The Vogue Factor

by Kirstie Clements

  A fashion ‘story’ is a sequence of photographs based around a specific theme, such as denim, or tailoring, or floral dresses. This was the greatest editorial training I would ever have, and those lessons carried me through my entire career at Vogue. These women knew what they were talking about. They had intrinsic good taste but they also possessed cultural references. They knew the history of a designer, and why a particular show was a standout, or a disappointment. They could articulate the reason because they had the knowledge and the language to do so. So much amateur fashion commentary today is subjective: ‘Oh, I loved the green dress, I’d wear that. The shoes are amazing!’ A lot of so-called experts are merely airing fatuous personal opinions.

  I recall Judith planning some fashion shoots for a particular issue, inspired by Hemingway heroines. ‘We are going to approach the issue by doing two main shoots,’ Judith told June during a meeting. ‘The philosophy for the first one is about women who row. The other is women who are rowed.’ The fashion editors literally wrote philosophies about what they were going to shoot, and why. These essays were then passed to everyone on staff—art department, sub-editors and copywriters—so that we all had an understanding about what was being featured.

  There was context around things. If the shoot was to be in Africa we were encouraged to read Isak Dinesen, Marrakech, Paul Bowles. One Hemingway novel suggestion I remember for a particular shoot was A Moveable Feast. I ate all the literary references up. Later on, when I became fashion writer, I would spend hours with Judith in her office making up stories about shoots, wondering what a fifties-glamour girl in the Suez Canal would wear (‘a shirtwaister and some leather sandals!’) or the cultural implications of a safari suit. The person who would benefit most from this thoroughness was the reader. I still get cross when I look at fashion pages that have simply grouped items together because they’re the same colour. Everything needs to be there for good reason. Your role as an editor is to inspire and inform, not merely collate.

  Vogue Men was a great opportunity for me and I gained experience, fast. Nancy and I worked like demons, shooting all the fashion, mostly on models, but also photographing ‘real’ men. That’s what the industry calls individuals who are not professional models: ‘real people’. You very quickly become familiar with the look you’re going to get from a hardcore fashion stylist when you suggest something should be shot on a ‘real person’, and it’s not thrilled to pieces, that’s for sure.

  I wrote as much of Vogue Men as Nancy would allow, which was a great deal as our commissioning budgets were tight. This included writing all the fashion copy, cover lines, interviews with designers and popular identities—anything and everything. I was still promotions assistant, Nancy’s personal assistant, and at night I covered the social functions and took names of the guests for the photographer. That was how I first met renowned social snapper Robert Rosen, whose candid photographs of the in-crowd would continue to feature in the pages of Vogue Australia for another twenty-five years.

  The pace was intense, especially considering there were none of those fancy time-saving devices like computers or mobile phones. We posted courier bags filled with letters to the international Vogue offices in the afternoons, and sent telexes. The typewriters were basic. Liquid paper and carbon sheets were a necessity. In 1986 the first fax machine duly arrived, and it became one of my daily tasks to send faxes. The machine was placed upstairs with the typesetters, a group which included one particular miscreant who would regularly ask me to take off my top while I waited the agonising one and a half hours for one page to stop/start its way through. It was easy enough to just flip through a magazine and ignore him, but the mere sound of a fax machine now takes me straight back to that prehistoric cave.

  But drudge work was fine with me, especially as I was about to embark on my very first location trip, to the beautiful Marina Mirage resort which had just opened in Port Douglas, Queensland.

  Trips are considered one of the biggest perks when you work at a fashion magazine, but in my experience they can also be one of the most difficult and fraught aspects of the job. Team dynamics are tricky, and when you throw in logistics, weather, budgets and personalities, the natural likelihood that things could go wrong generally means they will. But as trips go, this was one of the better ones: five sunny days at a five-star resort in Far North Queensland with two ridiculously good-looking male models who got so competitive during the shoot they would regularly stop what they were doing and challenge each other to see who could do the most push-ups.

  Preparing the fashion for a shoot was so different in the late eighties and early nineties than it is today. The big luxury houses like Louis Vuitton, Gucci and Prada did not yet exist in Australia, and there were no press racks to borrow clothes from. Imported fashion had to be borrowed from department stores or from smaller multi-brand boutiques, which of course created a minefield of problems as it was actual stock, not samples. If you ruined something by, say, scorching it with an iron, smearing it with makeup, getting it wet or, even worse, if someone on the set went too close with a cigarette, it was a disaster.

  In hindsight it was incredible training because you were taught to be fastidious with the clothes and accessories. I have no time for stylists who have no respect for the clothes they are handling, even if they’re samples. Fashion editors working today now simply call in the clothes that they desire, usually from look books (photographs of all the pieces in a collection, shot on an in-house model) or their choice of a particular runway ‘exit’ (each individual look that was shown on the catwalk). In the case of local designers, they will go to showings to view a designer’s collection and choose from what is there. But back then at Vogue, the fashion editors would have things specially made.

  Australian designers represented the core of what was shot, because many of them were also our advertisers. Judith, and the other stylists at the time—Victoria ‘Tory’ Collison in Sydney and Mary Otte and Sandra Hirsh in the Melbourne office—would settle on a trend from the shows, and rather than just call the PRs and have it sent in (an option which simply didn’t exist), they would make the rounds of their favourite Australian designers and explain the philosophy of the shoot and what they envisaged it would look like. This is not to say that designers were asked to copy things. It was a creative collaboration between the stylist and the designer. There would be long meetings complete with inspiration boards, art books, novels, fabrics and maps of exotic locations. Design houses would create the most magical one-offs, and it was always a thrilling moment when they arrived at the office. No one really knew exactly what to expect, because designers could certainly go off brief. But when they got it right, you could see the vision being realised while the story came together before your eyes. And sometimes their ‘off brief’ took the shoot in a whole new and marvellous direction.

  Knitter John Macarthur could always be counted upon to conjure up the most wonderful handknitted sweaters and accessories. It was these types of spectacular pieces that were captioned ‘Made to Order’ for the reader who decided she couldn’t live without a blue plastic mermaid dress. Young milliners such as the talented Annabel Ingall in Sydney and Tamasine Dale in Melbourne would create whimsical hats and headpieces, themed to suit. Judith always liked a hat. And a chunky knit. It was a way of approaching fashion shoots that was highly creative and original. It rarely happens today. No one has time to brief a designer, and the important international advertisers have to be accommodated first.

  There was always a major issue with shoes: that being there weren’t any. Judith’s biggest lament was that there were not enough good shoes in Australia. We could borrow imports from the topnotch shoe emporium Evelyn Miles but, again, they were stock that had to be sold, so the soles were taped, taped and taped again to prevent wear and tear. The editors used to design the shoes or sandals they needed to complete their vision and then have them made by a small shoe factory in Melbourne. The Vogue fashion department’s rabid attention to detail
delivered me a sterling life lesson—if the shoe isn’t right, then nothing is right.

  Fashion assistants lived in fear of not having the correct shoe to present to the editor. Completed shoots were scrutinised by the senior editors through a magnifying loop in the art department, and the dreaded question would be asked through pursed lips: ‘Was that the right shoe do you think?’ If you heard that from June, Nancy or Judith, you were toast.

  I walked into the fashion stockroom one day to find the new and gorgeous young fashion assistant Naomi Smith sitting on the floor, surrounded by literally hundreds of pairs of shoes. She turned to me, pale as a ghost, and said, ‘The shoot is tomorrow. Apparently we don’t have the right shoe’. I tried to joke her out of it, but tears were welling up in her eyes and I could sense the panic was rising. I comforted her by saying she had called in more shoes than I had ever seen. Judith would like one of them, surely?

  ‘No, no, Kirstie, you don’t understand. This is really, really serious. We don’t have the right shoe,’ she said gravely. ‘We need a Louis heel.’

  I pointed tentatively to a gold satin shoe I could see sticking out of the knee-high pile of options. ‘Noooo!’ she wailed. ‘That’s a kitten heel for god’s sake!’

  I felt so sorry for her and I walked back to my computer and typed out a piece of paper that said: ‘No, this is really serious. We don’t have the right shoe.’ I then blew it up to poster size and taped it up on the wall in the fashion office. Fortunately Judith saw the humour in it, and decided one of Naomi’s selections fit the bill, but shoes—to this day—remain a make or break factor in the world of high fashion. A well-chosen shoe adds proportion, modernity and newness to a look. Especially if you can’t actually walk in it.

  By 1988 my position at Vogue had changed. One day, while Nancy and I were shooting a promotion which required me to iron what seemed like four hundred white linen pants, shirts, jackets and skirts in an overheated studio, I had a mini meltdown. I loathe ironing. I’m terrible at it. I make more wrinkles than I take out. Back then, we used to iron everything to death. Now the art directors just take out every flaw in a photograph in post-production. I think I said something really pretentious to Nancy along the lines of, ‘I’m too smart to iron for a living. My mother didn’t raise me to do this.’

  I probably would have shown me the door, but the gracious Nancy worked her magic back in the office, and convinced the powers that be to create a position for me that involved assisting the beauty editor Karin Upton, and writing fashion stories, headings and captions. It was my dream job—the majority of the role was writing, and I enjoyed the beauty world. It also meant the occasional shoot. It was everything I loved doing. I would have worked for free.

  Naturally, like everything at Vogue, this move was not taken lightly. I was interviewed by June and asked to produce two designer profiles, a thousand words each, which would be duly appraised. I pounded them out with confidence and was offered the post.

  I was now installed in the fashion office, privy to all the conversations, the fun, the hysteria and the drama. We were not highly staffed by any means, so it was vital to work together and keep the bitching to a minimum in order to get through the workload. At any given period there would be a fashion director, one or two fashion editors, one fashion assistant and an office coordinator. Normally there would be only one editor in beauty, but because Karin and I could write across all areas the department was expanded.

  Karin proved to be a wonderful mentor and colleague. She was elegant and attractive, expensively dressed and wildly materialistic on the outside, but underneath she was witty and generous and quite self-deprecating. She owned the job of beauty editor, investing it with unparalleled glamour and importance.

  Karin was renowned for driving a black vintage Mercedes with quilted seats while wearing white leather driving gloves. Her hair and nails were always perfect. Her wardrobe consisted of Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel and Armani. She smoked St Moritz menthols in her office and constantly drank Diet Coke out of a wine glass, leaving a perpetual red lipstick mark. She was larger than life.

  Beauty advertising far outstripped fashion advertising at that time, and our area was crucial. I began to attend beauty functions either with Karin or on her behalf, mingling with other magazine editors and our advertisers. I started to understand exactly how the relationship between client and journalist worked, and how to work a creative vision into that equation for the reader. You cannot make an impactful or interesting product if you are merely regurgitating a press release, or being coerced into covering something you consider inappropriate. An editor or journalist has to go the extra distance and work out a new angle, a new spin, and in some cases push back and say no, let’s think of something else. It is what the reader deserves. It’s not a popular viewpoint today, but I do believe there is a middle ground that can be found where everyone wins.

  Vogue’s publisher was Lesley Wild, who was tough, brash and confident. She certainly had her battles with the editorial team in the cut and thrust that comes with that role but she was damn good at her job, the clients loved her, and she had respect for the magazine’s editorial integrity. There seems to be a common perception today that editors who have regard for the consumer are arrogant dinosaurs, standing in the way of ‘commerciality’. But I question what will be considered ‘commercial’ about zero sales when the intelligent and sceptical reader realises full well you sold out, in order to please an advertiser.

  The chairman of Condé Nast in Australia was Bernard Leser, who had originally founded Vogue Australia in 1959. He was based in the Condé Nast offices in New York, but would regularly visit Sydney and was often seen leaping out of his car (with driver) sporting a safari suit. He had a particularly fetching one in pale blue that Judith loved, given her penchant for creating shoots around them. Bernie, as he was known, was a true gentleman, with his shock of white hair and mellifluous voice. He had old-school charm. But by 1989 it seemed that there was now a perceptible shift in the priorities of management.

  June’s Vogue had always been very arts focused, with a major amount of excellent editorial devoted to theatre, books, film, dance and opera. I was not privy to the exact reasons for the change of guard, but I suspect the all-encompassing and conveniently amorphous ‘commerciality’ argument played a part. It always does. Unless you are an axe-wielding psycho and need to be escorted off the premises, most exits come down to money. In fact, if profits were significantly up, I suggest even a psycho and their axe could stay and be given a bonus.

  Suddenly, June and Eve were ousted and a new managing director installed, Verne Westerburg, who hailed from US Condé Nast. Nancy Pilcher was given the position of editor, and a new era began.

  I had taken over most of the fashion writing at that point, which was reasonably daunting given I was following in the very impressive footsteps of Marion von Adlerstein, who had moved to predominately writing travel. Marion had been an advertising copywriter before she joined Vogue and she was white-hot at the perfect par. I always remember one heading, or what is called a ‘pull out’, on a Spanish flamenco-inspired fashion story where she wrote: ‘The lines of a dress, as emphatic as the click of stiletto heels on a tiled floor.’ And for a menswear story: ‘In this suit, you’ll get the job, the girl and the table.’ I think witty copy on a fashion page is a must. I’ve always laboured over them. Generic cover lines such as ‘Great shoes and bags!’ are a terrible, tired cop out.

  Adding to the pressure of being even half as good as Marion was the fact that we had to write to character count. It seems unbelievable now, but in those days there were still no computers in the art department. Layouts were done on paper, and copy was pasted on using bromides—type that had been painstakingly cut out with a scalpel and stuck down. There was some sort of medieval-style box contraption into which the artists would thrust their hands in to spray the glue on the pages. In retrospect it was an occupational health and safety nightmare but, then again, so were all the staff who
chain-smoked cigarettes in the office until the laws banned it.

  To make sure that the art layout was not changed too frequently, writers had to be character perfect. Unfortunately, Vogue Italia layouts had become a design benchmark, and were frequently referenced, so I would end up having to form a heading that had words of one letter, two, two and then three. I did try to explain to the art department that the English language was a little more limited than Italian in terms of words of one or two letters. But I also tried my hardest to fit the layouts, and I was very proud when one day the impeccably mannered art assistant Eric Matthews came to my desk and awarded me The Golden Scalpel Award for Exactitude.

  With such a varied, smart and opinionated group of people working in one office on tight deadlines, it was natural that things could sometimes be fraught, but the camaraderie between the team was strong and supportive. The media portrayal of women who work at fashion magazines has always painted us as being bitchy and catty towards each other. That exists, definitely, but do bitchy, catty environments not exist in other businesses? Given the amount of unsubstantiated, puerile mudslinging I’ve witnessed emanating from other media outlets over the years, fashion magazine environments seem like a somewhat Sapphic utopia in comparison. At the core of these stereotypes is a tired belief that all women in fashion are shallow, lazy, pea-brained and self-serving. And yes, there are some. But from what I have observed they never last the distance. It’s a very, very tough business.

  Putting the magazine out each month, to the exacting standard that was expected, was damn hard work. The office juniors would almost always work until 9 or 10 p.m. On many occasions I would put my head in the stockroom to check on Naomi, worried that she was going to be smothered, Extreme Hoarders-style, by the raft of suitcases that would arrive from the Melbourne office each day, filled with John Smedley sweaters, Comme des Garcons skirts and kilos of jewellery from Castalia Antiques. As the fashion assistant in the early nineties, Naomi had to suffer through the fashion period where everything was piled high with multiple necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings. Judith was in a ‘navy Armani jacket and a batik skirt, put back with silver ethnic necklaces and oversized amber beads’ moment, and the jewellery influx was torturous. One earring lost in a sea of tissue paper could cost you your job. Luckily, the fashion winds shifted not long afterwards and years of minimalism followed, where one lone Elsa Peretti bangle from Tiffany was often sufficient.