BIG EASY: French Vogue’s October issue, marking its 90th anniversary, will be a vrai whopper, and très collectible, too. Weighing in at 622 pages and with model Lara Stone on the cover, it is slated to hit newsstands around Sept. 20, in time for Milan Fashion Week and a costume ball in Paris on Sept. 30 to celebrate it. Since the French title’s 75th anniversary issue had an historical slant, editor in chief Carine Roitfeld decided to take another tack, seamlessly mixing the past and the present to showcase the magazine’s enduring threads of daring and modernity. “Vogue Paris has always played the card of audacity,” Roitfeld said, showing a 1976 Guy Bourdin image juxtaposed with a 2004 Patrick Demarchelier one, each oozing a hard-edged erotic glamour. Roitfeld didn’t show all her cards, but hinted at some surprises inside. “We couldn’t do a lukewarm issue,” she teased.
The magazine will carry 276 traditional advertising pages, plus 104 pages of congratulations from a wide swath of international designers. That compares with a total of 166 ad pages last October.
Roitfeld and her team pulled together a well that spans more than 150 pages, corralling its regular photographers to contribute new shoots: Mario Sorrenti, David Sims, Terry Richardson, Steven Klein, Hedi Slimane and the duos Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott and Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Slimane’s feature focuses on a classic — the little black dress — but on a surprising model: the 11-year-old daughter of Inès de la Fressange. Showing how timeless some Vogue features were, Roitfeld opted to republish an arresting black-and-white portrait and interview with actress Romy Schneider exactly as it was in 1962, including the miniscule photo credit for Helmut Newton. “The archives of Vogue are extraordinary,” she enthused.
As a gift to readers — in France, at least — the issue will come polybagged with a portfolio of oversize photographs from the nine decades, all unbound on thick paper and ready to frame. The cover price has been bumped up to 5.90 euros, or about $7.50 at current exchange, to cover the exorbitant printing costs, and Vogue increased the global print run by 40 percent, to 280,000 copies, in anticipation of strong demand. Roitfeld noted the October issue also will introduce new typography and an “easier-to-read, clearer” design that will be fully evident in the November issue.