Vitriol, venom Vogue’s and PURGE OF THE POSH
Inside the catfight that’s the talk of the fashion world
Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. But not in the case of Lucinda Chambers, former fashion director at vogue, who prefers to serve hers piping with rage, spiced with brutal honesty — with a dash of bitter name- calling on the side.
Lucinda, who worked at vogue magazine for 36 years and has built a reputation as one of the grande dames of British fashion, has revealed how she was unceremoniously fired from the style bible six weeks ago — in just three minutes.
In an extraordinarily candid interview with an online fashion journal, her first since it had been widely assumed that she voluntarily stepped down from her position, Lucinda, 57, reveals she was sacked by edward enninful, vogue’s incoming editor, without the knowledge of the outgoing editor, management or anyone else in the building.
Railing against ‘smoke and mirrors in the industry’, she says: ‘ Fashion can chew you up and spit you out . . . Truth be told, I haven’t read vogue in years . . . The clothes are just irrelevant for most people — so ridiculously expensive.’
She says her time at the company was ‘anxiety-ridden’, labels a cover starring Alexa Chung ‘ crap’, and tears into vogue for pandering to advertisers such as designer Michael Kors, whose T-shirt Alexa wore on the cover, saying: ‘He’s a big advertiser so I know why I had to do [the shoot]. I knew it was cheesy when I was doing it.’
Of her dismissal, Lucinda adds: ‘I phoned my lawyer; she asked me what I wanted to do about it. I told her I wanted to write a letter to my colleagues to tell them that edward decided to let me go. And to say how proud I am to have worked at vogue for as long as I did . . . My lawyer said sure, but don’t tell HR. They wouldn’t have let me send it.’
Her ire-laced exposé has now been read and shared hundreds of thousands of times online, with readers gripped by her fascinating description of the inner workings of vogue.
Life behind the covers of the fashion magazine has, certainly, been anything but dull for the past six months.
In January, there was the shock departure of Alexandra Shulman, vogue’s popular editor of 25 years, with whispers that Anna Wintour, the omnipresent ice queen at the helm of U.S. vogue, and no ally of Alex’s, was behind it (rumours she vehemently denies).
Then, in April, edward enninful, a ghanaian-born British stylist and fashion director at uber-trendy W Magazine, was announced as her successor. A far from obvious choice, he beat several glossy- maned female candidates to the job, despite a glaring lack of journalistic experience, thanks, some insiders believe, to a close friendship with — once again — Wintour herself.
With rumours that the formidable fashionista was throwing her weight across the Atlantic, and rumblings of a new dawn at British vogue, life at the company was thrown into turmoil. VOgUe
stalwarts began dropping like flies. The same day that Alex’s departure was announced, Frances Bentley, managing editor for 24 years, revealed she planned to step down. Fiona golfar, editor at large, was quick to follow. Both left the title last month, around the same time Alex bid her tear-stained farewell.
As guests at her leaving-do, held at London’s chic Dock Kitchen, quaffed £21-a-bottle Whispering Angel rosé and munched on hummus with roasted aubergine, or salted caramel ice cream, many mourned not only an editor, but the end of an era.
edward, who’s still working for W Magazine in America and isn’t expected to take up his new position until August 1, was conspicuously absent from the party.
Meanwhile, emily Sheffield, vogue’s deputy editor and sister of Samantha Cameron, who was widely tipped for the editor’s role, is said to be telling anyone who’ll listen how deeply unhappy she is.
‘everyone thinks her days are numbered,’ says a source at the magazine. ‘She’s told management she isn’t happy. It may be that she knows she’s about to get the chop.’
What’s more, staff say savage class warfare has broken out, with the new editor on a mission to rid the office of ‘posh girls’ and bring in his own team of social media- savvy stylists to revolutionise the country’s top- selling fashion title.
‘vogue is replacing the old guard with the new,’ says one fashion insider. ‘Alexandra had built this great empire with her own, fiercely loyal staff. Some might call them rich Sloanes, but there was a slightly eccentric, bohemian englishness to it all.
‘The general consensus is that vogue had become quite dull and was in need of change. But it’s being done in a very brutal way. These grand doyennes of fashion are being pushed out and dispensed with in an instant.
‘ The adoration edward inspires is almost god-like. But even those who celebrated his appointment a few months ago are quickly realising it isn’t good news for anyone associated with the vogue of old.’
On Monday night, there was yet another twist. Lucinda Chambers’ explosive interview was mysteriously removed from vestoj, the ‘critical thinking’ fashion website to whom she’d given her exclusive.
Yesterday, it was back. editorin- chief Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, who also did the interview, told the Mail it had been temporarily taken down ‘due to the sensitive nature’ of the subject matter.
She explained: ‘ Fashion magazines are rarely independent because their
existence depends on relationships with powerful institutions and individuals, whether it’s for tickets to shows, access in order to conduct interviews or advertising revenue. We created Vestoj to be an antidote to these pressures, but we are not always immune.’
Rumours continue to swirl as to who or what these ‘ powerful institutions and individuals’, which pressured Vestoj to take the interview down from its website, may be — and what this means for the future of British Vogue, if outgoing staff members are gagged in such a way.
Could advertisers, so lambasted in Lucinda’s interview, be to blame? Or could Edward himself, and his incoming guard, be trying to dampen dissent?
Insiders say unrest has been spreading through the ranks since Alex’s departure. On one side are her old employees and friends — all middle-aged women like Lucinda Chambers and Emily Sheffield; on the other are those charged with implementing the new regime.
In her final weeks at Vogue, a source reveals, Alex shut herself in her office in a state of shock as the bloodbath of redundancies began around her. ‘She kept saying: “This was never meant to happen,”’ the source adds. ‘It was done without her knowledge and she must have felt completely humiliated by it.
‘She told one staff member who resigned: “I’m so glad you’re getting out.’ By that stage, she had completely lost hold of the reins of power.’
In a thinly veiled criticism of events, Alex took to calling her departure ‘ Vrexit’ and posted several messages and photographs on her Instagram account with this tagline, chronicling her leaving do and gifts from devastated staff members.
One, a card bearing a mock Vogue cover with her face on it, is particularly telling. A strapline reads: ‘The Vrexit Vote: 100% call for Remain!’ Another says: ‘The Big Cover-Up (Everybody knew)’.
DESpITEthe whispers, friends insist Alex quit of her own accord. Former Vogue features director Louise Chunn, who’s known her since her first day in the job in 1990, explained: ‘I think she feels she’s done her dash, and she would rather leave on a high than fade away, or wait to be pushed. Whatever is hinted elsewhere, this is entirely her decision.’
But others have suggested she left for a reason, with plenty of industry insiders critical of the product she created. A series of venomous anonymous blog posts, written under the pen-name pea priestly (a reference, it is thought, to Miranda priestly, the cut-throat editor from 2003 novel The Devil Wears prada) have in recent months appeared on the website of The Spectator, tearing to pieces the ‘complacent’, ‘borderline racist’ and ‘tasteless’ magazine under her editorship.
‘Edward needs to get rid of the whole anaemic team — every last Sloaney sloth,’ reads one bilious post. ‘It’s clear a purge will need to take place. Once the salivating ceases, it will dawn upon all that Vogue is on the verge of becoming a war zone — a beautifully scented, passive-aggressive one.
‘Clever ideas will infiltrate camp in the form of new blood; staff will desert to porter Magazine [a bimonthly title published by the NetA-porter shopping site] where they can create terrible work without reproach; and while the old guard chew over survival strategies like demented chihuahuas, Enninful will be busy turning the magazine into the kind of entity that people actively want to buy.’
Though neither has directly spoken about the other, or indeed been seen in the same room, there seems to be no love lost between Alex Shulman and Edward Enninful.
He has remained conspicuously tight-lipped on his predecessor, while Alex said in a recent interview: ‘I don’t know Edward and I don’t know what he’s going to do. But I can safely assume that he will want to do something very different. I do think he’s a really brilliant stylist.’
What he has been doing of late is courting the spotlight. The onceshy Londoner, who was spotted on the Tube at the age of 16 and thrust into the limelight as a model, isn’t one for glitzy parties — but since his appointment in April he’s been on every guest list going.
In May he attended the Met Gala — the star- studded charity event whose invitees must be approved by its chairwoman, coincidentally Anna Wintour — with Naomi Campbell on his arm. He dressed in white tie and wore his OBE, which he received last October for services to fashion, on his lapel. Naomi is just one of many supermodels in thrall to the stylist, whose shoots cover controversial issues from immigration to diversity, and who commands almost universal adoration among the fashion glitterati.
The day his appointment was announced, she tweeted: ‘God is the greatest! I love you. Today history was made.’ Edward has wasted no time in finding new faces to replace Alex’s inner circle. His appointments are likely to rely not on traditional journalistic abilities but on modern skills, chief among them social media. Indeed, a trawl through the 500 or so people he follows on Instagram may yield clues to his next hires. His first recruit is Venetia Scott, a respected stylist and photographer who started out at British Vogue. Edward describes her as ‘thought-provoking, visionary and always chic’, and she’s shot for Valentino, Vogue paris and W Magazine. On Instagram, she has an impressive 43,100 followers.
By way of comparison, Lucinda Chambers, into whose shoes Venetia will step on July 10, has no social media accounts. Her approach was decidedly old- school: that she is close friends with Mario Testino, the legendary photographer, and styled the Duchess of Cambridge for her landmark Vogue cover in 2016, appears to be irrelevant.
But Lucinda herself was all too aware of the transient nature of the industry.
SpEAkINGin the 2016 documentary, Absolutely Fashion: Inside Vogue, she said, somewhat presciently: ‘In fashion, it’s very quick. It’s very quick to decide if you’re in or you’re out. It can be over very quickly, and then it’s almost as if you count for nothing. Because it’s very instantaneous. It’s relentless. You’re making things redundant, in a way, all the time. You’re making things relevant all the time, but in a very superficial way.’
The company line is, as expected, that a changing of the guard is only to be expected under a new editor.
‘It hasn’t happened for 25 years at Vogue so it seems particularly disruptive,’ explains a magazine insider. ‘ Rare is the editor who wants to stick with their predecessor’s team, and equally rare the team who all want to stick around with a new editor.
‘Though temporarily traumatic, it’s quite natural, good even. It refreshes the publication.
‘In the end, you need people who are cooperative and enthusiastic. people either get revved up by a new editor, or they leave.’
For her part, Alex seems to have very successfully moved on.
Earlier this week, she announced a new job as a columnist at Business of Fashion, the influential website and power-player behind London Fashion Week. She’s also enjoying a well- earned holiday, and, as the chaos unfolds in London, is sunning herself in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera.
Back at Vogue House, staff are nervously counting down to E-Day. With four weeks to go until their new editor arrives, there may be plenty more bloodshed to come.