A Retrospective : Vogue South Africa (1960s)

[callmejaeden]

Vogue South Africa is probably the most elusive Vogue publication aside from Vogue Argentina, compared to Vogue New Zealand which has almost all of its covers easily available online, I've only been able to find one cover of Vogue South Africa (and one for the British Vogue supplement for South Africa & Rhodesia, which is fully available online and I will post in here).

The earliest mention I have found of Vogue South Africa (within Vogue) is the November 1st 1962 issue and the last mention is the December 1966 issue. The National Library of South Africa's catalogue say they have two volumes (Summer 1963 and Winter 1964). To my knowledge only one cover is available online of the magazine which is a Midsummer issue seen below.

source: _andrewwhiley_ on Instagram.com

 

[callmejaeden]

Sorry about the long title! Anyways the cover below was shot by Eugene Vernier and according to the writing cover this is the first South African/Rhodesian supplement. Also I got the entirety of the scans from redressingvogue.co.za made by Jade Nair for a University project so thanks to her for scanning this rare issue. Would be great if anyone could identify the model!
Vogue Supplement for South Africa & Rhodesia - №1 | Summer 1955
source: redressingvogue.co.za
Photographer: Eugene Vernier
Description of the cover from within the issue: Heavenly blue skies, heavenly blue sun dress and bandeau; the complexion sheltered by a huge straw hat (see our advice on summer beauty, page 52) Grafton's Grafagleam cotton. Make-up by Elizabeth Arden; powder, Invisible Veil No.7, Desert Pink lipstick, Blue-vert eye shado. Sunglasses by Thurgar Bollé. Hats by Otto Lucas at Stuttafords, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. Cotton, beauty preparations, sunglasses, also at Stuttafords; and at Barbour, Rhodesia
Editor: Rosemary Cooper
Managing Director: H.W. Yoxall

Thread for the supplement

 

[Young Ling]

Vogue South Africa Unknown

 

[callmejaeden]

Elegantly Papered

 

[Young Ling]

View attachment 1321767
Elegantly Papered

Model: Editha Dussler

 

[kasper!]

Mary McFadden was an editor for them.

 

[Deleted member 1957]

Not to be political but am glad that it no longer exists. Considering what was happening in S.A around that time it must have been one nasty publication. Wouldnt mind a 2024 edition though thats more in tune with the times. Their fashion industry is strong enough to sustain it.

 

[Deleted member 1957]

Redressing Vogue curated by Jade Nair​

Redressing Vogue seeks to uncover and expose the sexist and racist ideologies and practices that informed the making of this 1955 Vogue supplement. On the surface this 1955 Vogue supplement is an innocent representation of glamour, however, the world it depicts is populated solely by white people, a manifestation of apartheid’s ideological goals – that leisure and luxury be reserved for them. In its failure to reflect a larger, and more diverse South African context, it denies both the existence of black bodies, and their participation in, and contributions to fashion. This exhibition creates connections between the content, and gaps, of the 1955 Vogue and fragments of South African history and the South African present. In so doing, inserting the stories and bodies of the many silenced and ignored by ‘white’ spaces such as Vogue. Whilst this 1955 Vogue supplement was entering circulation in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Salisbury (now Harare), the community of Sophiatown was being forcibly removed to Meadowlands, the first of many communities to experience the horrors of the Group Areas Act.

As part of a generation that has encountered this history through inherited memory, storytelling and an ongoing societal debris, I have engaged both the form and strategy of collage with the aim of addressing the fragmentary nature of identities and histories that, often, fail to tell the nuanced and complicated stories of the marginalized. The redressed Vogue, presented here, is now filled with fragments of popular culture, political history and contemporary art and fashion. Ultimately, by considering the erasure of black bodies in this magazine and the erasure of black bodies through forced removals, the brutality of the latter becomes evident and visible in the former.

Vogue South Africa