The Vogue Factor: The Inside Story of Fashion's Most Illustrious Magazine (2 page)

The beauty editor Karin Upton sauntered past at one point, wearing a Claude Montana raincoat with stupendous eighties shoulder pads and a tiny short-skirted Chanel suit. “Karin, did you get your hair cut while you were away?” asked Judith Cook, the fashion director, who was in reception to collect a model’s portfolio.

“No, no, I would never let anyone in New York touch my hair!” replied Karin.

I decided then and there I was never going to leave.

The managing director of Condé Nast was (surprisingly forward-thinking for those times) a woman, Eve Harman. Tall and elegant, with high cheekbones and a silvery-blonde bob, Eve had the most beautiful diction, smoked cigarettes and called everyone “darling.” I was in awe of her. Then again, I was in awe of almost everyone.

The
Vogue
women in those years were in a league of their own. Their style was not just related to fashion, or which designer was hot or not. They lived and breathed
Vogue
, their taste extending through to their homes, their art, their dinner parties, their holidays. There was Marion von Adlerstein, the travel editor, whippet-thin with her crisp white shirts, skinny black pants, silver cropped hair and long cigarillos. Judith Cook, the ultra-chic fashion director, whose interest in art, literature and film informed all her fashion choices. Nancy Pilcher, the executive editor who originally hailed from the United States, with her tiny waist; thick, long, blonde hair; and her incredible Santa Fe/Ralph Lauren style. Carolyn “Charlie” Lockhart, the editor of the groundbreaking
Vogue Entertaining Guide
: again, in a class all of her own. I had been transported to a world of infinite taste, mentored by women who were neither snobbish nor judgmental. They were warm, intelligent and wickedly funny.

As good as the reception desk was, it had its quiet moments, and I began to look for other things to do. I noticed that the fashion stockroom needed tidying. Note to any future interns reading this book: fashion stockrooms always need tidying. As I was on good terms with all the girls in the fashion office, I thought I may as well offer my services. I approached Judith and timidly asked if I could reorganize the drawers containing the stockings and socks. My request was met with gratitude. So I began to ask for more and more things I could do. I wanted to be busy, but I also wanted to know more about
Vogue
.

Nancy had just returned from the international shows, so I suggested that I type up her notes for her. And could I help pack suitcases for the shoots? Also, did Karin need help rearranging the beauty cupboard? Without really thinking too much about it I began to make myself more and more useful. Then one day, as Nancy rushed past,
I decided to push my luck. “Nancy, if by any chance you are ever looking for an assistant, could I ask that you consider me?” I had developed a bit of a girl crush on Nancy. She is one of those people who lights up a room.

And so she made it happen. Coincidentally, there was a position open for an assistant in
Vogue
promotions. This is the department in a magazine that produces advertising pages for clients, which have an editorial look and feel. I was offered the job, on the provision that I would also assist Nancy. Not even six months since I had started and I was off the reception desk.

Promotions was a brilliant training ground because you worked on every detail of a job, from conceptualizing the shoot, casting the models, and choosing the clothes, the photographer and the location. Naturally I put my hand up for every task. Could I write the captions? Could I also try writing the headings? In promotions, you also learned to manage client expectations, while trying to maintain artistic integrity. It was an invaluable introduction to magazine politics and the inevitable dance between commerce and creativity.

It was then I began to understand the level of perfectionism expected at
Vogue
. It was extraordinary. Corners were never, and I mean
never
, to be cut. The dress, the tablecloth, the heading all had to be just so. It was all very
Madame Bovary
. Nothing was ever good enough. A philosophy that could drive you mad or spur you to do better. I chose the latter.

For one job, we were to shoot an image for Schiaparelli hosiery that required a good pair of legs and some shoes. I called in dozens and dozens of shoes for Nancy to choose from. She settled on one pair she liked. I then proceeded to set up a model casting, just for legs. Models can have particular attributes that they specialize in—hand models,
foot models, models who can smile. We spent all day asking dozens of girls from four different agencies to parade around the creative services office and show us their legs, until finally Nancy said: “No, none of these are right.” And this casting was only for the legs, not the top half. My mind was reeling at the thought that one day I was going to have to find a
whole
model who passed the
Vogue
test, top to bottom.

The shoot was the next day. The photographer had been booked. Time was ticking. I paced the office in a panic and then collapsed dramatically across the desk of the art assistant Fiona. I looked down and noticed something I already knew. She had really fantastic legs.

The next day Fiona, the photographer Monty Coles and I were outside taking the shot. Monty strode purposefully up and down the street numerous times until he found the exact place he wanted Fiona to stand. There also happened to be a great, huge wad of chewing gum that had dried rock hard on the pavement right there. “Can you get that off?” he said to me. Retouching was rare during that period, reserved mostly for covers or beauty shots. “And hurry, because we are losing light,” he added. As I began to frantically scrape the gum with my fingernails, I naively asked Monty if maybe he could move to another, less gummy part of the street. It was then I learned my first lesson about photographers, one that stayed true for the next twenty-five years. They will never, ever, do anything the easy way.

The fun really started when it was decided that Nancy and I would produce a twice-yearly supplement, called
Vogue Men
, to be attached to the back of
Vogue
. This meant producing editorial, which to me was the pinnacle. You had an entirely blank slate, forty-eight-plus empty pages ready to be brainstormed and produced. Total artistic license. This is the core of magazine publishing and—right up until the day I
left—was always the part of the job that thrilled me the most. It is also now the aspect of magazine publishing that is most under threat from commercial pressures.

Because we would be producing editorial I began to join in on general meetings, terrifying as they were. June would sit at the table, tapping her perfectly manicured blood-red fingernails on the desk if anybody stayed on one point for too long. I kept quiet for many months, just soaking it all in. I would volunteer to stack the slides from the ready-to-wear (RTW) shows into the carousel so I had something useful to do. They were then projected on the wall, and the machine would jam umpteen times while Judith and Nancy discussed which shows they had seen in Paris and Milan, what they liked, and what stories for the magazine would stem from them.

A fashion “story” is a sequence of photographs based around a specific theme, such as denim, or tailoring, or floral dresses. This was the greatest editorial training I would ever have, and those lessons carried me through my entire career at
Vogue
. These women knew what they were talking about. They had intrinsic good taste but they also possessed cultural references. They knew the history of a designer, and why a particular show was a standout, or a disappointment. They could articulate the reason because they had the knowledge and the language to do so. So much amateur fashion commentary today is subjective: “Oh, I loved the green dress, I’d wear that. The shoes are amazing!” A lot of so-called experts are merely airing fatuous personal opinions.

I recall Judith planning some fashion shoots for a particular issue, inspired by Hemingway heroines. “We are going to approach the issue by doing two main shoots,” Judith told June during a meeting. “The philosophy for the first one is about women who row. The other
is women who are rowed.” The fashion editors literally wrote philosophies about what they were going to shoot, and why. These essays were then passed to everyone on staff—art department, sub-editors and copywriters—so that we all had an understanding about what was being featured.

There was context around things. If the shoot was to be in Africa we were encouraged to read Isak Dinesen, Marrakech, Paul Bowles. One Hemingway novel suggestion I remember for a particular shoot was
A Moveable Feast
. I ate up all the literary references. Later on, when I became fashion writer, I would spend hours with Judith in her office making up stories about shoots, wondering what a fifties-glamour girl in the Suez Canal would wear (“a shirtwaister and some leather sandals!”) or the cultural implications of a safari suit. The person who would benefit most from this thoroughness was the reader. I still get cross when I look at fashion pages that have simply grouped items together because they’re the same color. Everything needs to be there for a good reason. Your role as an editor is to inspire and inform, not merely collate.

Vogue Men
was a great opportunity for me and I gained experience, fast. Nancy and I worked like demons, shooting all the fashion, mostly on models, but also photographing “real” men. That’s what the industry calls individuals who are not professional models: “real people.” You very quickly become familiar with the look you’re going to get from a hardcore fashion stylist when you suggest something should be shot on a “real person,” and it’s not thrilled to pieces, that’s for sure.

I wrote as much of
Vogue Men
as Nancy would allow, which was a great deal as our commissioning budgets were tight. This included writing all the fashion copy, cover lines, interviews with designers and
popular identities—anything and everything. I was still promotions assistant, Nancy’s personal assistant, and at night I covered the social functions and took names of the guests for the photographer. That was how I first met renowned social snapper Robert Rosen, whose candid photographs of the in-crowd would continue to feature in the pages of
Vogue Australia
for another twenty-five years.

The pace was intense, especially considering there were none of those fancy time-saving devices like computers or mobile phones. We posted courier bags filled with letters to the international
Vogue
offices in the afternoons, and sent telexes. The typewriters were basic. Liquid paper and carbon sheets were a necessity. In 1986 the first fax machine duly arrived, and it became one of my daily tasks to send faxes. The machine was placed upstairs with the typesetters, a group which included one particular miscreant who would regularly ask me to take off my top while I waited the agonizing one and a half hours for one page to stop/start its way through. It was easy enough to just flip through a magazine and ignore him, but the mere sound of a fax machine now takes me straight back to that prehistoric cave.

But drudge work was fine with me, especially as I was about to embark on my very first location trip, to the beautiful Marina Mirage resort which had just opened in Port Douglas, Queensland.

Trips are considered one of the biggest perks when you work at a fashion magazine, but in my experience they can also be one of the most difficult and fraught aspects of the job. Team dynamics are tricky, and when you throw in logistics, weather, budgets and personalities, the natural likelihood that things could go wrong generally means they will. But as trips go, this was one of the better ones: five sunny days at a five-star resort in Far North Queensland with two
ridiculously good-looking male models who got so competitive during the shoot they would regularly stop what they were doing and challenge each other to see who could do the most push-ups.

Preparing the fashion for a shoot was so different in the late eighties and early nineties than it is today. The big luxury houses like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada did not yet exist in Australia, and there were no press racks to borrow clothes from. Imported fashion had to be borrowed from department stores or from smaller multi-brand boutiques, which of course created a minefield of problems as it was actual stock, not samples. If you ruined something by, say, scorching it with an iron, smearing it with makeup, getting it wet or, even worse, if someone on the set went too close with a cigarette, it was a disaster.

In hindsight it was incredible training because you were taught to be fastidious with the clothes and accessories. I have no time for stylists who have no respect for the clothes they are handling, even if they’re samples. Fashion editors working today now simply call in the clothes that they desire, usually from look books (photographs of all the pieces in a collection, shot on an in-house model) or their choice of a particular runway “exit” (each individual look that was shown on the catwalk). In the case of local designers, they will go to showings to view a designer’s collection and choose from what is there. But back then at
Vogue
, the fashion editors would have things specially made.