Style counsels

At the time of his death in 1942, Condé Montrose Nast, owner of the publishing house that still bears his name, oversaw a stable of prestigious and lucrative magazines, although one was dormant: French Vogue (or Paris Vogue, as Condé Nast staffers prefer it) had closed its doors for the duration of the war. Nast’s obituary in American Vogue, the pre-eminent Vogue then as now, related that “to the publishing world, he was one of the few who have always originated, never copied. He lifted fashion drawing from the level of hackwork to that of an art. He was the inspirer of new tastes”.

It might have added that his generously paid staff (also a novelty) oversaw the creation of the modern magazine layout and fostered the art of modern typography; that almost every well-known photographer of the quarter-century before his death – De Meyer, Steichen, Beaton, Horst, Man Ray, Lee Miller – had either started with The Condé Nast Publications Inc or had worked for it at some point.

Had Nast’s Argentinian Vogue still been around (it ran from 1924 to 1926), or the Havana-based Spanish Vogue (1918-1923, revived successfully in 1988 but from Madrid), or the first German Vogue (a lamentably short early life 1928-1929, but also revived), no doubt they too would have eulogised their proprietor. For Nast, a young publishing executive from St Louis, Missouri, who had bought Vogue as an under-performing society weekly in 1909, was truly a modern publisher.

Nast set about enhancing Vogue without alarming its core readership, Manhattan’s social elite – “the magnet that drew out the gold”, as he called them. He made it a fortnightly; the society pages began to feature fashion as well as the “fashionable life one leads”; and he replaced its over-decorated monochromatic front covers with designs in full colour. Nast launched British Vogue at an unpromising moment, September 1916, the midpoint of the Great War and the very month a new instrument of mechanical warfare, the tank, was launched at the Somme to break the deadlock on the Western Front. Which it singularly failed to do. Meanwhile, on both sides of the Atlantic, Nast’s magazine was a howling success. Brogue (early Vogue shorthand for British Vogue) was set on an upward trajectory.

Nina-Sophia Miralles takes the story from then until now, the pace only flagging when we hit recent times, chiefly because the magazine, or the brand, has lost its lustre, tarnished by market forces beyond its control, hidebound by a digital age which, she conjects, it was both ill-prepared and ill-equipped to join. The early history of Condé Nast, the man and the institution, are well told, being based for the most part on two excellent biographies, Caroline Seebohm’s The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast (1982) and Always in Vogue (1954), the memoirs of Nast’s long-serving editor-cum-consigliere Edna Woolman Chase. It is sadly not “the inside story of Vogue”, as billed. Miralles has never worked for the company, was given no access to the main players, nor to other primary sources. The archives in London – and New York, particularly – hold a wealth of correspondence, much of it uncatalogued (Miralles mistakenly supposes all of London’s paper archive was destroyed in the Blitz).

In Brogue’s earliest years, Dorothy Todd, looms large and Miralles rightly gives her the attention she merits, the pioneering editor having been first reclaimed by Lisa Cohen in All We Know: Three Lives (2012). Openly lesbian, Todd was defiantly literary too. Between 1923 and 1927, more than 200 contributions were either made by or written about the Bloomsbury Group and their associated circle, including five essays by Virginia Woolf. Todd attempted to turn Vogue from a fashion magazine with light coverage of the arts into a magazine of the arts which grudgingly included fashion.

What finally propelled Todd from office was not, as Miralles assumes, institutional prurience of her sexual mores – how tempting for today’s revisionist lobby – but because by 1926, Todd’s modernist Vogue was losing £25,000 annually (around half a million pounds today). Being talked about in narrow, if elevated, circles was never the Nast way. Nor inattention to the bottom line. Meanwhile, the gang’s all here: Woolman Chase, Diana Vreeland and Anna Wintour of American Vogue, the first two richly drawn, Wintour a reductio ad absurdum of sleek bob, wraparound sunglasses, and Devil Wears Prada comebacks. In London, we find Alexandra Shulman of British Vogue and her successor Edward Enninful.

Neither emerges unscathed, least of all Shulman, who comes in for the customary punishment beating for her magazine’s perceived lack of diversity, and trailing in her wake a bonfire of the “Posh White Girls” who supposedly – and quite incorrectly – comprised her staff. Miralles aims lower than most by repeating distasteful, unsigned pensées on Shulman’s stewardship first appearing in The Spectator, while neglecting her successes, a commitment to writing and photography of the highest order, and not least an editorship that lasted 25 years, a quarter of the magazine’s life.

Miralles’s Weltanschauung is enviably simplistic. This is the lead-up to the Fall of France: “Familiar French cynicism reigned and everyone was bored to sobs, until the Germans moved in easy as anything.” Her use of contemporary jargon sometimes grates. It’s hard to imagine Vogue’s wartime readers maintaining their standards in order to “give Hitler the finger”. For all that salaries are “juicy”, changes “seismic”, blondes “leggy” and clothes “devilishly expensive”, this is a breezy ride, a tale enthusiastically told and an enjoyable one. Condensing the life and times of a publishing phenomenon – 28

territories now have their own Vogue – is quite a feat.

Meanwhile, between delivery and publication, events, events, events find several of Miralles’s leading players now gone from their posts or their roles changed fundamentally as Condé Nast re-consolidates. “Vogue will always be Vogue,” concludes Miralles. This history may already be history, but the brand plays on.