Celebrating your 100th birthday if you’re British means, for one thing, a personal message from the Queen. To commemorate British Vogue magazine’s centenary this year, editor Alexandra Shulman reversed the tradition and published a public paean to the monarch marking her 90th birthday, praising her “unique grandeur” and examining how her “considered wardrobe” had played a central role in her reign, diplomatically, culturally and socially. Perhaps, given the magazine’s status as a bastion of British society, the Queen might say the same of Vogue?
Since it first hit the newsstands on 15 September 1916, its near-1,500 issues (it ran weekly and bi-weekly before eventually becoming a monthly) have documented and shaped British life, going far beyond the fripperies of fashion to reflect an ever-evolving culture and society. This week, London’s National Portrait Gallery opens Vogue 100: A Century of Style, a major retrospective exhibition chronicling the remarkable archive of work produced for British Vogue, telling the story of one of the world’s most influential magazines.
It may not have the financial clout of Forbes or the investigative insight of Time, but Vogue stands as both a mirror of modern life and a shaper of it.
“It is, contrary to popular opinion, not a fashion magazine,” says Robin Muir, the exhibition’s curator, who is a photographic historian and contributing editor to the title. “Vogue is about people, society and culture and how fashion, art, photography and literature play out within that.”
An American Anglophile, Condé Montrose Nast, founder of the eponymous publishing house, first introduced American Vogue, aimed at an elite audience of wealthy socialites, to London’s leafier enclaves in 1912. He successfully nurtured his vision of a publication that acted as “a magnet that drew out the gold”, showing wealthy readers how to spend their money, and consequently attracting strong advertising revenue.
Circulation in England grew steadily for four years, before paper shortages and restrictions on shipping “non-essentials” across the Atlantic meant he had to reconsider his strategy.
“Condé Nast decided that despite the pall of bloodshed and tumult that hung over Europe, the British woman would nonetheless embrace a magazine dedicated to style and high society life,” says Shulman, editor for the last 24 years –the longest time anyone has held the post. “He was right.”
But it took time to find its fashion feet. Initially featuring editorial pages created in New York, the British edition included homegrown advertisements and a promise that “each issue will be supplemented with carefully selected articles dealing with English society, fashions, furniture, interior decorating, the garden, art, literature and the stage”.
Nicknamed “Brogue” by its employees, British Vogue’s first issue was edited by the avant garde, highly intellectual Dorothy Todd, featuring essays by her friends in the Bloomsbury group alongside a scattering of fashion illustrations and society portraits.
Briefly usurped by the exotically named Elspeth Champcommunal, Todd was reinstated in 1922, with a staff of 14 and a defiant determination to continue pushing a literary bent – Noël Coward, Vita Sackville-West and Evelyn Waugh all got their first Vogue bylines under her editorship, while Virginia Woolf became a regular contributor. Her style did not go down well with her proprietor.
To her lasting credit, in 1924 Todd was responsible for publishing a photograph sent in, on spec, by a well-connected 20-year-old Cambridge undergraduate named Cecil Beaton, who went on to become one of the magazine’s most revered and prolific contributors – as a photographer, illustrator, cartoonist, writer, stylist, art director and social commentator.
“We can genuinely say he’s one of ours,” says Muir, who began his career working in the Vogue library in 1985 and went on to become picture editor. “He became our star photographer by the age of 23, capturing a certain indulgent recklessness of style until a year or so before his death in 1980.”
Visitors to the exhibition will discover an archive of Beaton’s work spanning 55 years, traversing the evolution of the magazine from niche publication to a powerful tour de force in the creative arts.. From aristocratic beauties to the aftermath of the Blitz and beyond, mid-20th-century Britain, seen through Beaton’s discerning eye, is a tapestry of class and culture, war and women’s wardrobes.
But Muir shares with me a poignant picture from 1942 of Beaton amid a mountain of photographic prints from the magazine’s prewar archive of Man Rays, Horsts, Steichens and his own work, about to be pulped to make more paper as part of the war effort.
In fact, when the war came, the government saw the publication as good for morale. Editors were encouraged to photograph utilitywear to encourage thrifty, confidence-boosting style in austere times. And its intrepid war correspondent, Lee Miller, “beat the American infantry to Hitler’s Bavarian retreat, offering Vogue readers a front seat in the theatre of war,” says Muir. “She was a true Vogue heroine: her photographs were gritty and evocative, her words bitter and powerful. That was the making of modern Vogue: when it went beyond fashion and into the realm of documenting events of the day.”
Perhaps the first incarnation of the now popular stereotype of an uncompromising magazine editor, as caricatured in The Devil Wears Prada, was Edna Woolman Chase, who began to mould the Vogue we know now in the 1910s and set a strict dress code for her female employees that included hats, white gloves and silk stockings.
“At its best, Vogue has always celebrated the best of everything,” says the fashion historian and author Bronwyn Cosgrave, who was features editor of the British edition from 1998 to 2003. “It sets the absolute benchmark for everyone who aspires to learn about style and culture.”
A series of venerable British editors, including Audrey Withers (1940-60), who arrived for her interview in borrowed clothes, and the formidable but stylish Beatrix Miller (1964-85), whose retinue of “Voguettes” only ever referred to their boss as Miss Miller, continued to attract new audiences with exciting and innovative fashion spreads.
By introducing the “cockney trio” of photographers – Brian Duffy, David Bailey and Terence Donovan – and models such as Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree and Twiggy, it was Miller who really made Vogue truly meritocratic, says Muir. “She really grasped the Swinging 60s and the new classless society, and at that point you didn’t have to be from an elite background to get your name in Vogue. You just had to be ‘on the scene’.”
When Miller retired, her shoes were briefly and ably filled by the famed, steely Anna “Nuclear” Wintour, who inhabited the corner office at Vogue House for two years before handing over to Liz Tilberis, who achieved the coup of persuading the Princess of Wales to appear on the cover.
Photography featuring figures of note has always been central to Vogue’s unique glamour, in effect creating the world’s first professional fashion photographer in Baron de Meyer, known fondly as the “Debussy of the camera” by his peers. Muir searched long and hard to find his favourite image in the exhibition: it was a de Meyer picture of a musical star named Dolores looking into a crystal ball.
Put under contract by American Vogue in 1914 at $100 a week, De Meyer set the precedent for the magazine’s practice of “adopting” creative talent, with the likes of Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Norman Parkinson, Bailey, Helmut Newton, Patrick Demarchelier, Mario Testino and latterly Tim Walker following in his footsteps.
From Avedon’s frame of the aristocratic model Dovima surrounded by elephants to Newton’s 1970s portrayals of debauched pool parties, and from Peter Lindbergh’s aspirational 1990 “supermodels” cover to the “heroin chic” of Corinne Day’s images of Kate Moss in her underwear, Vogue has documented the highs and lows of fashion with panache. Famous faces that have shaped the cultural landscape are captured in a curious and creative light: a walk around the exhibition offers up Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst, Marlene Dietrich and Gwyneth Paltrow, Fred Astaire and David Beckham.
“The photography in Vogue is always so original, so extravagant and so of its time,” says Cosgrave. “Vogue photographers show people how fashion relates to society and translates it for them. Whenever I got stuck writing an article, I walked into the art room to look at these awe-inspiring images, and thought: ‘That’s what I have to compete with’. It raised my game.”
But is this elite concept of style relevant in a world where reality stars grace the covers of glossy magazines and bloggers sit on the front row of fashion shows, posting fuzzy images on Instagram months before Vogue can share them on its pages?
“The digital space is wonderful for reacting to things and its immediacy,” says Shulman, who now oversees the 21-year-old vogue.co.uk website as well as its centenarian sibling. “But what has kept Vogue so special is that it is about a very finely crafted existence, and taking time to create the contents is vital. Anyone can post an Instagram. By no means everyone can create the kind of images on show at the National Portrait Gallery.”
Vogue 100: A Century of Style is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from 11 February–22 May 2016, sponsored by Leon Max
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Happy 100th birthday, Vogue
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