Definitely worth reading the entire article because it's one of the most revealing profiles on Angelica Cheung. I can't imagine she'll be too chuffed about it overall, but this is what journalism is about.
I'm now aching for a Vogue China documentary!
Vogue China editor Angelica Cheung is no devil in disguise but she is one of the most powerful people in fashion
Fionnuala McHugh
As the daughter of a diplomat, she has charm and curiosity. She speaks impeccable English. She is well travelled. There’s even the requisite photograph of her as a child in Beijing, waving her “little red book”.
She is also – when she wants to be – tenacious. Her professional demise has been forecast regularly. In July 2018, Sophia Liao, then president of Condé Nast China, was obliged to send an internal email to employees denying Cheung was leaving.
The editors of both
Harper’s Bazaar China and
Elle China left their jobs in the past couple of years. Cheung, now 54, likes to point out in interviews that
Vogue editors are long-stayers. These are, however, uncertain times.
Cheung is based in Beijing and so we speak, as is the fashion these days, via Zoom. Our original July meeting is rescheduled an hour beforehand when Condé Nast, in an excess of public relations caution, decides someone from London should sit in on the conversation.
The zeitgeist has not been kind to the American publishing company. Both #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have wielded their scythes over unwoke editors and contributors. It doesn’t help that the July/August cover of
Vogue Portugal seems to depict an institutionalised form of waterboarding upon a naked woman and is labelled “The Madness Issue”.
Unfortunately, by the time we reconvene the following afternoon, Condé Nast is once more tussling with internet outrage. In a forehead-slapping moment, Edward Enninful, British
Vogue’s first black editor, has been stopped by security from entering London’s Vogue House and, as he informs his million Instagram followers, instructed to “use the loading bay”.
Zoe Garland, Condé Nast International’s communications officer, hovers over us, drinking coffee and probably hoping for an easier day.
She needn’t worry. Cheung is not the type to parade public outrage. In the 1990s, when she worked in Hong Kong, we had a nodding acquaintance and my memory is of an energetic cheerfulness. I ask a photographer friend who knew her and her journalist husband what he remembers of Cheung from that era. He says, immediately, “Happy, outgoing, positive”.
There’s just one moment – her Zoom audio isn’t working and a member of staff is summoned to sort it out – when I wonder if Cheung has lost some of that perkiness. In a pale striped shirt (Prada) against an imperial, red lacquer backdrop, she looks as if she could be a tiny bit scary. Later, when I ask if she’s tough on her employees – if that’s when she throws her weight around – she cries, “I don’t know!”
Apparently, it’s only since she started posting recent video clips on Douyin, China’s version of
TikTok
, that she’s realised her sunny disposition hasn’t always percolated through to the nation’s fashion followers. “People said, ‘Wow! You are so nice! And you smile and you are not like the devil that we thought you were!’ And I said, ‘Do people really see me like that?’ I asked around my office …”
How did that go? “It is very funny,” she replies, thoughtfully. “There’s a reputation. And there’s the truth.”
A simple truth evident during our hour-long appointment, which continued for about 90 minutes, is that she loves to speak. She issues a warning about this at the beginning: “I sometimes have the tendency to just keep on talking. Tell me if I’m going on too much.” She did not lie.
It’s possible when she switches back to her parallel persona as Mandarin-speaking Zhang Yu that she turns terse (although I doubt it) but she’s certainly engaged by, and engaging in, English. One of the reasons she is a long-standing Arsenal fan, she says later, is that she admires its former French player Thierry Henry, not just because of his cool style but because he is “so articulate, so eloquent – he speaks English better than the English players”.
She thanks her parents for her own linguistic excellence. She cannot remember a time when learning English was not part of her life. Given that her birth, in 1966, coincided with the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution
, such lessons were, as she puts it, “a little bit secret, in some way – you didn’t want to broadcast it to everybody”. Her father died when she was nine. It is her mother, a teacher, who has been the driving influence of her life.
“I wouldn’t be where I am without her because I don’t feel I was naturally a very ambitious person,” she says. “It changed after my father died. My mum had a talk with me to say, ‘Now things are serious: we don’t have your father, we don’t have any background, any power, anything. If you want a better future for yourself you really have to work for it.’”
Until then, little Zhang Yu had been an absent-minded child, preferring play to homework. In the following years, she says, she learned self-motivation.
Cheung in Vogue China’s Beijing office. Photo: SCMP / Simon Song
That got her into Peking University, where she studied law and English language and literature. She did a long-distance master of business administration degree through the University of South Australia, in Adelaide. She became Angelica.
Her mother chose the name from an American soap opera popular at the time, although she cannot remember which one. (A prime candidate must surely be
Dallas, in which a fabulously stylish villain called Angelica, played by Barbara Carrera, was one of many individuals who tried to kill Larry Hagman’s JR.)
“My mum just loved that name, in Chinese it sounded so lucky.” When she came to Hong Kong, in 1993, her family name was transliterated into the Cantonese Cheung and her new identity was born.
Hong Kong, as is so often the case, was intended as a brief stop en route to “overseas”. She stayed for a decade. She worked at the
Eastern Express newspaper (English language, now defunct), was a lifestyle editor at another daily newspaper called
Hong Kong iMail (English language, now defunct), became associate publisher of
B International magazine (English language, now defunct), then editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong edition of
Marie Claire (traditional Chinese).
Her piecemeal curriculum vitae reflects not only a slice of Hong Kong history – pre-handover boom, Asian financial crash, 9/11, the swings and roundabouts of luxury goods advertisers as they gazed over Hong Kong’s shoulder towards the mainland market – but her own disinclination to commit.
“I’d always loved fashion, to a certain degree – as a consumer, really,” she says, and it’s not the voice of a burning passion. “I never thought I’d stay in fashion media. I always thought it was a year or two of fun as a young girl and I would head on to pursue law.”
She met her husband, an Englishman from Yorkshire, more than two decades ago. She was in the process of applying to legal courses in England when she was approached by the French publishing company Hachette. It wanted her to be editor-in-chief of
Elle China, which had launched on the mainland in 1988 and was generally considered China’s best fashion magazine. Hachette was worried because it had heard a new contender was riding into town:
Vogue.
“In Hong Kong, people perceived me as a China journalist but I’d never actually worked in China,” she says. “I thought if I didn’t take it, maybe I wouldn’t have the chance to work in this field in China at all. So that was the plan – to go to Shanghai for a year. And then, after a year and a half, Condé Nast came and talked to me about launching
Vogue in China.
“My immediate answer was no because by then I was, 35, 36 [actually 38], and that was ultimately, absolutely, the deadline I had to make the switch to law. Otherwise, I’d be in this business forever.”
Condé Nast wondered why she did not want to continue in fashion journalism. She told them that, having already edited two, she knew the “so-called international titles” in China were really syndicated editions, filled with second-hand material as a cheap way of filling pages. “Basically, the Chinese or Asian editions were like the poor cousins of an international family. That was the mindset. I said, ‘If you let me create a
Vogue China that would be on the level of these international
Vogues then I would probably find it interesting.’” They agreed.
Cheung is often described as
Vogue China’s first editor, which isn’t strictly true. In 2003, Condé Nast already had an editor – Taiwanese journalist
Shaway Yeh – and an office in a building on Shanghai’s Bund. What it didn’t have was a licence to publish. While it waited, there was a shift in personnel and Cheung became the launch editor. (Yeh is now a high-profile advocate for sustainable fashion.)
This was followed by a literal shift when the magazine was obliged, on an arcane technicality, to relocate to Beijing, a city not known for its fashion magazines. All foreign publications in China have a mandatory business partner; for 15 years,
Vogue China has been tied to China Pictorial Publishing House, which inspects the issue every month. “Yes, yes, standard practice,” Cheung says briskly. “Actually, sometimes I find it very helpful because they’re seasoned editors. It’s really good to have an extra pair of eyes. They actually help a lot in avoiding some mistakes.”
In the same pragmatic manner, she put up with Western photographers and stylists who, in the early days, arrived with their own mysterious-Orient views about how China should look.
“You can’t transplant someone to a country they’ve never been to and expect this someone to totally understand your culture,” she says. “They obviously had a perception of China from Zhang Yimou movies, Chen Kaige movies. It’s not their fault. And at the same time, we needed to nurture the Chinese. It was a process. We also grew with the Western creatives from the beginning.”
Yet, within a successful year or so, she was restless. Listening to Cheung now, the wonder is not that she has survived 15 years at the magazine but that she decided to stay put. “Sometimes you do ask yourself, ‘What’s the point of it all?’ It wasn’t a job I actively chose.”
When her daughter,
Hayley
, was born, in 2007, she contemplated leaving journalism to make mega money. “We were older parents, she’s an only child, I was the only child, so we didn’t have a big family. And if we were gone and my daughter is alone in the world, I need to make sure I do as much as possible to keep her safe.”
But she felt lucre wasn’t the answer. “By then, I’d met a lot of rich people who had terrible children and were not having a meaningful life.” A deft switch to more spiritual aspirations occurred: Hayley should have a positive outlook, a loving nature and proper values. “And, of course, I would like her to be a pretty and fashionable girl who knows how to dress herself.”
Those desires, blended editorially, became her new vision for
Vogue China – its “soul”, as she likes to put it – for the next generation of readers. “I started to introduce a lot of other content about attitude, how you meet challenges but also how to give a little bit of excitement to your life.”
Note fashion’s lower ranking on that maternal wish list. Sometimes her enthusiasm for Arsène Wenger, Arsenal’s former manager (“Every time he talked about football it was as if he were talking about how I ran
Vogue and my team”), and commercial business (she advises Western brands “because, obviously, I understand their culture, their sense of humour, I understand the process to understanding China”) suggests she might be just as focused selling, say, pharmaceuticals or combine harvesters.
“Sometimes, when my team is not doing things smartly, I say, ‘Why aren’t you using your brain?’” she says, at one point. “I am a person of no hobbies. Someone who has been with me for 15 years said to me, ‘Your hobby is what you are doing, your hobby is you use your brain.’”
When was the last time she cried at a fashion show? An uncharacteristic pause. “People do get emotional but … make me cry? Maybe not.” Then: “Actually, yes, I remember – the last show of Karl Lagerfeld [for Chanel, in March 2019] when Karl wasn’t there any more.” Wasn’t that more about circumstance than fashion? “I would say you cannot isolate fashion from people and from life.”
Perhaps. But fashion journalism, especially in print, becomes less relevant – less fashionable – every day. Social media influencers might have the lifespan of a mayfly but that is what people want to follow. It is a global publishing concern and China, with its vast numbers of digitally savvy millennials, is at the sharp end.
Cheung is professionally active on social media but Douyin is a more deliberate placement of self. “On Douyin, I decided to talk a little bit about fashion in a more approachable way to young kids, to talk a little bit about their career path and to give a little bit of a hint about my life. If you understand the nature of your job is to pass on the message to the people, you need to be where the people are.”
I am reminded of a story she tells about her grandmother, who was a tailor and made her a pair of black-and-white trousers that she wore to school in an era when being different was undesirable. “Bourgeois,” pronounced some of her peers and she never wore them again.
That was a different time but doesn’t she worry that the masses can still bring an individual down? “I’m OK,” she says. “Occasionally people come and shout at you, and you have to face it and accept it.”
A good thing about the pandemic, she says, is “it pushed us to go online even more aggressively”. (Being at home with Hayley, now 13 and the key influencer in Cheung’s life, will also have had that effect.) Throughout
Covid-19
, she’s never paused. She’s struck by how the West seems to have ground to a halt. “In China, we were busier than ever! Even though Chinese whinge a lot, after they whinge they forget about their miseries and focus on business.”
She’s working on the September issue, considered the biggest and most important of the year, although Cheung observes, “in China, every issue is a big one – the January issue and the September issue are probably the same size”.
To mark the extraordinary nature of this year, the 26 international Vogue editions have united behind one September theme: hope. Maybe that also says something about Condé Nast and the current, complicated world of fashion. A few weeks later, Enninful’s cover is made public. Cheung probably approves of having a footballer on it (Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford) but it looks more doleful than hopeful.
Meanwhile,
Vogue China has reliably stellar actress Zhang Ziyi in front of an orange globe, rather like a radiant yolk filled with possibilities. It will sell more than all the other Vogues and five minutes after I’d looked at it, I couldn’t remember what she was wearing.
South China Morning Post
