HEAR ME ROAR
As a teenager, author Caroline Baum spent her gap year working on UK Vogue, where her ideas about feminism were shaped.
After winning Vogue UK’s prestigious writing competition at the age of 17 in 1976, author Caroline Baum spent her gap year working on the title. It was here – while conducting some research for the magazine’s own 60th anniversary issue – that her ideas about feminism were shaped.
SOME OF US were radicalised by our mothers, or our sisters or our teachers, some of us by writers we admired. But my feminist awakening happened at Vogue. Not a publication often credited with consciousness raising. Not Spare Rib, or Ms. No, it was Vogue. British Vogue, to be precise. Back then it was more conservative than its American parent and younger Australian sibling, more trapped in the aspic of class and tradition.
I was a precocious, ambitious 17-year-old Londoner when I won British Vogue’s famed talent contest in 1976 – the same contest Jackie Kennedy had won decades earlier in the US. First prize was a 12-month contract at the magazine. I could hardly believe my luck as I made my way to Vogue House in Hanover Square at the start of my gap year.
An ingenue still wearing clothes my mother made for me (from Vogue Patterns, which she considered the most stylish), I was assigned a dream role, researching for a book on the history of fashion photography in the magazine to mark the British edition’s 60th birthday.
For months, I studied photographs taken by the greats: Horst, Man Ray, Blumenfeld, Penn, Bailey, Newton, Bourdin. I learned a new visual vocabulary, becoming so fluent I could recognise an image at a glance. The kinetic energy of Lord Snowdon, the sexy, glossy élan of Richard Avedon, the very British polish of Norman Parkinson – like a sommelier who can identify a vintage with one sip, I became a connoisseur of composition, contrast, framing and style.
The models – birds of paradise, swans, peacocks – displayed their dazzling plumage of maquillage and finery through the lens of mostly male photographers – until Sarah Moon and Deborah Turbeville came along and disrupted that exclusive club with a softer vision (although they were never given as many pages).
In issue after issue, whether they looked straight into the camera or away, these beautiful creatures were subject to a male gaze that lit, shaped and caressed every sinew, lash, curve and pore. The desire they embodied was interpreted through a masculine lens. Men idealised and objectified women for female readers in an act of visual seduction that was both complicit and consensual. It was a paradox we never discussed. It was simply the way fashion magazines worked.
Until one day I saw a photograph that changed everything. It was not even a cover. It was a black-and-white shot taken by Helmut Newton for US Vogue in 1975 of American model Lisa Taylor wearing a casual summer print dress and slides. She was sitting on a sofa, legs wide apart in a pose we would now call man-spreading, taking up space. Utterly at ease in her body. And the look on her face was one of lust – no, make that LUST – for a man seen only partially – a rippled tanned back of defined muscles, the sleek silhouette of a pair of perfectly cut crisp white pants with knife-sharp creases.
She looked like a lioness about to eat a gazelle, but whose appetite might require a second helping. There was something so open and direct about her expression of sexual longing. Nothing coy, no side eye flirtation. Just pure carnal want.
That photograph sent a seismic shock through me. It said, unambiguously, that women had desires just like men, and did not have to conceal them or apologise for them. That photograph set me free in ways I could not explain at the time. It gave me permission.
I lived a sheltered life. The Female Eunuch had been out for six years but had failed to register on my young psyche. The vapour of liberation may have seeped into the atmosphere on the street, but inside the portals of Vogue the air was as rarefied as on Everest, and the only scent was that of French perfume.
I sensed subtle whiffs of change from my editors – women who were strong, assertive, clever, witty. Joan Juliet Buck, who later edited French Vogue, where she overturned rigid Parisian norms; Lucy-Hughes Hallett, who became an award-winning biographer; Georgina Howell, one of the finest fashion writers of her generation; and Polly Devlin, whose earthy Irish humour and warmth kept things real. They wore vintage frocks and even, on occasion, gumboots to work, but they talked about dinner with Zeffirelli and Edna O’Brien. They became my role models. Independent, bawdy, irreverent, they brought the words of Germaine Greer into the office, not as ideological manifesto but as everyday conversation. I never noticed that I was being taught women’s lib 101. Their conversation reinforced and amplified the power of that image.
My point is: you get your feminism where you can. For me it was not at home, at school or at university but in a workplace that seemed, on the surface, to commodify women.
Instead, Vogue showed me that feminism could co-exist with style. That glamour was not the enemy. That the tension between the fantasy the magazine projected and the real world was rich and fertile territory for a lifetime’s exploration. When I look at that photograph today, it is still potent. For me, Vogue was where the revolution began. Caroline Baum was Vogue Australia’s features editor from 1992 to 1994.
“That photograph sent a seismic shock through me. It said that women had desires just like men, and did not have to conceal or apologise for them”