Vogue outs bonkers celebrity

Vogue, or at least the British edition of the Condé Nast monthly, finds itself credited in today’s Sunday Times for its sound judgment in spiking an interview with Maya Arulpragasam, better known as the singer MIA. ‘Thank heaven for Vogue,’ says Sarah Baxter, in condemning MIA’s ‘bonkers’ attitude towards taking a vaccine coronavirus.

The row came after MIA had tweeted that death would be preferable to taking a vaccine. ‘if I have to choose between a vaccine or chip [against the coronavirus], I’m gonna choose death’. She said that Edward Enninful, the editor of British Vogue had withdrawn his offer for a feature. She has since removed the post.

Enninful, editor of British Vogue – known as Brogue – responded:

Considering . . . we’re chronicling the struggles of the NHS to cope, we don’t feel we can have her involved. It just wouldn’t be right.’

Even after deleting her messages, MIA responded to Vogue: ‘I missed a lot of vaccines and PLOT TWIST. I’m still alive. If I don’t make it past this age, that’s okay.’ Is she loopy or what?

Baxter adds the tennis player Novak Djokovic to the list of bonkers celebrities as another ‘anti-vaxxer’ in an article that compares their warped attitudes with the madness of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

It’s not all glory for Vogue, though. The columnist also recalls that the US version of the glossy fashion magazine once described the wife of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, as the ‘rose of the desert’ just as the country’s civil war broke out.

Christmas magazines: vanity and Vogue

 

The theme of Vogue’s 1935 Christmas cover was vanity

Vogue‘s 1935 Christmas issue was a vanity number – and it is dated 25 December – though the cover photographer is not credited. At this time, Vogue came out twice a month (notice it is issue number 26 for the year), a practice that carried on into the 1980s.

Masks were a feature in English theatre at the time and were a specialism of Angus McBean. McBean’s 1936 photograph of Ivor Novello as George Hell, the anti-hero of ‘The Happy Hypocrite’ play, showed the actor holding a mask made by McBean. The image was a sensation – it was published in the Sketch, Tatler, Bystander, Illustrated London News and Britannia and Eve – and encouraged the mask-maker to focus on theatre publicity and ‘surrealized’ photography.

Bruehl-Bourges colour photo for Condé Nast

Condé Montrose Nast, the owner of the US fashion magazine Vogue, was keen on introducing colour advertising and in 1931 turned to photographer Anton Bruehl and colour specialist Fernand Bourges to develop a process to produce high-quality colour transparencies. Among the results was Vogue’s first photographic cover in 1932 (July 20). They produced hundreds of brilliant plates for Condé Nast’s House & Garden and Vanity Fair, as well as Vogue. The company published 64 examples of Bruehl–Bourges photographs in a brochure, Color sells.

Cecil Beaton did these ballet costume designs

Cecil Beaton was an established Vogue photographer by this time, and these sketches were done as ballet costume designs for ‘The Edwardians’.  He would do similar work for ‘My Fair Lady’ in 1964 – and won two of that film’s eight Oscars. Beaton did a fashion shoot as well in this issue, as did Shaw Wildman.

Semi-display adverts: collecting, bath granules, hair perfection, cruel fur and Olympic travel

This half page of semi-display adverts shows some of the preoccupations of Vogue readers in the 1930s and the issue’s vanity theme. Yesterday’s post suggested that it wasn’t until the 1990s that fur became a dirty word. However, that wasn’t totally accurate as this advert against the cruelty of trapping for furs shows. Major C Van Der Byl of Towcester had been running adverts as part of a ‘fur crusade’ against the ‘horrors of trapping and skinning animals alive’ in newspapers such as the Telegraph since at least 1929.

To the left of the major’s campaign, readers are recommended to wear a Lady Jayne slumber helmet. To the right is a more sinister image – an Olympic skier doing a Nazi salute.

More Christmas goodies: self-referential Christmas magazine covers.

 

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To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design

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The week in magazines: in and outs at Vogue

Arabic language cover of Vogue Saudi Arabia. Princess Abdulaziz lost her job as editor on Thursday

Well, what a week in magazines. It’s difficult to have missed Edward Enninful as the the new editor at the century-old British Vogue, but did you hear what happened at the title in Saudi Arabia? They lost an editor princess, no less. And back in the UK, Relx has sold its iconic title, New Scientist.

The arrival of Edward Enninful at British Vogue is seen as marking a switch to a more digital focus, with Alexander Schulman having wrung as much from print as there is to find. It is also the start of the change of the old guard, with Albert Read – Enninful’s boss in New York – set to take over from Nicholas Coleridge as MD of Condé Nast UK  on August 1st.

But Read does not inherit the whole of Coleridge’s brief. Wolfgang Blau, digital chief of Condé Nast International, will take over as president of the international side. The fallout from the shenanigans in Saudi Arabia will no doubt still be reverberating then.

Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz was sacked on Thursday as editor of Vogue Arabia after just two issues. Abdulaziz – described last year as ‘a beacon of fashion in the region’ was appointed for the launch in July 2016. At the time, she said:

Don’t forget that we understand luxury almost better than anyone else on earth. Middle Eastern women have been serious couture clients since the late 1960s. We’ve been around long before the Russians and the Chinese ever came into the picture

Abdulaziz put Gigi Hadid on her Vogue cover

However, putting Palestinian-American model Gigi Hadid wearing a veil on the cover for the first issue in March proved controversial. Cries of ‘cultural appropriation’ and accusations of plagiarism have bounced around social media.

Abdulaziz has since been quoted as saying:

I refused to compromise when I felt the publisher’s approach conflicted with the values which underpin our readers and the role of the editor-in-chief in meeting those values in a truly authentic way

Manuel Arnaut, a Condé Nast veteran and editor of Architectural Digest in the Middle East, has been parachuted in to calm things down. He has worked  as a writer and editor at both Vogue and GQ in Portugal.

So, that’s three editions of Vogue with men at the helm.

Madonna on Vogue covers

Vogue profile

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To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design

 

 

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Enninful ends the male ‘white-out’ at Vogue

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Edward Enninful has been fashion and creative director at W magazine since 2011

Much of the coverage about the arrival of Edward Enninful as editor of Vogue talks about ‘surprise’ in the fashion industry. He may be the first male editor-in-chief of the British edition of the title, but Condé Nast, who founded the US original in 1892 based on a French magazine, was hardly a woman. Somehow, the company always seem to generate surprise at these announcements – just look back at Alexander Shulman’s appointment. But Condé Nast tends to promote from within and, as the creative director of W, Enninful has been under the nose of Jonathan Newhouse, the big chief, in New York for six years.

Of course, he is a rare black editor at a big Western magazine. How many others are there? I remember commenting on the loss of Helen Bazuaye as a black editor back in 2004 when 19 closed. And former Cosmopolitan editor Linda Kelsey has blamed the conservative nature of the industry for the lack of black models on magazine covers.

Shulman has had a hard time at Vogue from Naomi Campbell, who was first black model to appear on the covers of Vogue in the UK. Campbell attacked Vogue in 2008 for not putting her on the cover often enough. Shulman dismissed the comments as ‘a PR thing’, saying ‘Campbell was just trying to get publicity for the event she was doing’. Campbell has also claimed that an Australian magazine editor lost the job after putting Campbell on the cover.

Enninful, who is a 45-year-old Ghanaian-British stylist, will take over as Vogue’s 11th editor on August 1, following Shulman after her quarter-century stint. She will be a hard act to follow, with circulation doubling under her tenure to 220,000 copies a month. She was also lauded in the press for last year’s centenary celebrations campaign for the title, with a National Portrait Gallery exhibition, a BBC TV documentary and a Duchess of Cambridge cover.

He joins Emanuele Farneti, editor of Italian Vogue, as a man running an edition of the US-owned fashion monthly. Farneti, like Shulman, was editor of men’s monthly GQ, before moving across to the bigger woman’s monthly.

Enninful was touted as the world’s youngest fashion director when, aged 18, he took the post at Terry Jones’s i-D. and has spent the past six years as creative director at W in New York. His campaigning side has come out with his talk of ending the ‘white-out’ he sees on catwalks and in magazines and he styled Italian Vogue’s Black Issue back in 2008.

Enninful has more digital savvy than Shulman, judging by the success of ‘I Am an Immigrant’ video he released on W’s website after Donald Trump’s travel ban. With print sales under the cosh, ad revenues and digital presence will provide the benchmarks on which he will be judged.

This month in magazines: Vogue’s 1977 green jelly

Vogue’s February 1977 green jelly cover was by Terry Jones

I always get something out of interviews with Terry Jones because he always wants to spill the beans about something. The details make life at Vogue come alive behind the oh-so-made-up corporate face of Condé Nast, with stories of cover transparencies being lost in bins, rows with all the ‘suits’ who want to push in and change things, and his attempt to get a nipple onto his last cover as art director.

I wrote a piece last year for the sold-out last issue of Gym Class about cover design rules, and Jones epitomises the final rule – break them all!:

For every rule, there’s a cover that broke it yet was a tearaway success. Black for the cover didn’t work for Talk in the US – yet it was the signature colour for Willy Fleckhaus on Twen. He produced a classic, but who’s done it since? … One day the rules here will be built into InDesign and Photoshop. For now, and probably even then, it’s up to you to test the rules, make mistakes and learn what works for your magazine.

Jones – who was made an MBE in the 2017 honours list for services to fashion and popular culture – founded the punkish, dot-matrixy i-D magazine after he left Vogue, with later help from Tony Elliott to turn it into a  mainstream title.

Jones has identified his favourite Vogue covers in interviews with Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (FT, ‘Happy birthday i-D magazine’, 19 November 2010) and for i-D/Vice. Among his three favourites is the green jelly cover from February 1977 shot by Willie Christie:

The image was originally for an inside editorial that Grace [Coddington, fashion editor, who was previously a model] and I convinced Beatrix [Miller, then editor] to run with. We got approval from Bernie Lazer, the managing director at British Vogue, who had to defend the decision when Daniel Salem, the European company director, demanded to have it stopped on press.

Vogue itself described the issue so:

The cover is entitled ‘first taste of spring’ and features ‘Rowntree’s jelly… full of gelatine, a valuable source of protein and good for strengthening nails.’ Green is the colour of the fashion moment inside, modelled by Jerry Hall, while Maria Schiaparelli Berenson’s wedding to James H Randal is featured, wth Anjelica Huston, Jack Nicholson, Liza Minelli, Halston and Andy Warhol all there to see it. ‘If there was ever such a thing as a groovy wedding, that was it,’ said Nicholson.

So un-Vogue: January 1974 cover shot by David Bailey for Terry Jones

Jones was given space to experiment on covers, but he was also aware that ‘there were rules you were meant to abide by’.

Another cover he’s amazed that he and Coddington managed to ‘smuggle’ through was a full-length portrait by David Bailey of Anjelica Huston and Manolo Blahnik drinking champagne on a beach at sunset (Jan 1974).

As he says, ‘It was so un-Vogue. I don’t think Vogue have done a full-length since.’ Sometimes, it’s by breaking the rules that you set them.

 

So grainy: Vogue 1974 cover of Bianca Jagger blown up from 35mm

The third cover he rejoices in is ‘the accidental cover’ of Bianca Jagger photographed by Eric Boman (March 1974). Boman took a 35mm shot of Jagger at the Paris Opera that Jones liked, but the model was very small in the photo.

So Jones had a 10×8 transparency made up that was cropped to the head and then blown up to the cover area. This blow-up made the image very grainy, a feature that Jones wanted but that would have been regarded as unusable by the normal production standards at Condé Nast.

‘The print production manager still complained,’ said Jones, ‘but it remains one of my favourite covers alongside the the green jelly cover from February 1977.’

 

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To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design

 

 

 

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Shulman steps down at Vogue

Alexendra Shulman in front of a wall of historical Vogue magazine front covers

After 25 years as editor, Alexandra Shulman is leaving Vogue magazine. A successor has not yet been announced and her future is not known. She said: ‘It was difficult to decide to leave but 25 years is a very long time and I am tremendously excited that I will now look forward into a different future.’

Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Condé Nast Britain, said: ‘Alex has been the longest serving and most successful editor of Vogue in its 100-year history.’

Shulman took over at Vogue from Liz Tilberis, who left to edit Harper’s Bazaar in New York – joining two other British women at the top of the biggest American glossies (Anna Wintour was editing US Vogue and Tina Brown was running Vanity Fair).You would have thought Shulman was primed to take over from Wintour.

Shulman began at Vogue as features editor in 1988, before joining GQ as editor in February 1990. She took the helm at Vogue in 1992 (with Michael VerMeulen stepping into her GQ post). Shulman started out in journalism at Over-21, before joining Tatler in 1982, where she became features editor. In 1987, she joined the Sunday Telegraph as editor of the women’s pages before working on one of the paper’s tabloid sections.

McCullin, Wintour and Brookes given honours

Don McCullin, former war photographer	Anna Wintour, chief of the US edition of Vogue	Times cartoonist Peter Brookes – did Oz covers

Photojournalist Don McCullin, Anna Wintour, chief of the US edition of Vogue, and Times cartoonist Peter Brookes are the prominent names in this new year’s honours list.

The 81-year-old McCullin, who made his name on Town and The Sunday Times  Magazine among others, has been knighted.

Peter ‘Hack’ Brookes cover from 1971

Peter Brookes, who in the past drew for underground magazine Oz, has been made a CBE. In a news item in The Times today headlined ‘I won’t start pulling my punches’, the 73-year-old cartoonist defends accepting the award:

I am glad to live in a country that recognises cartoonists in this particular way. There will be those who wonder whether Theresa  May and others can justifiably say ‘we have got him now’. My feeling is very much that they haven’t. I am not going to stop hitting hard.

He points to the contrast between his honour and the treatment of Atena Farghadani, who was jailed in Iran for 12 years after posting a cartoon in protest at laws restricting birth control and divorce. ‘She has been jailed for doing the sort of drawing I do three or four times a week,’ Brookes said.

Anna Wintour, who was appointed editor of ­American Vogue in 1987 after two years at the helm of the British edition, has been made a dame, while veteran Liverpudlian comic Ken Dodd is knighted at the age of 89. His world of Diddymen and the Jam Butty Mines in Knotty Ash has been a legend in my lifetime. Difficult to imagine ‘Nuclear Wintour’ repeating the sentiments of Daddy on hearing his news: ‘full of plumptiousness’ and ‘highly tickled’.

Vogue – vague about photography

Inside Vogue by Alexandra Shulman marks the magazine’s centenary year

Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year came out this week with editor Alexandra Shulman writing about the magazine’s celebration of 100 years since the first issue of British Vogue – known in the trade as ‘Brogue’. Incredibly, she’s been at the helm for 24 of those years.

She was asked on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about that first issue and came across as a tad vague. She remarked that it was then a society magazine rather than a fashion magazine and that ‘there were no photographs, of course’. Why ‘of course’?

Photography was well established and the Graphic had been reproducing half-tones for 30 years. Its four-page supplement in 1884, ‘An amateur photographer at the zoo’ is one of the first examples of photographic reportage.

Could it be that ‘of course, Vogue is always slow to follow the trends’? Or perhaps ‘of course, Vogue simply didn’t like photographs’. It did not run its first photographic cover until 1932.

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To see almost 500 magazine covers and pages, look out for my book, A History of British Magazine Design, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, the world’s leading museum of art and design

 

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‘Do us a solid.’ GQ’s scatalogical battle to kill ad-blockers

GQ’s message to freeloading readers – watch the ads or pay up (there must be a pun in there somewhere – GQ = Gentleman’s Quarterly; 25c = a quarter)

Turn off your ad blocker or pay 25c to read this article. That’s the message being put out on articles by US magazines such as GQ and Forbes, says Fortune magazine.  There’s a battle going on here with ad-dependent websites trying to kill ad-blocking before they becomes standard – because publishers know that if it does become the default for phones and tablets, most people will never turn the blocker off.

Where does the money go, I wonder? The text ‘Support GQ‘s award-winning journalism’ hints that some of it may go to the writers at the men’s magazine; but I doubt it. Unless they are a big name writer, they’ll have had to sign a 10-page contract that takes all rights to exploit the article.

A big issue for many users, however, is the intrusive nature of the GQ advertising, along with many apps, particularly free games. As Aminatou Sou commented:

25 cents seems fair. I would turn off my ad blocker @gq except that you’re using 14 different trackers to follow me

Just as irritating may be GQ‘s language – ‘do us a solid’. Is that what passes for lavatorial humour at GQ and Vogue publisher Condé Nast?

>>History of digital magazines

Blow by Blow in Vogue

Why the hats? ‘To keep everyone away from me, said Isabella Blow

The A.G. Nauta fashion blog has put together a nice sequence of Isabella Blow photos from magazines, including pages from the 1993 London Babes feature shot by Steven Meisel and conceived by Blow – the fashion muse’s brother has described it as the most expensive Vogue shoot of the era.

The blog quotes Blow, who wore some astounding creations from the likes of Philip Treacy – you have to see them live to really appreciate them:

Why the hats? To keep everyone away from me. They say, Oh, can I kiss you? I say, No, thank you very much. That’s why I’ve worn the hat. Goodbye. I don’t want to be kissed by all and sundry. I want to be kissed by the people I love.

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