This week sees the publication of Vogue: The Biography of an Icon, the fascinating story of British Vogue as told by historian and author Julie Summers. Over the last three years, Summers has pored over 1,768 issues, read close to 5,000 articles, and scanned almost 9,000 fashion shoots in the name of research. The resulting book is a biography rather than a history, she says, because Vogue had its own voice on both sides of the Atlantic from the very beginning.
The British edition of Vogue launched in 1916, perhaps as inauspicious a time as any to found a luxury magazine, as tanks rolled out over the plains of the Somme, but it was an instant success – not to mention the second most widely read magazine in the trenches. (Quite what could top Vogue on the Western Front remains elusive.)
It’s been said before, but Vogue holds up a small yet dazzlingly bright mirror to history while relentlessly searching for what’s next. “Sometimes it looks over its shoulder,” says Summers, “but [really] every single issue is about the future, and about interpreting the world around us. I think that’s extraordinarily impressive, and that’s really what my joy was: to get hold of each issue and say, ‘What was Vogue trying to convey here?’”
British Vogue sped through the age of Modernism, bringing readers early glimpses of Picasso and Cocteau. It tripped through the Jazz Age, the sunlit and snow-blind sportiness of Chanel, and Schiaparelli’s remarkable feats of Surrealist engineering. It survived a Second World War, though the office windows were blown in during the Blitz – and when the conflict was over, it looked with optimism to a new Elizabethan Age.
And behind every issue, of course, there was a formidable editor. In 108 years, there have been, it is generally agreed, 11. One was editor twice, two were in situ for more than 20 years, and there were several peculiar, if brief, interregnums, when managing directors took the helm of the magazine. I sat down with Julie to hear her take on three fascinating yet frequently overlooked editors who shaped British Vogue.
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Dorothy Todd (1916-18 and 1923-26)
British Vogue’s first and third editor. It was assumed that her open relationship with fashion editor Madge Garland led to her final dismissal. She had close ties to the Bloomsbury Group.
“I think Dorothy Todd is the most fascinating editor of Vogue. Taken as a body of work, her issues stand up as a sort of bastion of Modernism. They’re faultless in the quality of the writing, the quality of the criticism. She published Edith Sitwell’s poems, she brought in Man Ray and Cocteau, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, Colette and DH Lawrence. Aldous Huxley was her sub-editor. Marcel Boulestin, the great chef, was her cookery writer.
“Still, she faced a considerable number of challenges. One was that managing director Harry Yoxall needed circulation to increase in order to boost profits, and Todd wasn’t interested in circulation, she was interested in content. And, it has to be said, she was quite extravagant. She and Madge Garland used to hold these huge parties in Bloomsbury at Vogue’s expense, and that’s where a lot of the contracts would get handed out. She was fiscally undisciplined, to put it mildly – but her Vogue is so rich, so colourful.
“I do think her take on queer culture probably frustrated and upset the powers that be, but while her sexuality was definitely part of the story behind her dismissal, it wasn’t the main story. That was her inability to manage a budget and get the magazine out on time.”
Ailsa Garland (1960-1964)
A fashion journalist and broadcaster, appointed editor-in-chief from the fast-paced, male-dominated world of Fleet Street.
“I want to blast my trumpet about Ailsa Garland. Coming from daily newspapers, she was considered ‘trade’, which meant ‘essentially suspect’. She came to Vogue in 1960, once Audrey Withers had been booted upstairs, and she got her teeth into it. My goodness, did she bring in some changes.
“Because she’d lost Antony Armstrong-Jones as a photographer after he married Princess Margaret, she had to find new talent. She brought in the Black Trinity of David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy, and suddenly Vogue lit up. She commissioned the first British photographer to capture Paris Fashion Week in full – that’s Bailey, of course. And her features were terrific. She picked up The Beatles. She spotted The Rolling Stones. She recognised talent in theatre. She was a big fan of David Hockney. She had her finger absolutely on the pulse, and she leapt into every youth movement, encouraging younger women to shop.
“Why did she leave after just four years? She hinted that there were strong differences of opinion between her and Vogue’s managing director Reginald Williams – and reports, incredibly, of fisticuffs with her chief fashion editor, Pat Cunningham, who left in a fury in 1964.”
Beatrix Miller (1964-1986)
Miss Miller, as she was known, saw Vogue through the Swinging Sixties and the haphazard Seventies. Her Vogue was characterised by a peculiarly English sense of eccentricity, idiosyncrasy – and elegant charm.
“Beatrix Miller was resolutely pro-woman. She hired the financial journalist Sheila Black as her economics editor, giving advice on how to get a mortgage, how to balance a cheque book, how to pay taxes. All of that was completely new. She was big on health, too; she advised women on all the difficult, previously taboo, issues, such as abortion.
“For the era, she ran some very shocking articles about health – but there was also a wonderful sense of escapism. Her successor, Liz Tilberis, once said that Miller had ‘gold dust on her hands’, and she really did. Patrick Kinmonth, her arts editor, made this point as well: she was a very clever operator. She was so trusting of her talented writers and stylists.
“She had a great crop of models and photographers, too, and gave them real space to be creative, which resulted in fantastic pictures. For me, reading the archive, it came to mean a great deal that she was so totally dedicated to her readers.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity throughout.
