IRENE IS ONE OF the fashion industry’s many éminence grises. She started her work in fashion in the late 1960s and worked her way from Mademoiselle to Elle to Vogue. In the late 1980s she became the fashion editor of Vogue Paris where she pioneered the work of photographers like Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel, Bruce Weber and Paolo Roversi, at the time all young and looking for a break. In 1991 she resigned, after a lunch meeting where an important advertiser tried to put the screws in, and her publisher’s silence spoke volumes. On the day she left she famously received the gift of a photograph from every photographer she had worked with at Vogue, delivered to her office every hour, on the hour. Shortly afterwards a chance encounter with Yohji Yamamoto led to the next phase in Irene’s life, as the designer’s creative director. Next to Yamamoto, who Irene affectionately calls her spiritual ‘brother’, she helped the designer fine-tune his vision and shape his legacy, in the process leaving an indelible mark on the history of fashion.

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We talk on a bench by the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It’s a glorious summer day, and he’s here to work. He speaks of his long career providing security for gallery openings, fashion designers, ladies who lunch and, later, for New York Fashion Week with a candidness that is totally disarming. I drink my coffee and listen while he looks through the big stack of files he’s brought with him, and reminisces about what fashion once was.  

Forty years ago I was a detective in New York City, but you never make enough money being a policeman you know. You have to supplement your income as a civil servant, so many of us did security work on the side. It’s called moonlighting. My first job was at a cocktail party in an art gallery; I made a crisp fifty-dollar bill in an afternoon. That was a lot of money for me back then. What did I make? Say $20 000 a year? And all I had to do was stand at the door with a guest list and make sure that no one got in who didn’t belong. It was all very innocuous, there were never any issues really. Every once in a while a homeless person would come by, look through the window and see somebody serving trays of hors d’oeuvres and try to come in but that was about it.

I started my company a year later, in 1981. My reputation spread through word of mouth mostly. Alongside gallery openings I did these high end cocktail parties on Park Avenue in people’s residences. I remember noting that most of those women, the dowagers, had very big feet, and telling my wife about it. Getting to know my fair share of ladies who do lunch, as they were called back then, helped when I started working on fashion events. Many of those ladies with big feet would come to the shows too. I knew them by face which was helpful since nobody would bring their invitations to the shows back then. Their face was their invitation. Typically, they would just walk through the door, with a ‘how could you not know who I am’ expression, and I did know who they were. I still do.

Anyway, I get ahead of myself a little. I did a lot of AIDS related fundraisers in the Eighties. I worked with Norma Kamali for her shows and her boutique, and eventually that led to a job for Valentino in the early Nineties. That was a very big job for me. He literally built a piazza on Park Avenue, and called it Piazza Italia. The right people saw me working there, approached me and said that they were going to erect tents in Bryant Park to host fashion shows. I was asked to put a bid in on the job, and I did. I got the job, and the first official New York Fashion Week shows at Bryant Park opened in the fall of 1993. I learnt a lot about fashion from the get go. When the shows are on, you’re immersed in it for eighteen hours a day. It’s very very demanding, and you need to be focused on it.

NYFW has grown so much. In 1993 we only had twenty-seven shows, but last time I was involved we had ninety – that’s almost four times the amount. The venues in 1993 held four hundred people, now they hold 1500. Overall, now we shuffle over 100 000 people into various fashion shows for the duration of fashion week, and this needs to be done in a civil manner. These people are very sensitive, and they cry very easily. I’ve dealt with tears and with tantrums. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘I’m with her, she’s with me,’ or ‘don’t you know who I am.’ They’re all legends in their own minds.

We practice what we call ‘security with a velvet touch.’ We stay in the shadows. The PRs check people in, and most of them don’t know what they’re doing but that’s another story. Anyway, we stand behind the PR people. If we see them lingering with an individual, we might catch the individual trying read the guest list. People do that you know – they can read upside down. If we see that one of these PR persons is taking more than a minute or two with someone, then there’s usually a problem. PRs are often afraid that if they bar someone they’re going to lose their job. Meanwhile, they could also be letting in the wrong people; someone might use your name to get in, and then when you show up five minutes later I won’t let you in since you’re already here. Imagine – that’s a whole scene. Basically, we play the bad cop. But we always try to give people a gracious way out, like, ‘Sorry you’re not on the list, obviously there was an issue with your invitation, maybe you didn’t RSVP in time?’ You never say, ‘Oh get outta here,’ even though you want to. But you can’t, because like I said they cry very easily and you never know who they know.

Only certain people on my staff can do fashion. I’ve learnt to be a good judge of that. To work at a fashion event, number one: you need to look good. And you need to speak well, you need to follow instructions, you need to stay focused, and you need to know who’s coming in the door. You need to know the Anna Wintours. You need to know the first, second and maybe even some of the third row people. Anybody above the third row is in Siberia – they’re somebody’s Aunt Tilly. We need to take care of the first, second and third row. Those are very important people. I keep track; I have photos of everybody. They are posted on our door, and when my staff leave the office they see them.

I’ve been fortunate enough to count about three quarters of my staff as regulars – they’re policemen, they’re firemen, they’re postal workers, they’re ex-army. They come back twice a year and they become more familiar with who’s who. It works out. I don’t hire people who just have a big neck, you know. If you give me your resume and tell me you’re a judo guy, that’s the last guy I’m going to hire. I can’t have that. I don’t want you to be using those skills, or to show me that you can knock somebody across the room. I don’t have that kind of clientele, and I don’t want that kind of clientele. Dealing with the public is so important. It’s like a ballet – you take this part and put it over here. ‘Now what’s the problem? You’re not getting in, is that it? I’m sorry, that’s the score.’ These fashion people are not stupid, they look and they see and they listen. I mean if too many guests tell the designer they had a problem coming to their show, the designer won’t be coming back to us.

We are typically the ones who have to tell people when the show is overbooked and they’re not getting in. They don’t love us then. ‘That’s stupid, how could you do this?’ Well, we didn’t. The designer did. But someone has to be the bad cop, and that someone is us. Stanchions are our best friends in those situations; they allow us to channel people properly, ‘Standing room is to the left, seating room please go right in.’ You have to always let the public know what’s happening, don’t ever keep people in the dark even when the news is bad. Tell them, they want to know. Nobody wants to stand around like a lamp post. I’ve been doing this twenty-five years now, I know the drill. I’ve made a lot of friends over the years, and probably a lot of enemies too. There are some people who just won’t give up.

I’ll show you my archive. I’ve saved everything from every season since 1993. Look, this is me with no grey hair – can you believe it? I had to institute a rule early on, that all my staff had to be in black suits. I can’t tell you how outrageous the suits people turned up in were. And the ties – oh lord. People thought that because it was fashion, they could turn up in a tie with pineapples on it. That was not ever going to fly. Now everybody has a black suit and I give everyone a tie.

I remember the first show during that first Bryant Park fashion week. October 31, 1993, Donna Karan. Donna invited Barbara Streisand, but Barbara Streisand was late. The show was supposed to start at one o’clock. At one thirty Barbara Streisand still wasn’t there so Donna started the show. Who shows up five minutes later? That’s right, Barbara Streisand. And I had to go ‘Barbara’s here! Barbara’s here!’ So what they did is they stopped the show, and then they started it again.

There was a time when people were literally slicing open the tents to sneak in. We had one young lady covered in mud one night – this was a season when it rained all week. I caught her sliding under the tent. I said, ‘This is a fashion show, what are you doing?’ ‘I have to see it, I have to see it!’ ‘Well you’re not gonna see it now anyway let me tell ya that.’ We’ve had people replicating invitations, we’ve had people impersonating others. If they knew a journalist was out of town they would come in and use the journalist’s name – this is another reason we need to have facial recognition. There are so many different ways you could try to sneak into a show. Now we have people selling tickets on the net. I remember a mommy and daughter who flew in from Texas. They were in town for fashion week for three days, and they had four tickets in their hands for the most popular shows that season. None of the tickets were valid. The first show they tried to get in, ‘Bingo!’ ‘Where did you get this ticket?’ ‘Well I bought it on Craig’s List, and I have three more.’ We accommodated them in some way because they already spent airfare, hotel and $3000 to buy four fake tickets. These people don’t know.

Did you hear about the lady that died on the runway? This was about five-six years ago – her name was Zelda Kaplan, and she was ninety-five I believe. She was sitting on the first row, second seat at the Lincoln Center. Zelda was a fashion icon for years, always dressed to the nines. She was with her escort who was sitting behind her, a younger gentleman. All of a sudden Zelda does this – puts her head down like this, so her friend grabs her shoulders, he realises something is wrong. This is when we take notice, and can you believe it – she’s dead. But the show is still going on. So we cross over as discreetly as possible and pick her up. We cross the runway, carrying her, and we bring her outside and of course the medics are there, trying to revive her. The show never stopped, and most of the people never knew what happened because they were looking the other way. Afterwards of course this makes the newspaper. Death and fashion, they love it. New York Post is having a field day. All everybody wanted to know was, ‘Is she dead?’ Well I’m certainly not going to give away your medical information, so all I said was, ‘There was a woman at the show that needed medical attention, and she was taken to the hospital.’ If there’s an upside, it’s that Zelda Kaplan had been coming to fashion shows all her life. If she would have scripted it, it couldn’t have been done better. She made her exit the way she lived. Anyway, that’s the Zelda Kaplan story.

There were always a lot of people at Bryant Park in the early days: we would refer to them as lobby fleas. They would come in in the morning because they had an invitation to a show, and they’d never leave. They’d spend the day, people watching, just to see who’s there, just to be seen. You couldn’t get rid of them. The lobby would be filled with all these people, if it was cold or rainy, forget it they never left. Fashion people can be fanatical, but then again so are people at football or baseball or basketball games. It’s not every show though; out of eighty shows, seventy are fine. Only ten are ‘I gotta get in’ type shows. Nobody’s breaking into a show at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. And then if it rains, you’re embarrassed for the designer. You don’t want that to happen. Sometimes we have to sit in as seat doubles; we sit in the front row and pretend to take notes.

Every day, I read the fashion weeklies. I subscribe to People magazine. I don’t read it, I just look at the pictures because I have to know who the next hot starlet is, you know, who the next guy is going to be, because they come to these shows and they sit in the front row. Sometimes a PR person will come up and say ‘I have a talent person with me and we need some special treatment.’ It means they need to go in a certain door, or they want to go backstage so we accommodate them, we do. Sometimes the designer doesn’t want to take a picture with a certain person, and then we have to make sure that never happens. I can’t mention any names but there was one designer who said absolutely not, and she knew that this individual wanted their picture taken together. And of course there are some people that want to sit next to Anna and have their picture taken. We make sure that the appropriate people are sitting next to Anna, not just anybody.

After working with NYFW for twenty years, Anna Wintour said hello to me. It was about ten years ago now. I thought I must have been mistaken, she must have thought I was somebody else. I asked around and was told that she knew exactly who I was. So now it’s ‘hello’ always. She often comes an hour before the show, and sees it alone – before the public. Then she comes through the back door and we bring her in. When that happens, I walk next to her but otherwise I very rarely am backstage. We only allow female security backstage. They make sure that the photographers aren’t taking inappropriate photographs at certain times, right, which we find they try. They make sure that there’s nobody back there that doesn’t belong, you know stagehands, the lighting guy – they don’t belong back there, the models are getting dressed! We also keep the public at the end of the show from charging backstage. Wait two minutes will you, let the models at least get some clothes on. Often the PR people will have some celebrity that they want to let in before the others, someone the designer wants to take a shot with. The word is always, ‘The clothes were fabulous.’ It’s the only word they ever use – ‘fabulous.’ Already in 1993 that was the word. ‘Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous.’

Anja Aronowsky Cronberg is Vestoj‘s editor-in-chief and publisher.

Vogue magazine was born with power. The founder, Arthur Turnure, conceived and nurtured it during America’s Gilded Age, and as much as he was a typography enthusiast and an ardent bibliophile, he was also anxious to preserve the hegemony of New York’s impenetrable upper class. Turnure was in the middle of a social war against new money, and he weaponised the publication, using it as a tool to assert his circle’s authority.

It was Turnure’s own personality and his position that set Vogue up for initial success; it would become a perfect microcosm of the elite world he was part of. ‘The magazine’s wielding force is the social idea,’¹ he wrote in 1892, in its first ever issue. To guarantee unprecedented insight from this group, and to guarantee the particular elements of codified language and topics of interest pertaining to this group, he put together a staff almost entirely transplanted to the office from his drawing room. The result was an ecosystem of astonishing simplicity: the people who made Vogue put themselves in it and sold it to each other.

From the beginning, Vogue was preoccupied with maintaining the habits and values of the status quo. It was also already an echo chamber. The attributes of the individuals involved were – and are – evidently significant to the assembled whole and show how, in part, Vogue fortified a strong foundation that eventually expanded to international influence.

The French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu advanced his famous theory on capital in 1986, identifying the main forms it takes: economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital.² Indisputably, those participant in the Vogue project had economic capital which supplemented the magazine both directly and indirectly. The founder had the funds to inaugurate a new publication, while his peers became shareholders, backing Vogue with phenomenal fortunes (early supporters included the Astor, Stuyvesant and Whitney families). Their financial resources had another, ancillary role: it meant the Vogue-adjacent had a level of spending power that would assure audience interest whenever their possessions or assets appeared in the pages. They were able to commission the most extravagant ball gowns, host the most lavish coming out cotillions, and curate the most sumptuous dowries, all of which would pique reader curiosity.

They had cultural capital in great measure too, both embodied in tastes, manners, posture; and institutionalised, through education, boards and clubs. The assembly of these created a ‘habitus’ according to Bourdieu, indicating that their deeply ingrained dispositions resulted in a communal outlook. This is palpably obvious if one examines the text; early Vogue is teeming with inside jokes, allusions, remarks, evocations, name-dropping and slights which all require knowledge of a specific set of social codes to decipher. It is through cultural capital, and the way it’s derived from other forms of capital, that ‘a non-economic form of domination and hierarchy’³ can be established.

By virtue of knowing each other the makers and readers of Vogue reinforced their own prominence and privilege. Bourdieu framed social capital as the property of the individual, rather than the collective, but like economic and cultural capital, the social capital of those involved with Vogue benefitted the magazine. Social capital can strengthen symbolic capital, which denotes the resources available on grounds of such as prestige, honour and reputation, and it ‘may also reinforce identity and recognition’⁴ – a precious thing indeed if one is building up a name.

If capital shows where power can manifest, then it seems evident that the economic, cultural and social capacities of numerous important New Yorkers created a kind of pool of power for Vogue to draw from and establish itself. As Bourdieu discusses in a later work, those who put a product on the market ‘consecrate’ it, ‘and the more consecrated he personally is, the more strongly he consecrates the work.’⁵ The producers of cultural products invest their own prestige into the merchandise, in this case, conferring their own status onto the magazine.

The resultant symbolic capital Vogue acquired can be seen in the authority that comes with the name, and the reputation that precedes the product. The dominance an organisation can take on, if it attains a certain level of rank, can pale that of the individual, in part because an organisation can easily outlast a human lifespan. An organisation can also sustain a number of connections far greater than the individual, which results in them being ‘socially embedded in a much stronger sense.’⁶

By dint of its founding circumstances and purpose, Vogue – and the glossy counterparts that followed – standardised wealth, influence and pedigree as necessary qualifications for participation in the fashion media. These distinctions allowed Vogue to continually leverage its employees: for instance, American Vogue retained a travel editor in the 1960s who had connections in Washington, allowing them to shoot in exotic locations others could not access.

As Vogue absorbed and profited from these forms of capital it could generate currents of power, moving it back and forth on a closed circuit. The magazine continues to boost its reputation by virtue of relationships with important individuals, but equally, important individuals are created when Vogue choses to elevate them. There are adequate modern examples of this vacuum: Cara Delevingne, who shot to supermodel fame, is the goddaughter of Nicholas Coleridge, then president of Condé Nast International. Vogue gave her exposé, and as she became increasingly famous, she shared this newly acquired star power with Vogue by continuing to appear in its editorials.

Vogue was a creation of the ruling classes: their power was its power. To this day, it incorporates individuals with significant capital to act as ambassadors with a view to maintaining its status. This can be seen with Edward Enninful’s appointment of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss on the masthead of British Vogue, even though they are models – not publishing professionals.

Aligning with noted personalities to continually consecrate their reputation does not just serve to convey Vogue’s ideological loyalties, it has a very real result in the long-term, for much of this non-economic capital is converted to hard currency if it enhances the publication.

‘The Tyranny of the Status Quo’

All forms of power require legitimacy. To validate its existence as a foremost fashion magazine Vogue would need to show fashion – so often deemed frivolous – as worthy of attention. Throughout the course of history, Vogue has worked determinedly to elevate the whole sector. This can be seen in its efforts to reframe the designer as an artist in the 1910s, then commonly regarded as a craftsman or skilled tradesman. Vogue was instrumental in creating the first trade body against the illegal counterfeiting of Parisian designs, acting as protector to noted couturiers thereby preserving their exclusivity and publicly shaming copycat retailers. During WWI Vogue hosted what is widely acknowledged to be the first ever runway show to promote American design. After the war it hosted a second benefit to promote French couturiers in America and strengthen ties with them.

Through countless such initiatives, Vogue has shown its ongoing mission to promote and protect the fashion sector, functioning as cheerleader and agent. It is imperative for Vogue to ‘build and maintain the cultural weight and authority to proclaim the value of, and invest its prestige in, the couturiers’ cause.’ In this way it takes on the role of ‘symbolic banker,’⁷ offering as a security all the accumulated symbolic capital.

These methods are still in play today. In 2021 alone Edward Enninful has been appointed on the advisory committee of the British Fashion Council’s Foundation and to the judging committee of their Changemakers Prize, while Condé Nast Britain figures amongst their patrons. Through funding, judging or advising on NGO boards they are surely able to direct, guide or press behind the scenes should they chose to. At the very least they are privy to a wealth of information that enhances their stance and consolidates their networks.

As it has grown, Vogue has sought to align itself with a wider corpus of huge, often globally significant institutions. In Britain, Vogue has worked in occasional collaboration with the government since WWII, when they repackaged propaganda from the Ministry of Information to better appeal to female citizens. During the coronavirus pandemic, Vogue allegedly cancelled an interview with musician M.I.A over the latter’s comments on social media regarding vaccination. A message circulated, apparently from Vogue representatives, saying: ‘Considering our August is an issue where we’re chronicling the struggles of the NHS to cope while a vaccine is tried to be made we don’t feel we can have her involved.’⁸ This missive essentially states that Vogue is concerned with supporting the government agenda.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll not list the innumerable instances American Vogue under Anna Wintour has affiliated itself with democratic leaders. Suffice it to say that Wintour personally raised over $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign (placing her on the list of top-tier patrons). She did not do this just as a private individual. She did this as the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine, a position she then used to secure three Vogue covers for Michelle Obama. All this activity led to serious rumours the Obamas would reward her with an ambassadorship. It’s not incidental for a fashion publication to be associating with the ruling family of an economic and military superpower, nor is it likely to be an entirely moral decision. There is soft power gained in association with hard power.

Wintour is frequently at the head of such reputation-expanding initiatives. She formed Fashion Night Out in partnership with the city of New York. She has been the chairwoman of the Met Gala since 1999, a celebrity-filled event that makes headlines every year, hosted at a venerated cultural institution: The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. Ostensibly a fundraiser for the museum, ‘today, the guest list for the gala has come to mirror, very closely, the pages of Vogue’ wrote Vanessa Friedman for The New York Times, in an article titled, ‘It’s Called the Met Gala, but It’s Definitely Anna Wintour’s Party.’⁹

Such extracurricular activities cement the networks that Wintour needs for Vogue, although their purpose is outside the obvious remit of a glossy periodical. Here, once again, we encounter the flow of power back and forth, brokered by Vogue-representatives. Vogue enhances their power by staging such events, those participating – institutions, celebrities, designers, even cities – in turn strengthen their position by being amongst the chosen, and thus validated. As Friedman quotes in the article, ‘attendance at the gala “is something you now have to consider as part of a strategy for any designer in the world.”’¹⁰

It was the economist Milton Friedman who first used the phrase ‘the tyranny of the status quo’ to denote the strange inertia and bureaucracy that springs up around organisations once they are well-rooted. As it has become formalised, Vogue has to face a paradox: how can they continue to represent the cyclical trend-driven industry if they are so concerned with hierarchy that they cannot – or will not – allow entry for vital new ideas?

So determined have they been to administer the sector: oversee fashion hubs; supervise or act as host to parties, fundraisers, competitions and shows; act as gatekeepers and wardens to the elite; and make and maintain relationships with other leaders, in short, to harness every possible application of soft power, that they were not at all prepared for a reckoning with the digital age.

‘It was dense as a brick, as slick as a marlin, and almost perfectly empty.’¹¹

I have come this far in a discussion of a magazine without saying much about its actual contents. The glossy media, once able to appear inscrutable and mysterious, occupied the middleman function between designer and customer by virtue of access to catwalks and couture houses. But the openness of Web 2.0 sparked ongoing disintermediation and the great democratising of fashion through digital showcases, blogs, social media, the rise of fashion film and BTS footage. With the sharp decline of print and steep new competition, glossies have dramatically lost market share.

Nose-diving profits mean they are more than ever beholden to advertisers, which pundits consider a barrier to candid coverage. Yet I’m always surprised when people criticise Vogue and similar publications for a lack of fashion journalism. Omission, rather than criticism, is the mark of Vogue’s disapproval. As the all-in-capitals sensationalist headline of a tabloid is a brute shout, so the exclusion of a designer in Vogue is a social snub, silently embodying the politesse of its original class. These magazines were never intended to provide incisive and balanced commentary, and its staff is not made up of journalists. This is worth demarcating, since as I’ve noted, for the majority at Vogue their job is to protect and attract privilege, to network, organise, promote, publicise, but not to write critically. Where fashion journalism is being discussed I would argue it’s an error to include glossy media in the debate.

It’s common for Vogue and magazines of its ilk to receive criticism for being overfilled with adverts, for being ‘empty.’ Lucinda Chambers, who was let go from British Vogue in 2017 gave an incendiary interview in this publication, in which she said she had not read Vogue in years, and the clothes it featured were ‘irrelevant.’¹² Joan Juliet Buck, once editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, echoed these sentiments in her memoir, describing the magazine as ‘seduction without distraction’¹³ in the 1990s, implying the same lack of usefulness. As the scholars Susie Khamis and Alex Munt note, the imperative of the fashion media is: ‘to oil the wheels of commerce, to satisfy advertisers, and to lock consumers into a perennial cycle of desire and then dissatisfaction.’¹⁴

Arguably, Vogue set itself apart with high-quality imagery, though if discoursed through the prism of philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theory on aura, even that has become degraded. I would argue that Vogue’s current output has less and less special quality, for every image is now disseminated on multiple platforms: in print, online and shared on social media, spread on fan accounts, remixed, cropped, edited and filtered. This reproducible reality would be deemed a reckless loss of aura. For Benjamin, the more an artwork was reproduced, the less authenticity it had, for authenticity cannot be duplicated. By endlessly reproducing and making available myriad versions, uniqueness is destroyed and objects lose their authority.

Tied into co-dependent relationships with labels that forbid thoughtful coverage, and unable to sustain the aura of their photographic material under the requirement to publish incessantly and cross-platform, the actual contents of fashion publications becomes of minimal interest. What remains of the name is not a print product but a nebulous structure composed of soft power. Curiously, Vogue themselves acknowledge this. Emmanuelle Alt, editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris said in 2019: ‘I used to work for a magazine, and today I work for a brand.’¹⁵

This paradigm goes some way to showing why few in fashion remark on the emptiness of Vogue. Whether it’s empty or not, its authority is behind the scenes, including bestowing coveted invitations that many high-profile personalities would not like to run the risk of forfeiting. There is the vanity attached to working for a publication like Vogue, but even more so there is the shrinking job market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics job opportunities from 2018-2028 for fashion writers are predicted to increase 0%, while fashion editors face a decrease of 3%.¹⁶ This is visible at Vogue, where several European editor-in-chiefs have departed and may not be replaced, their positions effectively disappearing. If Vogue is a possible paymaster – lucrative or otherwise – hopefuls are likely to keep quiet.

Magazines like Vogue may remain beyond further opprobrium shielded by the pervading idea of fashion as trifling. Unlike in politics or even in Hollywood, calling out fashion media seems thankless, especially true since the wider industry is facing a grave retribution with sustainability. The idea of a fashion informant seems comical, and worse, the idea of fashion magazines as toxic environments is normalised. As fashion has become a kind of celebrity ring of its own, with members recognisable by trademarks and catchphrases, it is easier still to trivialise their problems. To many onlookers, the power dynamics in fashion are a form of entertainment in of itself. As i-D questions in the title of a judicious piece: ‘Is gossip interfering with the fashion industry?’¹⁷

Regardless of how strong a brand might be, it’s wise to have a quality core product or else the rest will come crashing down sooner or later, like the house of cards it is. Celebrities are everywhere, and designers can market their clothes without print ads, but discerning writing and top-flight photography is a true rarity. Print has a luxury appeal that is not dying out as fast as doomsday reports would have us think, and a higher cover price can pay for production costs, as can be ascertained in the business model of indie magazines from The Gentlewoman to Tank. If the glossy media put its efforts into creating high-end collectable magazines as cultural artefacts and keepsakes, a kind of hybrid between high-spec art-books like those printed by Taschen or the impossibly popular Assouline and indie journals of intellectual appeal, readers would surely be happy to part with more money. Pouring budgets into trite Youtube videos, celebrity make-up tutorials or using Instagram to sell hoodies with ‘Vogue’ emblazoned across them is a race to the bottom that cannot prosper.

The Fashion Archive, a Central Saint Martin’s student and Youtuber with a huge personal following of 65k+, proposes in his video ‘The Death of Fashion Magazines (RANT)’¹⁸ that glossies have ‘undermined the intelligence of their consumers’ and goes on to comment that his channel is ‘testament to the fact that young people are interested in fashion’ in a serious way. Paradoxically, to hold on to the reigns of its power the fashion media needs to loosen its grip, for while it can continue to hold the industry hostage for a time, eventually it will be swept away with the final generation of advertisers and designers willing to collude. It is creativity, and not control, that gives value.

Nina-Sophia Miralles is the editor of Londnr, and the author of Glossy: The Inside Story of Vogue.

1. Turnure, A., ‘STATEMENT’, Vogue, vol. 1, issue 1, 17 December 1892, p. 16 ↩

2. See Navarro, Z., 2006. In Search of a Cultural Interpretation of Power: The Contribution of Pierre Bourdieu, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 37 (No.6) p. 19, for the title quote ↩

3. Gaventa, J., 2003. Power after Lukes: a review of the literature, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, p. 6 ↩

4. Lin, N., 1999. Building a Network Theory of Social Capital, Connections, Vol. 22 (No.1), p. 29 ↩

5. Bourdieu, P., 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Columbia University Press, p. 83 ↩

6. Lin, loc. cit. ↩

7. Bourdieu, P., op. cit., p. 77 ↩

8. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/22/mia-claims-british-vogue-pulled-article-about-her-over-anti-vax-comments ↩

9. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/style/its-called-the-met-gala-but-its-definitely-anna-wintours-party.html ↩

10. Ibid. ↩

11. Buck, J. J., 2017, The Price of Illusion, Atria Books, p. 209 ↩

12. http://vestoj.com/will-i-get-a-ticket/ ↩

13. Buck, loc. cit. ↩

14. Khamis, S., Munt, A., The Three Cs of Fashion Media Today: Convergence, Creativity & Control, SCAN Journal of media arts culture ↩

15. https://www.voguebusiness.com/talent/articles/emmanuelle-alt-editor-in-chief-vogue-paris-interview/ ↩

16. https://study.com/articles/Careers_in_Fashion_Journalism_Job_Options_and_Requirements.html ↩

17. https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/qv893w/is-gossip-interfering-with-the-fashion-industry ↩

18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOAaO9YH-ZE ↩