Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
VOGUE under the cover
To celebrate its centenary, the fashion magazine let a documentary maker behind the scenes for the first time – and kept the biggest surprise for last. By Jenny Johnston
How confident are you about your ability to pronounce Givenchy? What about Miu Miu, Dries Van Noten, Bulgari and – oh heavens! – Ann Demeulemeester? The often haughty world of high fashion can seem like an impenetrable place for those of us who are a bit more M& S than Moschino (that’s Mos-KEY-No, you do realise?), but nothing marks you out as a fashionista fraud more than an inability to actually say the designer’s name out loud.
Pity poor documentary maker Richard Macer then, whose latest project took him as high into the high-fashion world as it is possible to go without exiting this planet. Richard – a man who says he ‘likes clothes, but only to a point’ – spent nine months behind the scenes at the British edition of Vogue magazine, that Bible of the welldressed. While this meant rubbing shoulders with the beautiful people – Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham among them – it also meant being way out of his comfort zone. The results can be seen this Thursday, as the first instalment of his two-part documentary Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue airs on BBC2.
Richard admits to spending the entire project fearing that he was about to open his mouth and let a hard G emerge, when anything but the softest G would mean social suicide. ‘I mean, I know how to say Givenchy, but you always have that worry,’ he says. ‘Louis Vuitton I also had problems with. There was always that paranoia that I was putting the ‘i’ in the wrong place. I felt as if I was having some sort of spasm every time I had to say it.’ Happily for viewers of the programme, it is Richard’s ever-present bafflement as he negotiates this rarefied world that makes it compelling viewing.
Securing the access was an achievement. In its 100-year history, British Vogue has never allowed cameras in. This year, though, its editor, the formidable Alexandra Shulman, relented, keen to mark the centenary year outside the glossy pages as well as in them.
The at- times frosty relationship between Richard and Alex plays out deliciously in the show. He thinks they got off to a rocky start with his very first question, when he asked what it was she loved about fashion. ‘And she said, “I don’t love fashion”. To her, Vogue isn’t just about clothes. It’s the cultural importance, the photography, the magazine as an art form.’
Still, the frocks are pretty important too. One of the delights of the programme, though, is realising that even the people who work at Vogue House, in London’s Hanover Square, can’t always tell whether the dresses are todie-for or yuck. There’s a glorious moment when Richard is eavesdropping on talk about a Gucci dress that model Edie Campbell might wear for a shoot. ‘The only thing I’m concerned about is whether it will look like an old lady’s knickers,’ says Shulman.
Deciding the tone of the programme was a tricky one, Richard points out. The sheer ludicrousness of much of the world could lend itself to poking fun. At one point he is granted an audience with designer Karl Lagerfeld (‘whose name I can pronounce’) and ends up talking mostly about the fashion guru’s cat. ‘He presented Alex with a sketch of his cat, and showed me this tiepin with his cat’s face on it. After, in the cab, I asked Alex if she’d consider him a friend. There was a pregnant pause.’
A highlight (for all the wrong rea- sons) is when Richard gets access to a cover shoot with Kate Moss. Vogue is obsessed with Kate Moss. She’s been on the cover of the British edition more times than anyone. He watches as she parades in a jumpsuit once worn by Mick Jagger (held on with a series of very unglamorous bulldog clips down the back – Jagger was skinny, but not Kate Moss skinny). He only gets to ask her one question before she simpers, ‘ I don’t like talking about myself’ and bolts. It seems very rude, reinforcing everything you’ve suspected about the fashion world being painfully far up its own backside.
As it happened, the Kate Moss cover didn’t make it onto the newsstands in the month planned, hastily replaced with one of singer Rihanna, who’d been due to be the next month’s covergirl. When Shulman discovered American Vogue was also planning a Rihanna cover, she made a determined effort to scoop her publishing stablemate.
Of course, at Vogue having the right cover is everything. Much of Richard’s time was spent observing how they pull off these talking points, and the vital cover for the centenary issue, dated June 2016, was the pièce de
résistance. Odd, then, that there was no lavish, Moss-like photoshoot for it. Instead, the magazine commissioned artwork for a stylised cover. Richard questioned Alex about the choice, and she pointed out that the centenary edition would be a retrospective, a celebration of Vogue’s first ten decades. Can one person encapsulate that? Being a trusting soul, he didn’t press further. But just before the launch of a glitzy exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to mark the centenary, Richard was summoned to a meeting. Alex had an announcement. ‘I thought she was stepping down,’ he admits. ‘I was playing through in my head how we’d edit that. I thought we might get some emotion.’
Alas, the emotion was all his. He was dumbfounded when the top-secret news was revealed – not a career change for Alex but a brand new Vogue centenary cover, featuring the first magazine shoot with the cover girl everyone wanted – the Duchess of Cambridge. It was a world exclusive. Yet Richard knew nothing of it. He’d never heard the Duchess mentioned in conjunction with a cover (‘I’ve been agonising about why I didn’t once ask, “Would you ever put her on the cover?”’).
Richard felt slightly sick, and who could blame him? The frantic activity he’d spent weeks following at Vogue had been an elaborate decoy. ‘They hadn’t just neglected to mention it, they had actively lied,’ he says. All those meetings with Shulman explaining her ‘vision’ for the arty cover were a smoke- screen. The real shoot had taken place a month before. ‘In fairness, the people who’d known all about it hadn’t even told their partners,’ he points out. ‘But yes, I felt peeved. I felt they’d pulled the wool over my eyes.’
He seems quite bruised about the experience but the saga does give the viewer an insight into this highly competitive world, one that has an ugly side underneath all the gloss. Alex Shulman has declined to be interviewed about the documentary, but Richard says she’s seen the film and thinks it ‘quite fair’. To whom, though?
‘They hadn’t just neglected to mention the cover, they’d lied’
Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue, Thursday, 9pm, BBC2.