Biography of an Icon; Vogue House

British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 2 Editing and Production

When I talk to students about editing, I see them roll their eyes and look away. ‘Editing,’ I say in my most enthusiastic voice, ‘is where the magic happens.’ This is usually greeted with a plaintive ‘but I hate re-reading what I’ve written.’ To which I reply: ‘Poor tutor having to read it then.’ I know what they mean, though, and sometimes it is tough to look at your first draft and love it, but writing is a process, and it takes time. Imagine your first draft as information gathering, your second as a first bash at what could become the story, the third a less clumsy version of that and so on. When I finish my first draft it is an unwieldy, shifting pile of sand that has some form but is in serious need of beating into shape. It takes me as long to edit my manuscript until it reaches the form it will have for the editor as it does to write the draft in the first place. Sometimes it takes longer.

This is a screen shot of the comparison between draft 1 and 6 of my biography of Audrey Withers

Once I’ve finished the first draft, I walk away from it for at least a week, preferably a month. It didn’t happen in the case of this book as things conspired against me. But I did manage to get five days out of my writing room. I think it is important to switch from being a writer to a reader and by that, I mean, to see the story from other people’s perspective. Is there a story there? is the first question I ask myself. On the second read I’m looking for whether the narrative is in the right order. Sometimes this involves moving whole chapters from one place to another. Third read for me is historical accuracy. If I get a date wrong, it can undermine a reader’s trust in my research and once that trust is broken it is very hard to regain it. Over the course of six drafts, I make ever more detailed changes. The last version of the manuscript, which will be sent to the editor, is as good as I can make it. I play with individual words, try to find beautiful but clear metaphors and sprinkle the book with what my agent calls ‘fairy dust’. Only then, after this rigorous process, do I send my perfect book to my editor. That is what happened on 30 August 2023.

And then the fun started. Six weeks after she received the book, editor Maddy Price at Orion sent back her comments and thoughts on the whole book. It turned out that she had plenty to say and offered excellent ideas about where to cut paragraphs or whole stories, what needed to be added to make the narrative flow better and, heck yes, a conclusion. That is always the most difficult thing for me to write. With Vogue we had to decide where to end the book. By a stroke of luck for me, though sad for history, Condé Nast sold Vogue House in the spring of 2024 and with that the greatest chapter in the magazine’s life ended. The company had been in Vogue House at 1 Hanover Square for 66 years, taking on the 150-year lease in 1958 when Audrey Withers was the editor and female employees still had to wear gloves to work.

I had the manuscript with Maddy’s comments for six weeks and then, when I was happy that I had made the changes she wanted, it went to the copyeditor. Here is a person I greatly respect. They are barely ever mentioned when books are prepared for publication, but their role is key. Their job is to challenge the author and call them out on sloppy references. My copy editor on this book was Jane Selley. She was eagle-eyed and picked up several points where I needed to produce explanations or be clearer. The next person in line is the proofreader who is looking at the text in minute detail: checking grammar, removing wayward commas, making sure references tally and generally providing a toothcomb approach. Justyna Bielecka worked on this book and, like Jane, did a great job. All of the changes and tweaks get fed into a first proof which is the moment when I, as the writer, see the book laid out in the form it will finally appear in months down the road. It is thrilling, I’ll be honest.

There are then several more reads of the book in proof form and it is extraordinary how many changes one makes. My first proof had 451comments, ranging from changing a whole paragraph to correcting a spelling. The second had 115, the third 39, and the final version 22. Next comes the index and then the plates, which are the images that tell the story of the book visually. This is a lengthy and complicated process, especially in this case as I had over 70,000 images in my database to choose from. Eventually I whittled it down to just over 50 pictures and worked with the picture librarian at Condé Nast, Frith Carlisle, to clear permission to reproduce these glorious images in the book.

Once that was all put to bed and the cover finalised, the managing editor at Orion, Sarah Fortune, sent everything to the printer. For the first time in my writing life, I went to see my book coming off the presses. On Monday 2 September I drove to Clays in Bungay, Suffolk, with my friends Richard and Carol Pietrzak, to have a tour of the printing works and stand by the huge machine at the end of the production line that spat out copy after copy of my Vogue biography.

The wind picked up the first page of an uncased book and I saw the beautiful endpapers

It was a great thrill to get to handle a naked book ie, one without its casing, then to get a cased version and finally, to my delight, a jacketed book. And yes, it was warm, so I can truly say it was hot off the press.

These books were about to be shrink-wrapped and sent on their way to storage

My editor, Nina Sandleson, and I, looking ridiculously proud in our hi-vis jackets and earplugs

Now the book is ready to start its life on the shelves of bookshops throughout the country. We – that is the publisher and I – will do everything we can to promote the book and make people aware of its existence. But ultimately it is you, the reader, who makes the final decision as to whether this book is worthy of a place on your shelves. And that comes back to whether I have done enough work on the original manuscript to produce something that is entertaining and informative as well as beautiful to look at. That look is down to the publisher and the last person to be named – the designer, Chevonne Elbourne. She took Willie Christie’s beautiful image from March 1977 and created my favourite cover to date. In my next blog I will tell the story of the cover picture.

British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon Part 1: Research and Writing

Once the lightbulb moment has faded and the idea for a book begins to take shape, there comes the biggest task of all: research. For this book it has been huge but at the same time contained. The subject matter limited the amount of secondary material I needed to find but the primary research was enormous. I read every single issue of Vogue from September 1916 to December 2023, which was the cut off after which no new material could be introduced. That constituted 1,679 issues containing roughly 70,000,000 words and 8,500 fashion shoots with some 2,000,000 images. Taken as a whole it seemed overwhelming but reading 15 issues a day made it doable. Still, that was 111 days spread over three years. I spent at least 90 of those days in the archive at Vogue House, London and the remainder at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Vogue House on my last visit, 9 January 2024, to look at photographs for the plates section

The only way I could handle that much material was to create a complex database which now contains a full list of every article, regular column and fashion shoot in Vogue with the names of the contributors, models, photographers, stylists and hair and make-up artists. The database also contains the names of every celebrity featured in Vogue and comprises the greatest party list of all time. Some were surprising favourites, such as David Hockney, who has appeared in the magazine regularly over the last 60 years. Others were names from the world of fashion that are immediately recognisable, from Chanel and Patou, through Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, to Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood and Stella McCartney. A few were names that were famous briefly and are known today only to a handful of people.

Taking just one step back from the magazine, I read the archive of Beatrix Miller, editor from 1965-1986. These papers were left to the Vogue Archive after her death in 2014 and had not been read. They contained delicious behind-the-scenes anecdotes in letters from readers that she received and replied to after every issue was published. Some are what you might expect: young women asking for advice on style or how to become a model (don’t give up the day job), or how to make a career in fashion (be prepared to start at the bottom). Some were letters of complaint about features or shoots, and some were just strange: ‘Dear Miss Miller, can you give me advice on how to get flying lessons for my daughter?’ one woman wrote in 1978. She received a courteous reply giving the name and address of a flying instructor in Surrey. Going back even earlier, I read the diaries of Harry Yoxall, Condé Nast Publications Managing Director for 40 years from 1923. He kept a weekly diary and tracked the first decade of British Vogue’s life as it struggled financially. By 1930 its dominance of the world of fashion magazines was established, and I argue that it has never been knocked off the top spot.

Harry Yoxall’s diaries were written in ink or typed in both English and French. They were a joy to read.

Then there were interviews I conducted with former Vogue writers, stylists and models whose lives, in many ways, were shaped by their relationship with the magazine. The overwhelming message I got when I interviewed people was: ‘don’t mess with Vogue. It was my family.’ People were deeply passionate about working for the magazine and I found again and again the reference to the Vogue family. It struck a chord. I worked at the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1980s and still feel deeply attached to the family atmosphere of the exhibitions office even 40 years later.

Finally there was material to be gathered from the Conde Nast Archive in New York. I had been there twice in 2018 when researching my biography Dressed for War of Vogue’s wartime editor, Audrey Withers. I had had the thrill of uncovering the memos between Audrey and Edna Woolman Chase that gave me the story of Vogue’s war. As Audrey and Cecil Beaton had destroyed the British archive in 1942 in the race to salvage paper, I had to rely on New York’s holding to paint the picture of British Vogue’s early years. By luck I had made good friends with a New Jersey man who shares my passion for historical detail. Ed Morrows was willing to do research on my behalf in the CN archives. Although there was nothing there pre-1931, he found a wonderful 19 page memo by Conde Nast himself entitled ‘The British Vogue Formula Report 1933’ in which he described the entire history of the establishment of British Vogue. Without Ed’s forensic research I, and therefore my readers, would have been deprived of some salient and delightful facts.

Usually when I write a book, I conduct all the research over the course of two or three years and then sit down to write in the peace and quiet of my home in springtime. That process normally takes three to four months. This book was huge and the material so overwhelming that I decided I would have to write it in three-decade chunks as I went along. I wrote the first three chapters in the early autumn of 2021, the next three in the winter of 2022, finishing in February, just before my father died, and the remaining five chapters over the spring and summer of 2023. This meant that I ended up with a huge, unwieldy first draft with big gaps where I’d noted research might go. On 26 June 2023 I wrote in my diary: ‘Walked into Vogue House at 07:45 and read the final issues to June 2020. With that I am done with reading Brogue in London. All the other issues are here [on my shelves at home].’ I also noted that I stuffed courgette flowers for supper that night.

On Tuesday 3 July I sat down to the first day of the final edit of my biography of Vogue. ‘Started with chapter 1 and struggled to make it flow. So much info in every sentence.’ That was my major problem: too much information. How to pick out the gems and produce a narrative for my reader that would not give them intellectual indigestion. My diary over the next seven weeks is filled with three different occupations: massaging the book, chapter by chapter, into submission, rowing with my crew and cooking. There is also a note about a cover that my editor, Maddy Price, sent me to have a look at. I wrote: ‘4/10 but we can work on this.’ The story of the cover will come in a future instalment of this blog.

Diary Entry for 26 July 2023 – rowing, writing, food – usually in that order

There are many cliches to describe pulling together a draft into a manuscript, but it’s never easy. On 10 July I had a complete meltdown over chapter 5, the 1950s, but two days later I’d regained perspective and was working well on the 1960s. And so it went on, up and down, while the rest of the world carried on oblivious. Carlos Alcaraz beat Novak Djokovic in five remarkable sets at Wimbledon as I worked on the 1970s. There were record temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona of 43C over a period of 19 days and wildfires in Switzerland as I entered the 1980s. The world turned and I rowed, and edited, cooked and edited, slept and edited until, on 26 July, I recorded in my diary: ‘wrote my conclusion and fed it into the whole book: 145,013 words.’ At the beginning of August, I spent a week teaching a writing course at Lumb Bank for the Arvon Foundation. It was a good excuse to step away from the manuscript and get much needed perspective. After that, over the course of 10 days, I did a final read and edit, sending it off to Maddy Price on 30 August at 12:45 pm. Two days later I was at St Pancras Station ready to catch the Eurostar to Avignon.

There was an crisis with a lost passport (not mine) but that is an story for another day…

Tag: Biography of an Icon; Vogue House

Where the Magic Happens

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