The Vogue Factor: The Inside Story of Fashion's Most Illustrious Magazine (8 page)

Nancy was a little more realistic. We talked about the possibility that he may be a serial killer and that if I needed an airfare home, she would wire me the money. I thought he had been too cool and well-connected to be a murderer, and when I disembarked at Charles de Gaulle airport a few weeks later and saw him in his black leather Perfecto jacket and Timberland boots, dragging on a Marlboro, I knew I’d made a good decision. Two years later, I would move to Paris.

O
ne of the most controversial aspects of fashion magazines, and the fashion industry, is models. Specifically, how young they are and how thin they are. It’s a topic that continues to create endless debates, in the press and in the community. As the editor of
Vogue
, my opinion was constantly sought on these issues, and the images we produced in the magazine were closely scrutinized. It’s a precarious subject, and there are many unpleasant truths beneath the surface that are not discussed or acknowledged publicly.

When I first began dealing with models in the late eighties we were generally drawing from a pool of local beauties. These girls were naturally willowy and slim, had glowing skin, shiny hair and loads of energy. They ate lunch, sparingly for sure, but they ate. They were not skin and bones. I don’t think anyone believes that a model can eat anything she wants, not exercise and still stay a flawless size 4 (except when they are very young), so whatever regime these girls were following was keeping them healthy.

But I began to recognize the signs that other models were using different methods to stay svelte. I was dressing a model from the
United States on a beauty shoot, and I noticed scars and scabs on her knees. When I queried her about them she said nonchalantly: “Oh, yes. Because I’m always so hungry, I faint a lot.” She thought it was completely normal to pass out every day, sometimes more than once.

On another shoot I was chatting to one of the top Australian girls over lunch. She had just moved to Paris, and was sharing a small apartment with another model. I asked her how that was working out. “I get a lot of time by myself actually,” she said, picking at her salad. “My flatmate is a ‘fit model,’ so she’s in hospital on a drip a lot of the time.” A fit model is one who is used in the top designer ateliers, or workrooms, and is the body around which the clothes are designed. That the ideal body shape used as a starting point for a collection should be a female on the brink of hospitalization from starvation is frightening.

The longer I worked with models, the more the food deprivation became obvious. Cigarettes and Diet Coke were dietary staples. Sometimes you would see the telltale signs of anorexia, where a girl develops a light fuzz on her face and arms as her body struggles to stay warm. I have never, ever, in all my career, heard a model say “I’m hot,” not even if you wrapped her in fur and put her in the middle of the Kimberley Desert.

Society is understandably concerned about the issues surrounding body image and eating disorders, and the dangerous and unrealistic messages being sent to young women via fashion journals. When it comes to who should be blamed for the portrayal of overly thin models, magazine editors are in the direct line of fire, but the conundrum is more complex. The “fit model” begins the fashion process: designer outfits are created around a live, in-house skeleton. Very few designers have a curvy or petite fit model. These collections are then sent to the runway, worn by tall, pin-thin models because that’s the way the
designer wants to see the clothes fall. There will also be various casting directors and stylists involved, who have a vision of the type of women they envisage wearing these clothes. For some bizarre reason, it seems they prefer her to be young, coltish, six-foot tall and built like a prepubescent boy.

It is too simplistic to blame misogynistic men, although in some cases I believe that criticism is deserved. There are a few male fashion designers I would like to personally strangle. But there are many female fashion editors who perpetuate the stereotype, women who often have a major eating disorder of their own. They get so caught up in the hype of how brilliant clothes look on a size 0 they cannot see the inherent danger in the message. It cannot be denied that visually, clothes fall better on a slimmer frame, but there is slim, and then there is scary skinny.

Despite protestations by women who recognize the danger of portraying any one body type as “perfect,” the situation is not improving. If you look back at the heady days of the supermodels in the late eighties and early nineties, beauties such as Cindy Crawford, Eva Herzigová and Claudia Schiffer look positively curvaceous compared to the sylphs of today. There was a period in the last three years when some of the girls on the runways were so young and thin, and the shoes they were modeling so high, it actually started to seem barbaric to me. I would watch the ready-to-wear shows on the edge of my seat, apprehensive and anxious. I’m not comfortable witnessing teen waifs on almost the literal point of collapse.

After the shows, the collection is made available for the press to use for their shoots. These are the samples we all work with and they are obviously the size of the model who wore them on the runway. Thus, a stylist must cast a model who will fit into these tiny sizes. And they have become smaller since the early 2000s. We’ve had couture dresses
arrive from Europe that are so miniscule they resemble christening robes. There are no bigger samples available, and in any case, the designer probably has no interest in seeing their clothes on larger women. Many high fashion labels are aghast at the idea of producing a size 10, and they certainly wouldn’t want to see it displayed in the pages of the glossies. As a
Vogue
editor I was of the opinion that we didn’t necessarily need to feature size 10–plus models in every issue. It is a fashion magazine; we are showcasing the clothes. I am of the belief that an intelligent reader understands that a model is chosen because she carries clothes well. Some fashion would suit a curvier girl, some wouldn’t. I see no problem with presenting a healthy, toned size 6. But as sample sizes from the runway shows became smaller and smaller, 6 was no longer an option and the girls were dieting drastically to stay in the game.

It is the ultimate vicious cycle. A model who puts on a few kilos can’t get into a sample size on a casting and gets reprimanded by her agency. She begins to diet, loses the weight, and is praised by all for how good she looks. But instead of staying at that weight, and trying to maintain it through sensible diet and exercise, she thinks losing more will make her even more desirable. And no one tells her to stop.

Girls who can’t diet their breasts away will have surgical reductions. They then enter into dangerous patterns of behavior that the industry—shockingly—begins to accept as par for the course. We had a term for this spiral in the office. When a model who was getting good work in Australia starved herself down two sizes in order to be cast in the overseas shows—one of the ultimate achievements for models, and the first step to an international career—the
Vogue
fashion office would say she’d become “Paris thin.” This dubious achievement was generally accompanied by mood swings, extreme fatigue, binge eating and sometimes bouts of self-harming. All in the quest to fit into a Balenciaga sample.

Not every model has an eating disorder, but I would suggest that every model is not eating as much as she would like to. In 1995 I cast a lovely Russian model for a studio shoot in Paris, and I noticed that by mid-afternoon she hadn’t eaten a thing (we always catered). Her energy was fading, so I suggested we stop so she could have a snack. She shook her head and replied, “No, no. It is my job not to eat.” It was one of the only sentences she knew how to say in English.

A few years later we booked another Russian girl, who also was starving herself, on a trip to Marrakech. When the team went out to dinner at night she ordered nothing, but then hunger would get the better of her and she would pick small pieces of food off other people’s plates. I’ve seen it happen on many trips. The models somehow rationalize that if they didn’t order anything, then they didn’t really take in the calories. They can tell their booker at the agency before they sleep that they only had a salad. By the end of the trip, she didn’t have the energy to even sit up; she could barely open her eyes. We actually had her lie down next to a fountain to get the last shot. Naomi telephoned her agency to report that we thought she had a serious eating disorder, but we got the “No, it’s just that she hasn’t been well lately” spiel.

In 2004, a fashion season where the girls were expected to be particularly bone-thin, I was having lunch in New York with a top model agent who confidentially expressed her concern to me, as she did not want to be the one to expose the conspiracy. “It’s getting very serious,” she said. She lowered her tone and glanced around to see if anyone at the nearby tables could hear. “The top casting directors are demanding that they be thinner and thinner. I’ve got about four girls in the hospital. And a couple of the others have resorted to eating tissues. Apparently they swell up and fill your stomach.”

As a not unintelligent woman, I was horrified to hear what the industry was covering up and I felt complicit. We were all complicit. But in my experience it is practically impossible to get a photographer or a fashion editor—male or female—to acknowledge the repercussions of using very thin girls. They don’t want to. For them, it’s all about the drama of the photograph. They convince themselves that the girls are just genetically blessed, or have achieved it through energetic bouts of yoga and some goji berries.

I was at the baggage carousel with a fashion editor collecting our luggage after a trip and I noticed an extremely anorexic woman standing nearby. She was the most painfully thin person I had ever seen, and my heart went out to her. I pointed her out to the editor who scrutinized the poor woman and said: “I know it sounds terrible but I think she looks really great.” The industry is rife with this level of body dysmorphia from mature women.

This was really hammered home to me when there was a swimsuit casting at the
Vogue
office in the late nineties. After seeing dozens of top girls, the then fashion editor decided that not one of them had the “perfect” body. The
Vogue
office was situated across the road from the Northside Clinic, which specializes in treating eating disorders. The clinic also happened to house the only café near the office. I walked over to buy a fat-free chicken sandwich after the casting had wrapped up, and regarded the pale, young, female patients on portable IV drips, smoking in the courtyard in their dressing gowns. The sad irony did not escape me.

In my early years at the magazine there was no minimum age limit on models, and there were certainly occasions that girls under the age of sixteen were used. Fourteen-year-old beauty Kristy Hinze graced the January 1995 cover and was instantly put under contract with
Vogue
. Kristy had a fresh, outdoorsy appeal, bright-green eyes and a beaming
smile. The fashion team tended to feature her frolicking at the beach, or staring serenely into the camera next to a horse: she had an Aussie glamour that was also wholesome.

The readers had no complaint about her age, because she wasn’t being dressed up to look more mature, or overtly sexy. Sexiness in the early days of
Vogue Australia
was more equated with the sun and surf than playing a vamp. Younger girls can also differ wildly in terms of maturity.

For one job, I had to collect two models from the airport: one a fifteen-year-old brunette from Melbourne who had never flown before, and the other a sixteen-year-old from Germany. The Melbourne girl arrived, wide-eyed and terribly shy, practically clinging to me for the whole shoot. The other girl was a gum-snapping, chain-smoking sexpot, who arrived with her fifty-year-old boyfriend. I don’t recall either of the shoots being terribly successful.

Over time, readers did become more critical of models who looked too young and too thin, perhaps in direct correlation to how much the industry was using them. When you receive a well-written letter from a polite and astute reader asking why you are choosing children to promote fashion for women, it is difficult to respond with any level of intelligence. It is a legitimate question.

In 2005 I was on a location trip to Morocco with my fashion editor Naomi, waiting for a model—a new face predicted to have a big future—to arrive from Paris. Her plane had been delayed and as she was not going to make it to the hotel until very late, we went to bed. When we went to the model’s room the next morning, we found her in bed sleepy-faced and clutching a large teddy bear. She looked about twelve years old. I was horrified.

Under my editorship the fashion office found a new favorite model—Katie Braatvedt, a fifteen-year-old from New Zealand. Katie would
travel to Sydney for shoots, always accompanied by her mother, who was a priest. On one shoot, I sat and chatted with her mother, while she wrote next Sunday’s sermon.

Katie was indeed gorgeous and we had her under contract: the idea being that
Vogue
grooms and protects the girls at the beginning of their careers. But in April 2007 I ran a cover of Katie wearing an Alex Perry gown and standing in a treehouse, and received a storm of protest, from readers and the media, accusing us of sexualizing children. I lamely debated the point that this was not the message we intended, and that the photographs were meant to be innocent and enchanting, until I decided to give up. I was being led by what the fashion office wanted, not what the reader wanted.

This is a constant tension when you are an editor. In the end I had to agree wholeheartedly with the readers. How had
Vogue
’s viewpoint become so narrow that we had to fly in a fifteen-year-old from New Zealand every time we shot? Was there not a broader range of beauty that we could celebrate? I felt foolish even trying to justify it. What do you say: “Oh, but she’s pretty”?

I immediately instigated a policy that we would not employ models under the age of sixteen. If a girl under sixteen was discovered who had potential, we kept an eye on her and had her agency update us with new photos every six months or so. I don’t think it would be a bad idea to push the age limit up to eighteen. Fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds tend to be naturally slim, but at eighteen or nineteen years bodies begin to mature and change. Would it not be preferable to start a career with a slightly more womanly body, rather than fall into the trap of starving yourself back to your sixteen-year-old shape?