Why work at Vogue, if you don't care how you dress?

I was astonished by this piece on the UK Vogue website

When I saw the teaser headline from Vogue UK in my inbox - ‘Everyone In The Vogue Office Is Wearing The Same Specific Outfit’ - I couldn’t click on it fast enough.

Still emerging from my winter wardrobe slump, I couldn’t wait to get some insider expert tips about new combinations and cheeky additions to bring my look snap into the new season.

Instead, I was met with this sentence: ‘jeans, a blue shirt and my trusty ballet flats (which are falling apart at the seams and probably belong in a bin)’.

Yes, they do. And they most certainly do not belong in the offices of Vogue or in any of the magazine’s content.

Neither, in my opinion, does the outfit ‘everyone’ in the Vogue office is currently wearing: a baggy blue man-style shirt worn hanging out, with baggy jeans and (aforementioned) ballet flats.

Now, I’m not totally against this combo. With a boyfriend’s Harvie & Hudson shirt, some great jeans and pristine ballet flats, it’s a pretty classic casual combo - to wear on the occasional day to work. Occasional being the operative word.

But the writer goes on to say: ‘While Plum Sykes may have implied it’s all chiffon Dolce & Gabbana skirts and town cars, my wardrobe is usually just variations on the same outfit and one pair of shoes for the week…’

Plum Sykes most certainly did not ‘imply’, she described the life she lead. She worked on Vogue and she lived it - as I did for my magazine, when I was editor-in-chief of British ELLE in the early 1990s.

Now the young woman who wrote this piece, who wears variations on the same outfit for a week (horror face emoji) and all her colleagues wearing the blue shirt combo to work at Vogue are all in their 20s and early 30s.

I’m nearly 100 and I do understand that times change - but the point of Vogue hasn’t changed since it was founded in New York in 1892.

Now with its 28 international edition, Vogue is the global magazine of record, the ultimate authority on the subject of high fashion – and that is a status that has to be earned. And everyone who works for the brand is part of maintaining that authority.

Yet we have one of the proud blue-shirt wearers happily saying in this piece:

“there’s something about a classic blue shirt that gives you that all important ‘I’ve got my life together today feeling’, even if it’s an oversized, un-ironed shirt draped over your favourite trackies or well-worn jeans. It’s the ultimate throw-on-and-go office attire.”

I don’t know which words made in that quote me feel more unwell – ‘unironed’ or ‘throw-on-and-go’.

Probably the latter, because that is the exact antithesis of the attitude to clothing that anyone who works at Vogue – or any other fashion magazine – needs to have.

Because there is no ‘throw-on-and-go’ (or throw-up-and-go, as I see this attitude) if fashion consumes you, as it should if you work on a fashion magazine.

So that every morning when you get dressed for work you are expressing your passion for clothing in every single piece you choose to wear.

Nothing is ‘thrown on’, it’s a vital daily process, putting together your LOOK: an intensely considered combination of items that expresses your understanding of all current trends and nuances, your personality and mood – and is also flattering to you.

I find it truly astonishing that anyone who doesn’t see getting dressed as a fabulous creative project every morning would want to work on a fashion magazine, let alone the ultimate one.

Thinking back to my days at ELLE, it was a daily treat to sit in my office, which faced the entrance, and watch my intergalactically talented team walk in.

Every one of them would be wearing a Look that made a Statement of some kind. Not anything outlandish, but cohesive and just ‘right’.

Our fashion director, the extraordinary Debi Mason, was like a living installation.

One day she would come in wearing floaty hippy layers (the designer version…), with her long black curly hair tumbling down, Indian jewellery she’d bought in markets piled on round her neck and wrists, sandals with leather thongs tied around her calves.

The next, she’d be in belted jeans, a Breton shirt and canvas plimsols, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail, neatly gelled over her scalp, with oversized black-framed specs. Short, scarlet fingernails.

Day three it might be head-to-toe black Yoji Yamamoto. Nail varnish gone.

It was pure joy for me to see what she would put together each day and everyone on the staff made an effort with their clothes, not just the fashion department.

Debi looking amazing now, from her Insta feed @debbi.mason_wears

We all lived and breathed clothes and trends and we respected our readers - and our advertisers! - by wholeheartedly living what we preached: that what you wear matters, every day and is worth putting time and effort into.

So I feel quite offended by the attitude of these Vogue staffers that sloppy easy living trumps making a dedicated effort to personal style. Especially as that doesn’t have to mean spending a mortgage on it.

One of my favourite of Debi’s pictures from ELLE days. Naomi Campbell, photographed in Miami by the wonderful Pamela Hanson.

The ELLE staff really weren’t on big salaries, but that didn’t stop them living and breathing fashion and looking amazing every day.

They may have only picked up designer pieces at sample sales, but they made them into fabulously original outfits combined with high street brands and vintage finds (which were still called second hand then…).

But I don’t blame the author of this regrettable piece, she’s young and expressing her reality - I blame the editorial level above her, for allowing it to go out.

A large part of the magic of Vogue comes from the dream of fashion and the aspiration it inspires in us - and there’s no place for this level of tatty-shoed reality anywhere in it.

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