Cicciolina
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Mod note: this thread will have articles and discussion relating to the business of magazines: redesigns, circulation figures, winners of publication design awards, etc. Please add all relevant articles to this thread...thanks!
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,332397365-118446,00.html
The world according to garb
Vogue is the UK's glossiest and most successful fashion magazine. But what's it really like behind the scenes, asks Lynn Barber
Lynn Barber
Sunday February 10, 2008
Observer
Before Christmas, I found myself sharing a sofa with Alexandra Shulman at a party and thought, 'Now is my chance to solve one of the great mysteries of life, the conundrum that has been bugging me for years.' So I said, 'Alex, tell me, because you will know - what is it with handbags?' I hoped she could explain how and why women suddenly became prepared to pay ludicrous amounts of money - as much as a car sometimes - for ugly shapeless bits of tat with fringes and buckles and studs and straps made from the hides of obviously diseased animals. Do men find them attractive? Do they think, 'Oh look, she's got a floppy pock-marked yellow one with studs on - I really fancy her? 'Dunno,' said Alexandra. 'Beats me.'
'But you're the editor of Vogue!'
'Yep. It's still a mystery.'
This is what is always so startling about Alex Shulman: she is the editor of Vogue but she's completely normal. She is not remotely like Miranda Priestly, the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, or indeed like Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue. She is a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Queen's Park, takes her 12-year-old son Sam to QPR matches, spends Saturdays trawling the Portobello Road, enjoys cooking big suppers for friends and talking about almost anything except fashion. She says it is a vile slur that she reads books during fashion shows, but admits that she does always take a book to fill the long gaps between shows and gets a lot of reading done during London Fashion Week.
Her partner is the journalist David Jenkins whom I remember as a drugs-crazed youth on Penthouse who could be relied upon to deliver brilliant copy several months late. Their friends tend to be other journalists, writers, artists, many of whom Alex has known since her twenties. She admits that she is 'probably the only person I know who didn't spend most of their twenties completely out of their heads. But I've never liked the idea of taking drugs - I guess I make up for it with drink really!' She says she'd rather die than go to a health spa - 'I hate spas. And treatments. All these places keep offering me a complimentary massage and it's very kind of them but there is nothing I want less. I'm a real hedonist but not for spas - I like sunbathing, I like food, I like alcohol, I like cigs, and for holidays I like staying with a pack of friends.' Not exactly the Vogue lifestyle, then? 'No, probably not, but I mean I used to edit GQ and my life then wasn't about Formula-1 cars, or pin-up girls. I don't think actually as an editor you have to lead the life you write about.'
She does the job, but she is not defined by her job: she will not have editor of Vogue on her gravestone. She still thinks of herself as a journalist rather than a fashion maven. She doesn't even dress particularly fashionably. At her best - with her wonderful dark eyes, dark hair, imperious carriage - she can look like Isabella Rossellini, but at her worst she worries about 'looking like an awful old fortune-teller'. She is five foot four with a curvaceous figure that is size 12 on a good day, size 14 on a bad one. A friend once described her style as hippie chic, but more hippie than chic. I told her boss, Stephen Quinn, that when I first knew her she was quite a scruff and he winced. 'Never a scruff! Perhaps more bohemian. I personally have noted a seismic shift because she dresses with great panache, there is a sort of grandeur to her.' Even so, she falls far short of immaculate. Her hair is often a mess, her fingernails unmanicured, stray buttons missing. One day at Vogue House I noticed her wearing a very blodgy purple T-shirt and she said proudly that she'd dyed it herself. I bet Anna Wintour has never dyed a T-shirt in her life. But Alex's answer to anyone who says she doesn't look like the editor of Vogue is essentially the same as Gloria Steinem's when told she didn't look 50 - 'This is what 50 looks like'. Likewise Alex - she is the editor of Vogue, so this is what the editor of Vogue looks like. Get used to it.
Moreover she is a supremely successful editor of Vogue, having seen the circulation climb steadily from 170,000 when she started in 1992 to over 220,000 now. She was rewarded with the OBE in 2005. But a lot of people in the fashion world were shocked when she first got the job. Who was she? They knew she was the daughter of two famous journalists (Drusilla Beyfus and Milton Shulman) and a good journalist herself but she had never worked as a fashion editor; she had never even been to the collections. Her previous job was editor of GQ - before that she worked at Tatler and as women's editor of the Sunday Telegraph. The day before she started at Vogue her sister Nicola (who is now the Marchioness of Normanby) took Alex to Browns and made her buy a suit - 'I remember it was a Lolita Lempicka with shoulder pads and zips all over it. I suppose I thought this is what an editor of Vogue wears!' But she didn't even think about what to wear for her first collections because it never occurred to her that anyone would be looking at her. Surely she can't have been so naive? She says now she realises that of course everyone would be inspecting her but at the time she didn't give it a thought.
I said I wanted to interview her. She said no - but I could come and hang around at Vogue and watch them preparing the March issue, and no doubt someone would be able to elucidate the mystery of handbags. In the event I never did solve the mystery of handbags - I got sidetracked by shoes, which are getting very weird indeed - but I enjoyed my little foray into the epicentre of fashion. It is a surprisingly cramped office on the sixth floor of Vogue House filled with beautiful white orchids and beautiful white girls. They all wear 'interesting' shoes or boots but nothing I could identify as a Vogue uniform. I expected it to be like The Devil Wears Prada or Ugly Betty with everyone bitching about everyone else, but there was not even a hint of that. Later, I told Alex I was disappointed by the general lack of bitchiness and she laughed, 'I'm sorry about that! But this is not a bitchy office. It can be tense, it can be competitive, it can be weepy sometimes when you have a lot of women in one office and people get stressed, all that, but it's not bitchy. I don't like people who are bitchy so I probably don't hire them.'
Lucinda Chambers, one of the two fashion directors, has been at Vogue since the Seventies when the terrifying Beatrix Miller still ruled. She remembers once asking Miss Miller (she was always Miss Miller) why there were all these girls weeping in the loos and Miss Miller barked 'Healthy competition!' She ruled by fear. But Alex, says Lucinda, is not like that. 'She's not lovey-dovey but she is completely straight. I think she's fair, but bloody firm.' Alex says her staff all think she's grumpy and Lucinda confirms it but adds, 'We tell her often enough.' Stephen Quinn the publishing director says, 'I always tease her that her staff are more scared of her than mine are of me. She has that grand authority.'
The first couple of editorial meetings I went to were baffling because I couldn't understand who or what anyone was talking about - it took a while to click that Mario was Testino and Kate was Moss and Uma was Thurman and Karl was Lagerfeld. There was much suspense about Sheherazade's floorboards - would they arrive in time? This turned out to be Sheherazade Goldsmith whose new house they were meant to be photographing but apparently it still lacked floorboards and, as Alex remarked, it is quite difficult to photograph rooms without floors. This problem was still unresolved when I left and I have occasionally caught myself wondering, 'Has poor Sheherazade got her floorboards yet?' There was also discussion of a make-up feature in which someone asked anxiously, 'Are we using real people?' 'Yes, but real beautiful people,' soothed Emily Sheffield, the deputy editor, an outstandingly beautiful person herself.
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.
(Continued...)
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,332397365-118446,00.html
The world according to garb
Vogue is the UK's glossiest and most successful fashion magazine. But what's it really like behind the scenes, asks Lynn Barber
Lynn Barber
Sunday February 10, 2008
Observer
Before Christmas, I found myself sharing a sofa with Alexandra Shulman at a party and thought, 'Now is my chance to solve one of the great mysteries of life, the conundrum that has been bugging me for years.' So I said, 'Alex, tell me, because you will know - what is it with handbags?' I hoped she could explain how and why women suddenly became prepared to pay ludicrous amounts of money - as much as a car sometimes - for ugly shapeless bits of tat with fringes and buckles and studs and straps made from the hides of obviously diseased animals. Do men find them attractive? Do they think, 'Oh look, she's got a floppy pock-marked yellow one with studs on - I really fancy her? 'Dunno,' said Alexandra. 'Beats me.'
'But you're the editor of Vogue!'
'Yep. It's still a mystery.'
This is what is always so startling about Alex Shulman: she is the editor of Vogue but she's completely normal. She is not remotely like Miranda Priestly, the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, or indeed like Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue. She is a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Queen's Park, takes her 12-year-old son Sam to QPR matches, spends Saturdays trawling the Portobello Road, enjoys cooking big suppers for friends and talking about almost anything except fashion. She says it is a vile slur that she reads books during fashion shows, but admits that she does always take a book to fill the long gaps between shows and gets a lot of reading done during London Fashion Week.
Her partner is the journalist David Jenkins whom I remember as a drugs-crazed youth on Penthouse who could be relied upon to deliver brilliant copy several months late. Their friends tend to be other journalists, writers, artists, many of whom Alex has known since her twenties. She admits that she is 'probably the only person I know who didn't spend most of their twenties completely out of their heads. But I've never liked the idea of taking drugs - I guess I make up for it with drink really!' She says she'd rather die than go to a health spa - 'I hate spas. And treatments. All these places keep offering me a complimentary massage and it's very kind of them but there is nothing I want less. I'm a real hedonist but not for spas - I like sunbathing, I like food, I like alcohol, I like cigs, and for holidays I like staying with a pack of friends.' Not exactly the Vogue lifestyle, then? 'No, probably not, but I mean I used to edit GQ and my life then wasn't about Formula-1 cars, or pin-up girls. I don't think actually as an editor you have to lead the life you write about.'
She does the job, but she is not defined by her job: she will not have editor of Vogue on her gravestone. She still thinks of herself as a journalist rather than a fashion maven. She doesn't even dress particularly fashionably. At her best - with her wonderful dark eyes, dark hair, imperious carriage - she can look like Isabella Rossellini, but at her worst she worries about 'looking like an awful old fortune-teller'. She is five foot four with a curvaceous figure that is size 12 on a good day, size 14 on a bad one. A friend once described her style as hippie chic, but more hippie than chic. I told her boss, Stephen Quinn, that when I first knew her she was quite a scruff and he winced. 'Never a scruff! Perhaps more bohemian. I personally have noted a seismic shift because she dresses with great panache, there is a sort of grandeur to her.' Even so, she falls far short of immaculate. Her hair is often a mess, her fingernails unmanicured, stray buttons missing. One day at Vogue House I noticed her wearing a very blodgy purple T-shirt and she said proudly that she'd dyed it herself. I bet Anna Wintour has never dyed a T-shirt in her life. But Alex's answer to anyone who says she doesn't look like the editor of Vogue is essentially the same as Gloria Steinem's when told she didn't look 50 - 'This is what 50 looks like'. Likewise Alex - she is the editor of Vogue, so this is what the editor of Vogue looks like. Get used to it.
Moreover she is a supremely successful editor of Vogue, having seen the circulation climb steadily from 170,000 when she started in 1992 to over 220,000 now. She was rewarded with the OBE in 2005. But a lot of people in the fashion world were shocked when she first got the job. Who was she? They knew she was the daughter of two famous journalists (Drusilla Beyfus and Milton Shulman) and a good journalist herself but she had never worked as a fashion editor; she had never even been to the collections. Her previous job was editor of GQ - before that she worked at Tatler and as women's editor of the Sunday Telegraph. The day before she started at Vogue her sister Nicola (who is now the Marchioness of Normanby) took Alex to Browns and made her buy a suit - 'I remember it was a Lolita Lempicka with shoulder pads and zips all over it. I suppose I thought this is what an editor of Vogue wears!' But she didn't even think about what to wear for her first collections because it never occurred to her that anyone would be looking at her. Surely she can't have been so naive? She says now she realises that of course everyone would be inspecting her but at the time she didn't give it a thought.
I said I wanted to interview her. She said no - but I could come and hang around at Vogue and watch them preparing the March issue, and no doubt someone would be able to elucidate the mystery of handbags. In the event I never did solve the mystery of handbags - I got sidetracked by shoes, which are getting very weird indeed - but I enjoyed my little foray into the epicentre of fashion. It is a surprisingly cramped office on the sixth floor of Vogue House filled with beautiful white orchids and beautiful white girls. They all wear 'interesting' shoes or boots but nothing I could identify as a Vogue uniform. I expected it to be like The Devil Wears Prada or Ugly Betty with everyone bitching about everyone else, but there was not even a hint of that. Later, I told Alex I was disappointed by the general lack of bitchiness and she laughed, 'I'm sorry about that! But this is not a bitchy office. It can be tense, it can be competitive, it can be weepy sometimes when you have a lot of women in one office and people get stressed, all that, but it's not bitchy. I don't like people who are bitchy so I probably don't hire them.'
Lucinda Chambers, one of the two fashion directors, has been at Vogue since the Seventies when the terrifying Beatrix Miller still ruled. She remembers once asking Miss Miller (she was always Miss Miller) why there were all these girls weeping in the loos and Miss Miller barked 'Healthy competition!' She ruled by fear. But Alex, says Lucinda, is not like that. 'She's not lovey-dovey but she is completely straight. I think she's fair, but bloody firm.' Alex says her staff all think she's grumpy and Lucinda confirms it but adds, 'We tell her often enough.' Stephen Quinn the publishing director says, 'I always tease her that her staff are more scared of her than mine are of me. She has that grand authority.'
The first couple of editorial meetings I went to were baffling because I couldn't understand who or what anyone was talking about - it took a while to click that Mario was Testino and Kate was Moss and Uma was Thurman and Karl was Lagerfeld. There was much suspense about Sheherazade's floorboards - would they arrive in time? This turned out to be Sheherazade Goldsmith whose new house they were meant to be photographing but apparently it still lacked floorboards and, as Alex remarked, it is quite difficult to photograph rooms without floors. This problem was still unresolved when I left and I have occasionally caught myself wondering, 'Has poor Sheherazade got her floorboards yet?' There was also discussion of a make-up feature in which someone asked anxiously, 'Are we using real people?' 'Yes, but real beautiful people,' soothed Emily Sheffield, the deputy editor, an outstandingly beautiful person herself.
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.
(Continued...)
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