Proof that women over 50 CAN stay in Vogue
Ahead of the fashion bible’s latest launch, meet the refreshingly candid 54-year-old editor who says it’s high time fashion embraced the older woman
Part way through our interview, Martina Bonnier starts chatting about the menopause. ‘It’s easier to discuss in Scandinavia than in other countries,’ says the 54-year-old.
People are more accepting. they will take a subject like this and ‘lift it up to the light; make it an issue that is important to discuss’.
It’s not something I expected to be covered by the new editor of a new Vogue — Vogue Scandinavia — which launches not just digitally, but in old-fashioned paper form, in spring 2021.
Nordic people are practical, unabashed, open, she says. they will happily talk about the menopause, sex, ageing and equality.
Her admission says two things about Martina: that she is bold — very bold indeed — and that she is not afraid of controversy.
the decision to launch a fashion magazine in these uncertain times, is, arguably, both brave and controversial. Not only has Covid all but wiped out luxury goods advertising, it has killed some small designer firms, wounded bigger retail outlets and given haute couture a nervous
breakdown. Last month the new York Times published an article entitled Sweatpants Forever, which predicted the end of fashion weeks and rigid fashion cycles.
But has Scandinavian fashion bucked that trend? Even before Covid (or ‘BC’ as it is now known), the region’s designers had caught the attention of fastidious fashion buyers.
In evidence everywhere — from net-a-Porter to your local high street — was Scandinavia’s strong unhysterical aesthetic in clothes. The value of Sweden’s fashion exports alone was £18 billion in 2015. Since then, fashion’s interest in Scandanavia has only grown.
Chances are, you already know many Scandinavian fashion brands. H&M is the most obvious (the High Street giant also owns Cos, & other Stories and Arket), but there are also the highly successful labels Ganni, Acne Studios, Stine Goya and Malene Birger among others.
PERHAPS Vogue’s parent company Conde nast is onto something. Perhaps now is the obvious moment for the world’s eyes to turn to Scandinavia, with its emphasis on practicality and nature, as we cope with the fallout from Covid.
So, what should we expect from Martina’s new Vogue?
It will be published in English, Martina says, to give it the widest possible market, and sell across Sweden, Denmark, norway, Finland and Iceland.
And it will be very different from all other Vogues (there are 28). For a start: ‘It will not be elitist,’ she says. It will be real, it will be ‘natural’ and — she references fashion’s current preoccupation — ‘it will be sustainable’.
nature is her muse, she says. ‘In Scandinavia, nature is more or less a religion.’
The stress on natural extends to Martina’s personal view of cosmetic surgery (no), tweakments (no), tattoos (no), piercings (no) and filters on social media (no).
This ‘authenticity of the filterless’ will be very Vogue Scandinavia, she says. Retouching is bland. ‘It’s oK to age,’ is her mantra. Martina doesn’t flinch from saying she’s 54.
In the past, there has been a tendency for women to be erased from view at this age. Last week Fiona Bruce, BBC news anchor and presenter of Question Time, said she was surprised to have a job at 56 for this reason.
Although still in situ at 70, Anna wintour became editor of British Vogue aged 36 and American Vogue aged 39. Alexandra Shulman was 34 when she took over British Vogue and retired from the chair at 59.
Martina believes women should make a virtue of their age. Her mantra is: ‘Dare to be more yourself.’
This does not mean she doesn’t dress up, of course. Her social media is a dizzying carousel of couture, often against sumptuous backgrounds — her house in Stockholm, her Manhattan apartment, boats, planes, beaches, ski slopes and (pre-pandemic) galas galore.
As well as big floaty numbers pictured against dramatic nordic scenery, she’s in bikinis and gym kit. ‘women should not be invisible when they are a certain age,’ she says.
As if to exemplify her point, she’s wearing no visible make-up, no nail varnish, no earrings in her unpierced ears today. She’s wearing a unisex shirt and a pair of — sharp gasp! — shorts. They are unisex sky-blue. Like her shirt, they are made by Swedish designer Hope, and have both men and women’s sizes on the label.
At the end of her long, shiny, naked leg (teeny black dots suggesting a shaver, not a waxer) is a kitten heel.
when I mention that Anna wintour has a blow dry at the crack of dawn every day, Martina says that in Scandinavia ‘you do it yourself’.
She is sitting at a slight angle, her knees pointing away from me, her hands scrunched in her lap, and speaks in a light feathery way although her eyes are dark and flinty as they take me in.
Martina has worked in fashion for 30 years. She’s edited magazines and is a frequent pundit on television. She has written five books: mostly on fashion history, but also a novel, obsession (about a Swedish fashion dynasty which has a crisis when the founder throws everything away to become an ecofarmer). It has sold out online.
In Stockholm, she’s called Sweden’s Anna wintour, a description she encourages. other labels she likes are ‘fashionista’ and ‘influencer’ (‘You should always be photographed,’ Martina told one journalist). She sees herself as a brand, she says. She once even put herself on the cover of her own magazine.
we meet during Copenhagen Fashion week in August. The city is (unusually) unbearably hot, as everyone from the hotel receptionist to the man in the coffee shop to Martina herself keeps saying.
women are flushed and fanning themselves, sweat pasting their middle-parted hair to their clearskinned foreheads, dampening their utilitarian black smocks, making their feet slide in their neutralcoloured Birkenstocks.
‘Scandinavian fashion is influenced by its history; it is functional and unfussy,’ Martina tells me. ‘That’s why we are so big on jeans, for example, because it’s workwear and everyday. And outerwear, of course, because of the cold winters. we have a saying in Sweden: there’s no bad weather just bad clothes.’
Swedes tend to be the ‘groomed and well-dressed’ of the region, she continues; Danes ‘a little more relaxed, a little more eclectic, more bohemian’. Finnish fashion is influenced by its border with Russia, ‘so a little bolder, more folkloristic’; norwegians like sports gear. ‘we have a joke in Sweden: norwegians never work, they go hiking.’
Jewellery designers are also big news, she says, showing me the chunky twist of thousands of pinhead diamonds on her wrist.
‘This is a Swedish designer, Engelbert.’ The crystals around her throat are ‘by another Swede, Marta Larsson. These are healing crystals. They give you more energy. well, at least I hope they do.’
It was while living in new York last year (with her husband Sverker Thufvesson, 61, CEo of a private
When I mention Anna Wintour has a blow dry at the crack of dawn, Martina says, in Scandinavia ‘you do it yourself ’.