The thought of replacing a British editor at a US mag with a Russian one, I think, will veer into how we view countries and their cultural influence, certainly decades ago, the thought of a Russian editing an American magazine would cause different reactions to the ones we have today.
At the same time, an editor will not embody the stereotype of their nationality, they're a person, not a cartoon (even if they adopt a personal style that's easy to caricature).
Good point. Aliona Doletskaya certainly does not conform to common Western stereotypes of Russians, rooted as they tend to be in Cold War demonology. In fact, she happens to be quite passionate about breaking down these barriers. Of course, she is quintessentially Russian but in a way that is more evocative of the old Russia and of the White Russians who fled Bolshevism, whilst at the same time being a very modern woman indeed.
There are some American editors with the requisite class and experience to steer US Vogue but not many. Mind you, with the inexorable rise of New Money and the entry into Western Society of a new class of stone-eyed
arrivistes from various points east of Suez, or west of Hawaii, "class" is no longer an indispensable qualification for editing top fashion and style glossies. Nor is education, judging by some of the vulgarians and overdressed fishwives one sees in the front row these days.
But we might be in for a sea change if the US elections put an educated, chic First Couple in the White House instead of a pair of goons that might have been dreamt up by a Simpsons artist on heavy medication. It will be rather like the Kennedy era and we might find the top style glossies, like Vogue and Bazaar, reflecting this in terms of a more sophisticated editorial direction. As far as Vogue is concerned, SI Newhouse Jr is quite an intellectual. This is not to say that Wintour's Vogue fails to speak to people who can do joined-up thinking but chief editors often reflect the times and Wintour was good for a post-Cold War era in which greed and venality were virtues.
I remember one of the last great intellectual Vogue editors, Joan Juliet Buck, considering a special supplement for French Vogue in 1999. It would consist of some rather troubling photo-reportage and written reportage from Kosova and northern Albania. There was a helluva row about this once the ad sales people started whining - ad sales people whine a lot, instead of getting on with their jobs - about how this would displease advertisers. The salient question was:
what did this have to do with fashion?
As far as Joan Buck was concerned, she was looking back to 1945, when the first images shot in Nazi concentration camps - Lee Miller's Dachau reportage - were published in US and French Vogue. Joan felt that Vogue had a duty to educate its readers about serious issues as well as handbags. They let Joan Buck go after a few more similar run-ins.
It was nonetheless a logical stance and one that we adopted when Richard Buckley was at the helm of Vogue Hommes International. Richard didn't care who he upset and they were too scared of upsetting his partner, Tom Ford, to give him too much of a hard time. Not that it was all smooth sailing. We had the same hassle over a lot of the content of VHI from 2000 to 2003 but our in-house critics had to shut up when they saw the rise in sales figures and ad revenue. And not a single advertiser complained, even when we put photos of violent death in a piece about globalisation and the behaviour of the police in Genoa. Yet when we put a Terry Richardson image of a man licking a woman's nipple on the cover, the copies shipped to the States had to have a spot over the offending contact area.
Conversely, I got a call from some stylist at a leading German fashion mag asking me what the refugee camps in Albania were like. Thinking she really cared, I was just wondering how to tell her when she told me that they had had this great idea about shooting a fashion story in a camp and could I recommend any camps where the people didn't look too bad. I sat there in silence for perhaps a full minute before hanging up on her.
I kid you not. Think about it, folks. Who would you prefer to be overseeing the glossies you bring into your house? Someone responsible like Joan Buck, with her high-minded, doomed ideals or some mindless sociopath who, not content with promoting clothing made by child slaves in sweatshops around the world, with labels tacked on Paris and New York by the designers' "seamstresses", wants to photograph them on victims of crimes against humanity?
I know a lot of you don't care. I see those hundreds of threads in the Magazines section, not a single one of which contains a reference to magazines' written content. But those of you who don't care will have tuned out of this post by know because you have the IQ and attention span of the average tree frog. One of the worst things about being an editor is knowing that plenty of readers out there are not stupid but that the publishers insist that one 'speaks to' the lowest common denominator.
And that could be the major obstacle to installing someone of Aliona Doletskaya's calibre at American Vogue. Mind you, if Obama and Biden prevail in November, there might be a sea change. We're already seeing Neo-Cons behaving like radical socialists. Perhaps we shall see more publishers assuming some social responsibility too. And perhaps some of those of you who need it will get a bit of real culture between your ears and you will evolve beyond posting xenophobic inanities on the web.
PK
