This issue has been out for a week or so, but I only bothered buying it yesterday, and for me, that's a measure of how irrelevant UK Vogue currently is, in terms of magazines that inspire and excite.
The issue opens with a lush series of ads, but the only time my heart beat faster was when I saw a page with a picture of "Vogue's market editor Emma Elwick" standing in front of a wall of issues from around the world. That's a mag addict's instinctive response to what looks like a newsstand - it wasn't anything to do with what the article was about. My eyes started scanning the image to see if there were any covers I'd never seen before (they had all the supplements of Paris Vogue that we never get).
As for the editorials, the Stam one... she looks like a little girl wearing big girls' dresses, because she just doesn't seem to fit with the story of someone wearing couture in grandiose settings. I don't know why, but she looks like she's 5'4" and 15 years old.
The Valentino story, well, I was never going to be happy with anything less than breathtaking glamour, so the sight of a happy tomboy in an auburn bob was never going to hit the mark. I can see the idea was a good one - to shoot it at Cinecitta - but I'll not be looking at this again.
The Agyness editorial is a geometric black-and-white blur, with an irritating level of fuzziness in some shots. At first I thought my eyes were getting worse, before I realised it was a deliberate effect. That said, in one shot, she looks like a devastatingly attractive Scandinavian man, all square jaw and ice-cold eyes, so I got a transgender thrill out of one page.
Keira looks OK but AGAIN with the blurring. By the time I came to Catherine McNeil's editorial, I had no patience left, and found myself calling her unkind names inside my mind.
This issue had everything I'd have wished to see in a Vogue, yet none of it satisfied, and I don't know if it's my fault or the magazine's. In contrast, the high street supplement - essentially a catalogue for Next - was much more lively.