The return of proper writing and even a posh lady gardener. Vogue’s coming home!
THE first British Vogue under the leadership of Chioma Nnadi has landed — with the fanfare of the changing of the guard at the magazine comparable only with the white smoke announcement of a new Pope.
It’s one of the huge privileges of editing Vogue — something I was lucky enough to do for 25 years — that the role is high profile and so, as the team leader, the interest is not only in the magazine but in the individual in charge.
Nnadi, 44 — who was appointed by Anna Wintour, now in charge of all the Conde Nast magazines — arrived from New York where she ran vogue.com.
Born and raised in London — her father came to the capital from Nigeria in the 1960s; her mother was a Swiss-German nurse — Nnadi is the first head of the magazine not to carry the title Editor, although I notice she still writes an ‘Editor’s letter’. Instead she is Head of Editorial Content.
It’s probably an accurate description of her role overseeing not only the print magazine, but all the digital iterations and social media.
But, all the same, it has the management-speak tone so beloved by the Americans and lacks the indefinable quality that the words Editor of Vogue have had since 1916.
Whenever a new — can we say Editor for the sake of brevity? — arrives, it is their opportunity to shape the magazine with their own passions, tastes and concerns.
All those years back in 1992, when I got the job, frankly I had no idea what I was going to do in this lauded role. But I did know I wanted to increase the amount of affordable clothes we featured, include more journalism and give more space to women’s voices, not only those from the precincts of fashion and celebrity.
It felt right to have more emotional first-person stories, and include articles about how we live now, rather than limit it to the loftier echelons of the world of glamour.
MY FIRST cover, April 1992, featured a picture of model Donna Bunte, shot by Eric Boman, posing against a pillar in Morocco. She wore an entirely British outfit of turquoise Liza Bruce leggings and a Bella Freud shirt.
I plucked it out of a fashion shoot and everyone at Vogue hated it, labelling it ‘too catalogue’. But I felt it had a touch of reality.
The cover was one of the few things in that issue that I had a choice in. Most of the content was already done and the fashion already shot, and I was under pressure not to waste any money.
I did, though, draw the line at running a creepily camp
Bruce Weber shoot of the German-American lion-tamer magicians, Siegfried and Roy, which my predecessor, Liz Tilberis, had commissioned.
Nnadi has taken over from Edward Enninful, a brilliant stylist who came to the Vogue chair determined to make the magazine appear strikingly different from the one he’d inherited. His passion was racial diversity and how to use celebrity to sell the magazine, and over his five-year tenure he stuck to those ideals.
He had no interest in celebrating the past and at one point banned pictures that had been published during my tenure from being reprinted.
It was, he felt, a title in need of revolution. #NewVogue was his motto.
Looking at Nnadi’s first issue, it’s clear she has been able to stamp her own personality on it right from the start, but has done so without in any way attempting to undermine what went before.
It’s a very assured statement about what she feels Vogue should be, right from the cover of singer FKA Twigs perched on a London taxi (pictured) in a buttercup satin Loewe dress by Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson, to the final pages, an interview with actress Billie Piper. The whole cover shoot is described by Nnadi as a love letter to London, happily including old tropes like the red telephone boxes and double-decker buses. Although there has been no radical redesign, the magazine does seem very different, essentially because there is once again a huge amount to read. Edward’s Vogue was more inclined to let the pictures, rather than the words, tell the story. There is Nnadi’s interview with the cover star, returning to a proper interview rather than the less probing Q&A Edward liked to use; a great piece on hypochondria; and an article about parenting within an open marriage.
SHE has also brought back into the fold a number of contributors I worked with: stylist Camilla Nickerson, who worked on my first Christmas issue cover of Bono and Christy Turlington; Plum Sykes, who was a fashion writer in my team for years, describing her love of preppy style; photographers Zoe Ghertner and Angelo Pennetta and Daniel Jackson, who all regularly contributed to my pages.
Jackson has even shot a classic British Vogue posh lady gardener story with Lila Moss, Kate Moss’s model daughter, wandering the paths of a country house with armfuls of branches and bud.
However, this is in no way a return to my vision for Vogue. Nnadi has infused the magazine with her own style. There is no evidence of Anna Wintour pulling the strings behind a puppet editor either.
Nnadi’s Vogue is fresh and youthful. One of the first stories is about professional vintage collectors, and there’s a shopping special that is a hilow mix of Balenciaga and The Row, with affordable bits and pieces from Marks & Spencer, Arket and Mango.
It seems a no-brainer to have cheaper fashion, but it’s surprisingly difficult to achieve fashion pictures like this which are wearable but still aspirational.
I had a wonderful time in the Vogue job, and Nnadi is lucky to have taken over one of the best magazines in the world. The cover line on her first issue reads Fashion’s Coming Home. I think they might be right.