DRESSED FOR WAR

THE STORY OF VOGUE EDITOR AUDREY WITHERS, FROM THE BLITZ TO THE SWINGING SIXTIES

JULIE SUMMERS

Simon & Schuster, 416pp, £20

Audrey Withers, who edited Vogue for 20 years from 1940, unflaggingly keeping the magazine going during the bombs and rations of wartime, was a bluestocking rather than a fashion-plate. As Ysenda Maxtone Graham put it in the Times: ‘Toothy, brainy and unflagging (and not quite pretty enough to go on the cover of this book – she’s relegated to the endpapers), Withers had been a keen lacrosse player at her girls’ boarding school and carried her games-pitch cheerfulness and sense of schoolgirl honour into her adult life.’ Lucy Davies in the Daily

Telegraph noted how Withers took the helm at Vogue during the Blitz and the staff had to escape to the cellar during bombing raids two or three times a day. ‘One learns, vividly, in Julie Summers’s magnificent new biography, how Withers took all this in her stride, keeping a small attaché case to hand, into which she could stuff anything vital for the next issue – proofs, copy, photographs, sandwiches (she was notoriously frugal) and a gas mask. “We look as if we are going on a peculiar picnic,” Withers wrote in a Vogue editorial, designed to show anxious readers how they, too, might find the courage to go on.’ In the Daily Mail, Liz Jones was full of admiration: ‘I’d have liked more gossip and I’d have loved more photos, but this meticulously detailed, fascinating book should be read by every young woman starting out so they might realise hard work, not connections, will get you anywhere.’