MissMagAddict
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continued...
Alex suggested I should go on a shoot. I volunteered to go to Peru with Mario Testino or to New York with photographer Craig McDean and Kate Moss, but Alex dispatched me instead to Kentish Town where photographer Jane McLeish Kelsey was shooting Three Ways with a Swirly Skirt. Pippa Holt, who was in charge of the shoot, explained that swirly skirts will be big in the high street next season, but readers need help in learning how to wear them, so they get three stylists to do three different 'looks'. She says that features like this 'balance out the well' which, after some translation, means they provide useful ideas for real people as opposed to the 'inspirational' features in the middle of the magazine (the well) which tend to show girls dressed as fairies pulling logs with reindeers. 'Alex,' Pippa tells me, 'has a big focus on real women.'
The shoot itself was unexpectedly real and domestic, with a toddler playing on the floor (he was the son of one of the stylists, Bay Garnett) and a pale silent girl reading Hemingway's Fiesta in Russian - she turned out to be the model. There was also a big burly man who just sat on the sofa doing nothing, so eventually I asked what his role was. 'I'm with the jewels.' What? He showed me a Chanel box containing a star that looked to my untutored eye like a Christmas-tree decoration but turned out to be a platinum-and-diamond brooch costing £171,750 - he was its bodyguard. He said he often went to shoots carrying literally millions of pounds worth of jewellery. 'They must trust you a lot,' I told him, but privately I was thinking, 'There'd be no point in stealing a brooch like that because no one would ever believe it was genuine.'
Kate Phelan, the fashion director, was doing one of the ways with a swirly skirt - 'a kind of Minnie Mouse look inspired by Miu Miu' (me neither) - but told me she was off to the States next week to shoot the Kate Moss cover and then on to the California desert to shoot another feature near Palm Springs. She said the Palm Springs shoot should be relatively easy because it never rains and they have a local producer to show them locations but it would still be a rush. Nowadays, she says, fashion trips are terribly short because top photographers and models are in such demand. When she started 20 years ago, you could potter round with a couple of models and a photographer for a week or even a fortnight, but nowadays it's usually one day to fix locations and two days to shoot, and if it rains you're in deep trouble.
She suggests I come to the 'rail meeting' when she shows Alex all the clothes she has assembled for New York. The rail is in a dark corner of the office and looks like something from an Oxfam shop - what is more exciting is the sea of shoes spreading out from the rail and all round the office - weird and wonderful shoes with heels carved like ships' figureheads or skyscrapers. Alex confides later that she hates these tortured heels but they are the new look. On the whole, she says, she leaves the choice of clothes to her fashion editors but she does demand to see 'the rail' before every shoot, and she is upset this time because the Chloé outfits she thinks might make the cover are already in New York. 'I hate using clothes I haven't seen,' she frets.
The theme of this particular 'story' is clothes inspired by paintings - a theme Alex spotted in the September shows in Paris, Milan, New York and wanted to focus on, 'mainly because it's very beautiful'. She shows me a Gucci dress that she says is 'almost like a Jackson Pollock' and a Prada skirt and top printed with 'something like Edward Dulac or Rackham in this techy fabric'. Tacky fabric? I ask, bewildered. 'No, techy - it's a new sort of organza.' The problem with the painterly theme is that Chanel and Dior don't have any clothes that fit the bill and both are big advertisers. Kate Phelan has brought a leopardskin print dress from Dior but Alex says flatly, 'No leopardskin'. So they both go through the Dior look book (catalogue) in search of other clothes that could be called painterly and decide that a spotted dress will do.
What shocks me is that many of the clothes on the rail are quite grubby - some of them are even torn. Apparently these designer samples go from magazine to magazine, location to location, getting staler all the time. I can't see why fashion houses don't run up some more samples but apparently they don't, so one of the many problems of organising a shoot is that you have to book the clothes, as well as the photographer and models, and return them on the due date on pain of death.
The clothes are all size 10 but Kate Moss 'can fit anything'. Apparently she even has 'miracle feet' that can wear any shoe size. But Alex is a bit worried about her hair. 'Does she still have the fringe? I don't mind the fringe but I don't want her hair scraped back.' She also tells Phelan not to let Kate look 'too boudoir. Keep that coolness about her, not too overtly sexy.' (A couple of weeks later, I see the photos of Kate Moss in the art room and exclaim rudely, 'God, she looks awful.' She has a sort of Mia Farrow or pottery-teacher hairdo and looks dead-eyed and desiccated. The art room goes into shock until Robin Derrick the creative director murmurs, 'Of course we haven't done any retouching yet'.)
I ask Alex if Kate Moss is always a safe bet for a cover? 'Nobody's a safe bet, but a famous model helps.' One of her problems, she says, is that there are so few superstar models now. In the good old days you could take your pick of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Helena Christensen and a dozen others but now - although there are plenty of good models who are well-respected in the fashion industry - their names mean nothing to the public. They work so hard, they don't seem to have any life outside modelling.
The other problem, Alex explains, is that top models and photographers earn so much more from advertising that they only do the editorial shoots they want to do - they are not the obedient puppets they used to be. For the March issue, for instance, she wanted to do a 'hippie nomad' story that could easily have been shot in Morocco, but Mario Testino wanted to go to Peru (because he is Peruvian) so Peru it was. Testino told me later that he always does his best work in Peru - and indeed the pictures are stunning.
Lucinda Chambers, the fashion editor on the shoot, said going to Peru with Testino was 'like the return of the Sun King' - they worship him there.
Going to Peru cost a packet - but then Vogue can afford a packet. Alex said I would have to ask Stephen Quinn (of Kimberly fame) about the money side because he is the publishing director. He said of course he couldn't give exact figures because Condé Nast is a private company, owned by the Newhouse family, but 'profitability has never been higher. British Vogue is the most profitable magazine in the company, outside the US, by far.' It ran 2,020 pages of advertising last year (60 per cent of the magazine is advertising) and advertising rates can be as high as £22,000 a page, though the average is more like £16,000. Which, if my calculator is correct, means they made over £32 million from advertising last year. The cover price of £3.80 probably pays for the production costs. Anyway, it's a rich magazine that doesn't have to worry about where the next airfare is coming from (and they usually manage to do deals on air fares anyway) though one staffer did confide that there was a bit of a fuss when they managed to incur a £14,000 excess-baggage charge on a trip to Papua New Guinea.
But this high dependence on advertising makes for what seems to me a shocking cosiness between editorial and advertising. Newspapers are always careful to keep a firewall between the two, but Vogue has an 'executive fashion editor' whose job is to check that advertisers get sufficient editorial mentions to keep them happy, and Alex has to apologise if they get left out - 'I seem to spend my whole life apologising!' she laughs.
'But Vogue makes most of its money out of advertising - and it does make an awful lot of money - so we've got to have a good relationship with our advertisers. They're not going to place £100,000 a year and then say, "Feel free not to use any of our goods" - life's not like that. So although there is this feeling sometimes that creatively it's not pure, well - magazines are a business, you're not sitting there writing poetry.'
She added that that was why she wanted me to come to Vogue - to see the constant juggling act her job entailed. 'I hope you will have seen by now that it's quite complex what we do here, quite dense. I think people tend to think, "Oh well Vogue's got lots of money so they just say, 'Go off and shoot some pretty clothes and give us the pics'", but it's not quite like that.' No, I can see that, and I can also see why Condé Nast felt they needed a strong editor, rather than a fashion expert, at the helm.
But I do still wonder whether Alex finds it fulfilling? 'Oh it's certainly fulfilling, there's no question about that. Sometimes I walk down the road and I think, how lucky can you be?' But other days she thinks maybe she should be at home with her son, maybe she should be writing a book. She is still not quite of the fashion world and admits that, even after 16 years, she has few or no designer friends. 'They're not soulmates. But then we're not there to be friends,' she says bracingly. 'I suppose in a way I compartmentalise my life. I do the job and I edit Vogue and I feel I'm very professional, but I'm not that emotional about it. The rest of my life I'm extremely emotional about, but I don't bring that into the office. And I suppose some people find that quite difficult, they don't understand how I can do that, but it's the only way I could do this job, because I do have very much another life of friends and family and things I like doing and that's what I define myself by - I don't define myself as editor of Vogue.
Which is lucky because a lot of my life I wasn't editor of Vogue and hopefully I will have another life after being editor of Vogue.'
