After THAT savaging by Radio 4’s grouch-in-chief, ex-Vogue boss gives him a very stylish handbagging
IT TOOK only took eight minutes, but by the end it felt like eight rounds, perhaps 12. I’m talking about last week’s interview at the hands of John Humphrys, heavyweight inquisitor on Radio 4’s Today programme – an interview in which I unexpectedly found myself having to defend the fashion industry from all manner of evil, such as promoting anorexia among young girls.
I love Today and listen every morning. So when I was asked to come on and talk about 60 years of change in the fashion industry, I was delighted to accept. This, after all, was part of a series looking back at six decades of progress in British life. Yet what actually took place was something altogether different – a grilling that turned into a denigration of the fashion industry and magazines.
It all started rather well. At 7am I was in the Today studio, excited as a teenager at a rock concert to be where it all happens. John came for a chat in the green room, warning me the coffee was disgusting. He was friendly and relaxing and said – light heartedly, it seemed – that he had intended to be ‘a bit chippy’ about fashion but that the programme’s editor, Sarah Sands, had talked him out of it.
I should have known better. My friend, Mail on Sunday columnist Craig Brown, once hilariously described to me the personality transformation undertaken by Humphrys in the journey from green room to Today chair, from a host who seemingly admires you to an attack dog.
By 7.32am I was happily talking about developments over the past few decades – the emergence of youth culture, the baby-boomer generation and how street style became a force. There are all sorts of interesting things to say – for example, how jeans, once the uniform of the midAmerican labourer, are now worn by Silicon Valley tycoons.
I would like to have spoken about the emergence of nylon, acrylic and polyester, and how they helped to release women from the drudgery of the kitchen sink and ironing board. Or of the massive increase in fashion retail that allows people to buy clothes at all points on the price spectrum. Had I been given the opportunity.
But exactly 1.55 minutes into the conversation, John decided he’d had enough of all that.
Having shown a polite interest in my views on youth culture, he interjected – without warning – that ‘hourglass’ figures had once been in fashion but that ‘now you have to be skinny as a rake’.
Back, in other words, to the same old, same old limited, repetitious and banal conversation. I was swept relentlessly into an attack on the size of models and their appearance in British Vogue, the magazine I left in June after more than 25 years at the helm.
The urbane John of just a few minutes ago had turned into the hard-hitting pit bull I hear many mornings, set on to politicians of the day. Suddenly I was confronted by a greyhaired guy in chinos hectoring me on the business I had worked in for a quarter of a century and which he neither knew, nor cared, much about. I faced, for example, a truly ludicrous accusation about the ‘cruelty’ of fashion, as demonstrated by the way women were forced to wear painfully high heels. As if we were promoting ancient Chinese foot-binding!
HE TOOK me to task for not including ‘comfortably shaped women’ on the cover of Vogue, even though I am well known for advocating healthy body shapes. Never mind that I had used images of Rihanna and Adele, and most recently size 18 model Ashley Graham, among others who are hardly rake-like.
Yet John ploughed on. Even Theresa May got swept up in his rampant critique of fashion, just because we have a Prime Minister confident enough to