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.
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.
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.
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…
