book and newspaper and which its founders hope will be a platform for young talent. This sense of history, which enriches Vogue, is much less evident today in other fashion glossies. It has been nearly wiped away at Harper’s Bazaar. An avid follower of politics, as well as sports, she has broadened Vogue’s coverage in both arenas and put a first lady on the cover. It was one of the first national publications to write about Sarah Palin. For all the fantasy in Vogue, especially the fairy-tale kind produced by Grace Coddington, the creative director, and Annie Leibovitz, the magazine is actually quite serious. There are things to read, long pieces, from writers with distinct voices: Julia Reed on politics, Jeffrey Steingarten on food, Sarah Mower on the Paris Collections And unlike many of her rivals, Ms. Wintour, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has largely resisted the pressure to break down content to lists and small bites. Though this faster, drive-thru approach to editorial consumption may be what more people want. According to a writer at Condé Nast, who requested anonymity because he works at a sister publication, “Anna’s two great talents are that she understands her readers and she speaks with this incredible authority to advertisers.” Indeed, as the writer points out, Condé Nast, having monopolized high-end magazines, has a rather odd relationship with luxury advertisers — which is that these advertisers cannot afford to go somewhere else, bad economy or not. Luxury brands haven’t yet found a formula for success in digital media. Their relationship, then, with Condé Nast creates an “interesting ecology,” as the writer put it. “They keep each other in business.” Meanwhile, though, many people have all but abandoned traditional media for Web sites and blogs. This is the locus of Ms. Wintour’s harshest critics and where rumors first surfaced that she was going to be replaced by the 50ish Ms. Roitfeld, who has made French Vogue exciting in part by drawing on the sexiness of her own act. She knows how to play with fashion’s self-referential habits. The rumors were silly — Ms. Roitfeld runs a magazine with a circulation of 133,000, in contrast to American Vogue’s 1.2 million. But silly or not, they were extravagantly denied by Condé Nast, which took out a two-page ad in The New York Times to show Ms. Wintour’s record. It cited figures showing that Vogue had the highest number of advertising pages of any fashion magazine. Yet, in 2008, Vogue’s ad pages were down 9.6 percent, Mediaweek said, compared with an average 8 percent decline for other fashion magazines. Rivals like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, which have adopted a pell-mell style that encourages value-for-money nibbling, have fared better. The very qualities that set Vogue apart — consummate fashion judgment, a comfortableness with ideas in the shallow pool of celebrity and weight-loss articles — now seem to be narrowing its view, like an aperture shutting down. There are too many stories about socialites — or, at any rate, too few such stories that sufficiently demonstrate why we should care about these creatures. What once felt like a jolly skip through Bergdorf now feels like an intravenous feed. To read Vogue in recent years is to wonder about the peculiar fascination for the “villa in Tuscany” story. Ditto staff-member accounts of spa treatments and haircuts. It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the “charms” of Wal-Mart and Target. A similar obtuseness permeates a fashion spread in the January issue, where a model and a child are portrayed on a weekend outing with a Superman figure. Is a ’50s suburban frock emblematic of the mortgage meltdown? To ask what works in Vogue is in a sense to ask the same of all fashion magazines. Many do not seem to know how to relate to women in their 20s, except to throw celebrity pictures and clothes at them. Although the median age of its readers has hovered around 34 since Ms. Wintour became editor, in 1988, you don’t feel that the magazine has considered how changes like social networks and Web-based subcultures have influenced women’s ideas about themselves. This lack of awareness is reflected in Vogue’s pages. Also, people are likely to be short of money in the coming years. Vogue, along with the fashion industry, must find a way to deal with this reality, said Grace Mirabella, who ran Vogue for 17 years until she was replaced by Ms. Wintour. “You’ve got a fashion market that doesn’t know how to do good, inexpensive clothes,” she said. “That is something which should stop whether there is a recession or not.” The critic Vince Aletti, who is a curator of “Weird Beauty,” an exhibition of recent fashion images that will open this month at the International Center of Photography, thinks that Vogue under Ms. Wintour is still the leader in a lot of ways. “For me any magazine that publishes Penn is great, and she has been publishing some amazing work by Annie Leibovitz,” he said. Referring to Condé Nast, he added: “I think they would be crazy to get rid of Wintour, although I think the magazine needs something different. I don’t think it’s a bad-looking magazine, but it hasn’t changed in quite some time in a significant way.” To people inside Condé Nast, like Michael Roberts, the fashion director of Vanity Fair and a friend of Ms. Wintour’s, it’s hard to imagine that Ms. Roitfeld would be in line to replace her unless, as he said, someone “has spiked the Kool-Aid.” If such an event were to happen, he said: “There’s a whole financial machine that would come crashing down, I would say. I’d like to see Carine talking to the people from North Beach Leather or St. John knits. It’s all very professional and businesslike at American Vogue.” As Ms. Roitfeld herself once said, with typical candor, “I’m not a business girl.” But there is something more in Ms. Wintour’s background that makes it hard to replace her, though, inevitably, it will happen. “In newspaper terms, she is old news — the Nuclear Wintour story,” Mr. Roberts said wearily. Editors of Ms. Wintour’s generation, like the designers they champion and the photographers they protect, have a depth of knowledge not easily reproduced. Mr. Roberts said: “I’ve never seen anything from Carine that astonishes me the way that I have in American Vogue. I’ve seen kinky, sexy but not astonishing. But I did see astonishing in Vogue when Anna published a picture of Nadia Auermann having sex with a swan.” He was referring to the Helmut Newton picture from the early ’90s. That kind of subversion made American Vogue really cutting edge, Mr. Roberts said. “He’s never been replaced.”

[Erin]

^ Thanks for posting this.

It was an interesting read.

[corsetted]

As a longtime Vogue reader, I totally bemoan the state of Vogue now. My first issue was September 1996 with Amber and Shalom wearing gorgeous lime velvet by Donna Karan. It was my bible, on food, the arts, homes and of course FASHION.
Today, it is banal, resorting to tabloid battles between Jen An and Angie Jo to boost circulation. It's lost some of its best qualities, stylish yet edgy styling (Carine Roitfeld did some inspirational work with Kate Moss and Rhea Durham in the late nineties), Jeffrey Steingarten who hasn't submitted anything recently and just a general lack of gorgeous clothes.

The sad thing is, with the internet and all, Vogue doesn't debut fashion fast enough anymore. Anne Hathaway was wearing a white Narciso Rodriguez dress with black chiffon strips crisscrossing the bodice in the Jan issue that Bee Shaffer wore months ago. If it's going to be the same thing again, style it better.

To be fair, I did enjoy the Sarah Jessica spread in June(?), it had fantasy and great fashion but it doesn't reach the heights of the Steven Meisel shoot in the nineties with all the supermodels, Linda, Naomi, etc dripping in jewels and Lacroix couture presiding over a magnificent feast in a French forest setting. Decadent, fantastic, edgy and beautiful. Just what Vogue needs now.

[papa_levante]

Is there a reason that US Vogue rarely has covers with models on it?

Italia and Paris, more or less, continuously features models on the cover.

Is there something about American culture that features celebrities more than models who aren't quite household names? Or is it just an Anna thing?

[b9409]

If Americans wanted to see models or cared about them, we would see models on American Vogue covers as well. Celebrities will be on the cover for a long time. But let's talk about what is inside.

I am sick and tired of seeing the same designers, the same colors, the same models, the same spread ideas and themes... It is all the same. All the same. Pushing for a certain look for a season is one thing, but when I know exactly which frumpy Marni dress or Marc Jacobs pants will be on some editorial next month... it is just so predictable.

Next season will be a huge challenge for Anna, because the heavy 80s influence is something she detested seeing and voiced her opinions time and time again. But almost everyone did the 80s in some form or the other. Maybe after the show, she had advised some designers like Dolce to tone it down a little for the actual retail market, but still. I bet we'll see A LOT of Prada as usual.

I wish she sexed things up a little, but in a sophisticated way. Not in a Balmain way, or the Carine Roitfeld constantly black-wearing red nailed French woman attitude, but something sell-able and optimistic. Like the early-mid 2000s. We rteally need some glamor and fierce-ness. I would also appreciate if Anna tried to make the designers and models 'stars.' I love reading about designers and their process, and their insights. Vogue covers many subjects, but their fashion coverage MUST be bigger than just clothes and parties. They cater to the elite of New York and maybe London: it is almost a race for NY socialites to show face on these prestigious pages.

I am also sick and tired of seeing stick thin girls jumping up and down on the Vogue pages. Also, give Raquel, Chanel, Caroline etc. a break, and find some new girls. But I guess that is everyone's complaint. One final thing: it is almost impossible to read the clothing info/details on the editorial pages, because of the lack of bold letters or anything different in the font that proclaims the designer or label's name. I would want to be able to read the label name right away wile scanning the clothes. You have to read the whole description. It is lame and not very user-friendly.

[miggyy]

Maybe its me but I am finding US Vouge to be "showing its age", I have stopped subscribing to US Vouge years ago, refuse to purchase it, but will skim thru it at the library or waiting in line somewhere. Its the same models, in the same poses, dressed in the same clothes, photographed by the same photographers, I can now easliy spot a fashion spread edited by Grace Coddington or Tonne Goodman (and I am a fan of thier work!) I have been reading Vouge since the late 70's early 80's when Grace Mirabella was editor of the magazine and I also find Anna Wintour leadership of the magazine amazing, but it is getting old and a little stale. Although I know this is the number 1 fashion magazine in the US, i am finding it boring. Anyone else feel like this?

[blueorchid]

Personally, I think it's on an upswing.

[MON]

Quote:

(A) Its the same models, in the same poses, dressed in the same clothes, ( photographed by the same photographers, (C) I can now easliy spot a fashion spread edited by Grace Coddington or Tonne Goodman

A. US Vogue is not the only Vogue magazine or magazine who uses repetitive girls. Vogue Paris anyone?

B. Every magazine uses the same photographer every month. Inez & Vinoodh, Mert & Marcus, Mario Sorrenti, Mario Testino, Steven Meisel et. al

C. They`re resident stylists of Vogue so as Geraldine Saglio, Anna Delo Russo, Edward Enninful, Marie Chaix

[Melancholybaby]

Right now I find US Vogue much fresher and diverse than VP and VI (which used to be bibles around here). Maybe my liking for US Vogue comes from the fact that I'm tired of nudity and controversy and I want straight-forward beauty and fashion for once but US Vogue is definitely not stale. It used to be a few years ago but since 2010 it became better.

[timandnorah]

I think that I would have agreed with this a couple of years ago, but US Vogue has taken such a turn for the better recently. More underused models, great editorial concepts, wonderful articles, and striking design. I find the magazine to be very cohesive every month and I always find it a joy to look through.

[Chanelcouture09]

To be honest i think US Vogue fills a certain position in the market, it will never be experimental in the ways we want it to be, of course they sometimes do challenging editorials with Annie Leibovitz that are exciting, for instance, but magazines and fashion will never be the same as the 80's and 90's with how experimental it was and how fun it was, its a major business now and they want to please the average reader who's actually going out to buy what is in the magazine so ultimately they are there really to please the advertisers in the magazine and not us, its just how it goes, as the saying goes Money Talks.
Lately i have been enjoying their issues and OK a model on the cover wouldn't hurt but i can live with that and the articles could be abit more... fashion related.