Vogue – Julie Summers

Audrey and Lee

Posted on November 6, 2024November 9, 2024 by Julie Summers

July 1941, the defiant image that characterised Audrey Withers’ wartime *Vogue*

In September 1944 Vogue’s editor, Audrey Withers, published a four-page spread with two turns at the back of the magazine on a field hospital in France. It was not the first time that she had brought her readers face to face with the horrors of war, but it was the most powerful reminder to date of the scale of the operations of D-Day. On 6 June that year almost 7,000 ships and landing craft had transported 156,000 infantrymen to the beaches of Normandy. Over the next weeks a further 2,500,000 would land on the coast of France to continue the push towards Berlin and the elimination of the Nazi threat. It was natural that newspaper and magazine editors would be following the story closely. But was it plausible that a glossy fashion magazine would want to take its readers into the heart of the war? After all, Vogue’s main fare was couture and culture, was it not?

**Fashion is Indestructible** by Cecil Beaton, 1941

British Vogue was called into being in the middle of the previous war. It was first published in London in September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. Its pages were filled not only with fashion and features but also with articles on the war, including reports from Belgium on the plight of pregnant women giving birth close to the front line and the work of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry in France. By 1939 Vogue was 23 years older and had gathered experience and influence. It was not surprising that in this new war the editor would want to help readers make sense of what was happening at home and abroad. During the Blitz, Audrey Withers, included a photograph of Vogue’s bomb-damaged offices and proudly told readers that the magazine, like its fellow Londoners, was being put to bed in a cellar. This was a reference to the cellar below No 1 New Bond Street where the Vogue staff retreated during the nightly air raids and where they carried on working as if it were entirely normal.

Audrey Withers once described herself as an unlikely editor of Vogue and this comment stuck to her reputation for the next sixty years. In fact, she was an outstanding editor. She was brave, single-minded and always alive to the most important matters of the day for her readership. At 5’ 10” in her stocking feet she was tall for a woman of the time. She had been brought up in an eccentric household where from a very young age she had been invited to engage with her father’s literary and artistic friends. One of these was the artist, Paul Nash, with whom she conducted a 16-year correspondence in which she tried out all her ideas about the world on him, often eliciting affectionate and amusing responses. It was Nash who advised her on attending Somerville College, Oxford and who applauded her decision to switch from English to PPE in her second term. And it was Nash who comforted her when she was awarded a 2.1 and not a First as she had hoped. When she decided to leave her first job in a bookshop and apply to Vogue, it was Nash who congratulated her on the appointment.

**Audrey Withers** by Clifford Coffin, 1947

Audrey started as a subeditor, the lowliest job in the magazine, in 1931, and gradually rose through managing editor to Editor in September 1940. Her greatest champion when she made the step up to the top job was Condé Nast himself. He wrote to Harry Yoxall, the managing director of Condé Nast Publications in London, to say he would rather ‘have an editor who can edit than an editor who can mix with society.’ She may not have had the right social connections, but she had the intelligence and courage to stand up to the most difficult of Vogue contributors. She once took on Edward Molyneux who threatened to pull his advertisements if he did not have control over which photographs she used in the magazine She refused. Vogue’s independence was more important to her than Molyneux’s contribution to the magazine. Her wartime Vogue is a remarkable body of work that deals with all aspects of war, from clothes rationing and austerity, through the roles women took on both in civilian life and in the armed forces to the great battles being fought abroad. Her main photographer, Cecil Beaton, was removed to India and China in 1942 and she wrote ruefully of how much his absence would mean to her readers. However, another photographer was waiting in the wings, and this was Lee Miller.

**Self-portrait** by Lee Miller ©www.Leemiller.co.uk

Lee had begun her career in the 1920s as a model, appearing on the front cover of American Vogue in 1927. She was described as one of the most beautiful women in the world. Her life changed when she went to live in Paris in the early 1930s where she worked as Man Ray’s assistant. By the outbreak of the Second World War she had become a photographer with an exceptional eye and a singular ability to pick out the essence in a scene. This was to develop over the course of the Second World War. She arrived in London soon after the outbreak of war and applied to work for Vogue photographic studios in 1940. She worked as a fashion photographer for the magazine but also worked alongside features editor, Lesley Blanch, taking photographs of work done by the female armed services personnel.

**Women of the Auxiliary Territorial Army operate a searchlight battery at South Mimms** by Lee Miller ©www.Leemiller.co.uk

The opportunity to get into France – occupied France – was only possible because of her US citizenship and the press accreditation Audrey had helped to secure at the end of 1942. Lee’s visit to the field hospital in Normandy in August 1944 left her deeply moved. Her photographs are fresh, absorbing and searingly honest, as is her writing: ‘Another ambulance arrived from the right and litters were swiftly transferred to the parlour floor. The wounded were not “knights in shining armour” but dirty, dishevelled, stricken figures … uncomprehending. They arrived from the front-line Battalion Aid Station in lightly laid on field dressings, tourniquets, blood-soaked slings … some exhausted and lifeless.’ Audrey was delighted with Lee’s work. She wrote later:

‘I made myself solely responsible for editing Lee’s precious articles. I used to begin by cutting whole paragraphs, then whole sentences, finally individual words. One by one to get it down. Always I tried to cut them in such a way that there would be the least possible loss of their impact. It was a painful business because it was all so good.’

What was new here, in Vogue, was the quality not only of the photographs but also of the writing. Combined it made some of the most powerful photojournalism of Vogue’s war. Today Lee Miller is well-known. When Audrey Withers agreed to sponsor her application for press accreditation there was little to suppose this would turn out to be an extraordinary relationship. Audrey later described it as the greatest journalistic experience of her war.

In October Lee had two features in Vogue, one on the battle for St Malo, where she had witnessed the use of Napalm, and the other from liberated Paris. She went on to produce articles on Operation Nordwind, a German offensive in Alsace, and then on the liberation of countries such as Liechtenstein. Her work became ever more intense as the war reached its conclusion. In April she entered the gates of Buchenwald and, just 12 hours after it was liberated, the concentration camp at Dachau. The photographs she sent back to London were so powerful and shocking that she sent an accompanying telegram ‘I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THAT THIS IS TRUE’. Audrey wrote that she had no difficulty in believing it was true: ‘The difficulty was, and still is, in trying to understand how it was possible for such horrors to be perpetrated not just in a fit of rage but systematically and carefully organised over years. To me, it was far more frightening than the existence of a Hitler or a Stalin and the fact that their crimes could not have been carried out without the willing cooperation of thousands who applied to work for the gulags and concentration camps just as if it was a job like any other.’

Audrey’s courage failed her. She could not bring herself to publish the photographs from Buchenwald and Dachau in her Victory issue of the magazine in June 1945. History, and she herself, has judged her harshly for that but both overlook the fact that she included Lee’s article in full. And the article is so packed with rage it almost burns the pages it was published on:

‘My fine Baedeker tour of Germany includes many such places as Buchenwald which were not mentioned in my 1913 edition, and if there is a later one, I doubt if they were mentioned there, either, because no one in Germany has ever heard of a concentration camp, and I guess they didn’t want any tourist business either. Visitors took one- way tickets only, in any case, and if they lived long enough they had plenty of time to learn the places of interest, both historic and modern, by personal and practical experimentation. . . Much had already been cleared up by that time, that is, there were no warm bodies lying around, and all those likely to drop dead were in hospital. Everyone had had a meal or two and were being sick in consequence – because of shrunk stomachs and emotion. There is a diet arranged for them now, very similar to what they have been receiving in texture, although the soup now contains vegetables and meat extracts. I had seen what they had, that emergency day; and you’d hesitate to put it in your pig bucket.

The 600 bodies stacked in the courtyard of the crematorium because they had run out of coal the last five days had been carted away until only a hundred were left; and the splotches of death from a wooden potato masher had been washed, because the place had to be disinfected; and the bodies on the whipping stalls were dummies instead of almost dead men who could feel but not react.’

As Audrey was a wordsmith, she knew the power of Lee’s words and I think it is telling that she chose not to tone down the fury that they conveyed.

The current film LEE, which is enjoying success worldwide, with Kate Winslet as Lee and Andrea Riseborough at Audrey, naturally focuses on Lee and her war photography. I just want to remind readers that without Audrey Withers, Lee’s work might never have gained the prominence in Vogue that it did. Lee was extraordinarily brave and brilliant but so too was her editor.

Home

With thanks to the Lee Miller Archives for the use of two images www.leemiller.co.uk

A Word in Your Ear

Posted on October 20, 2024November 6, 2024 by Julie Summers

Books appear in many different formats, shapes, sizes and technologies. This autumn British Vogue: the Biography of an Icon will be available in three formats: the hardback version, the Kindle version and the audiobook. This last intrigues me. It is a combination of my words, an actor’s voice and a producer’s interpretation of both. And it is the melding of the three parts that can create a magical voice for the listener or can produce an inharmonious clang that sounds quite off note.

This time I have been very fortunate to have my book read by Katherine Manners, a British actress with a sparkling career on stage and film. She is also trained as a funeral and family celebrant and officiates at weddings, funerals, memorials and naming ceremonies, especially serving members of the LGBT community. Best of all she has just the right voice for my writing. And that matters. Too strident and my words sound as if they are created for am dram, too soft and they lose their way in a haze of aspirants. I think she has done an amazing job and I am so delighted that the audio book is now out.

People often ask me who my favourite editor/stylist/photographer was to write about. It is hard to say because each era produced not only great talent but fascinating reactions to the times. However, it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Lee Miller to Vogue during the Second World War and I love this short clip, read by Katherine, that describes Lee’s first experience of arriving in France to photograph a field hospital in August 1944.

Lee would go on to photograph and write about the liberation of Paris, the final battle ‘Nordwind’ in Alsace and her first-hand experience of the concentration camps of Ohrdruf, Buchenwald and Dachau. Although Audrey Withers only reproduced one image from those ghastly camps, she delivered Lee’s final diatribe against the Nazis almost unedited. It is an astonishing piece of writing for its undisguised anger and jarred with the upbeat message of the Victory issue in June 1945. Audrey may have lost her nerve over the images, but she knew exactly what she was doing by letting Lee’s disgust appear in print the magazine. This was my second opportunity to write about Lee Miller and Audrey Withers. I never tire of looking back at their extraordinary working relationship over an intense 18 months of the war. In Dressed for War I was able to devote a whole chapter to them and it is now the subject of LEE starring Kate Winslet with Andrea Riseborough as Audrey.

While Audrey is best known for her wartime work at Vogue, her successor, Ailsa Garland, is seldom celebrated. She edited Vogue for 4 years and oversaw the transformation of the magazine from the staid 1950s to the sexy, swinging sixties. She introduced David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton to her readers, she featured the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1963 and embraced the brilliant Vidal Sassoon. This clip marks that moment when the first green shoots of the new styles that came to define the decade were first seen.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of researching and writing this book has been watching the magazine change month by month. It reflects the time period in which it comes out, and each editor interprets the world according to Vogue. The longest serving editor, Alexandra Shulman, was at the helm for 25 years and presided over the tumultuous events around the turn of the century, from the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to the Millennium, 9/11 and the Arab Spring. Her editorship was bold, creative and full of fascinating journalism as well as glorious fashion shoots. One of my favourite moments was when fashion features editor Harriet Quick summed up the new attitude towards body shape in 2003. I sense Katherine Manners much enjoyed reading that chapter.

Having had the most extraordinary fortnight following the discovery of Sandy Irvine’s boot on Everest and the subsequent media circus that resulted, I’m relishing the prospect of listening to Katherine reading words in my ear. If you are into audio books I do hope you will enjoy it as well.

Judging a Book by its Cover

Posted on September 20, 2024 by Julie Summers

British Vogue: The Biography of an Icon Part 3 The Cover Story

This blog is the story of the jacket of my Vogue biography. The name ‘jacket’ raised quizzical smiles in the archives at Vogue House when I mentioned it. The immediate response of the archivists was to imagine Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent or Dior, while I was thinking about how on earth to sum up the content of this survey of a century in one image. Book covers matter, whatever the old adage might tell you. Some authors are so devoted to their designer that they will countenance no one else to touch their book jackets, or in the case of paperbacks, book covers. It is their brand. For my books, given the range of dates and subjects, it has been a one at a time process. I could not, for example, have the same sort of cover for this book as I did for a book about the Bridge on the River Kwai or Mount Everest.

Book production, like everything else, has its own language and is incomprehensible to most outside the industry. Books have cases, covers and jackets. The first thing one sees after printing is the uncased version, which is simply the book’s pages. It is a white block and looks wholly uninteresting (except to the author). It is then put in a case, which is a hard cardboard sheet that is creased in the middle to provide what will become the spine. It usually has the name of the book and the author on that spine. In my case, the black case was embossed with the title in silver. And then there is the jacket, which is the shiny, thick paper that wraps around the book and makes it stand out on the bookshelves of shops, supermarkets, airport stores and anywhere else the publisher plans to make it available for sale.

Books ready to be cased and showing a sneak preview of the endpapers

My book in its cover but without its glorious jacket

Me clutching a jacket, unfolded, at Clays on 2 September

The hunt for an image started in July 2023 when Maddy Price, my editor at Orion, sent through a couple of suggestions. Neither worked. It seemed to us that any image we might pick from the remarkable collection of fashion shoots over the last 108 years would date the book to a decade, and for some eagle-eyed aficionados, to a year or month. We had a conversation about it and decided that the only thing to do was to plump for a single, bold, plain colour with the title in gold or silver. It was not a wholly satisfactory solution, so we parked it for the while. Maddy got on with editing my manuscript and I went to France for a holiday.

I had met the photographer, Willie Christie, in December 2022 when he came to Oxford, and I interviewed about his time at Vogue in the 1970s. He had a brief but productive spell as a Vogue photographer, working with Grace Coddington who was then the fashion editor. He showed me a selection of photographs that were to be included in his book, due out the following year. ‘You should come to the launch’, he suggested. On 20 September 2023 that is exactly where I was to be found: at Iconic Images Gallery in London, admiring a small selection of his beautiful photographs with my friend Deb. I was very taken by a black and white image of model singing into a microphone with a pianist in the background. It felt so Hollywood and timeless.

Marie Helvin channels old Hollywood glamour,
British Vogue 1974. Styled by Grace Coddington
photograph by Willie Christie

Deb bought me a copy of Willie Christie’s book which I read on the train on the way back to Oxford that evening. Turning page after page of stunning images my eye was caught by the shot of a model wearing a John Bates dress against a slatted background lit from behind. The more I stared at it, the more I realised I had found exactly what I was looking for: an image that was timeless, beautiful, spoke of luxury and desire but also of movement and life. Had I not spotted this when I was reading Vogue of the 1970s? As soon as I got home, I looked up the 15 March 1977 issue and there it was, on page 100. But a muddy version of this crisp and lovely image in Willie Christie’s book. I remember reading a memo by editor Beatrix Miller from around that time complaining about the quality of black and white reproduction in Vogue.

‘Hit Looks’ fashion shoot by Willie Christie, styled by Grace Coddington, *Vogue* 15 March 1977

I sent a snap of the picture to Maddy Price the next morning and received an enthusiastic thumbs up. She passed it onto designer, Chevonne Elbourne, who mocked up a version of the jacket. The thing she realised was that she had to interpret Willie Christie’s image as a portrait shot, whereas his original was a square format, shot on a Hasselblad. With bated breath I forwarded her suggestion to Willie. Would he mind us messing around with his photograph? I knew he did not like his images to be cropped, but we had gone further and removed the slats. To my inexpressible delight he gave permission for us to use Chevonne’s design, and she was able to work on what has become the final version of the book’s jacket.

I now have most beautiful book jacket in my collection of cracking good jackets – Dressed for War, Fashion on the Ration and so forth. It is an image that conjures everything this book is about: luxury, beauty and style but also movement, life, energy and humour. If you chance to look beyond the cover, you will see Chevonne’s brilliant endpapers, which bring a blast of colour in the display of Vogue covers over the last 108 years. It is a very clever juxtaposition and I am in awe of her eye.

I would like to invite you to judge this book by its cover but beyond that, it is up to you whether you like my take on Vogue’s eye view of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Willie Christie for allowing us to interpret his glorious image from 1977 and to Chevonne Elbourne for working her magic on this and the other images from Condé Nast Publications that are included in the book.

My three favourite jackets to date in reverse order. Fashion on the Ration was published in 2015, Dressed for War in 2020 and British Vogue, the Biography of an Icon, in October 2024.

Once Upon A Time …

Posted on September 7, 2024September 14, 2024 by Julie Summers

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…

Celebrating Women

Posted on March 8, 2023March 9, 2023 by Julie Summers

It is wonderful to celebrate the amazing achievements of extraordinary women on International Women’s Day. I’m very pleased to have heard so many female composers featured on radio 3 this morning, for example. And the newspapers are full of impressive profiles of women who have defied the odds, challenged misogyny or battled against fearsome prejudice. I am fascinated to read those stories. They are inspiring and valuable. They can also be a little intimidating and seem far removed from ordinary life.

I’d like to celebrate women who achieve extraordinary things every ordinary day. I was going to name some who I have found particularly inspiring, but I decided that might be either embarrassing to those I named or hurtful to those I leave out. So, I won’t. I’m going to start with carers, as I have quite a bit of first-hand experience at present of those who work in this field. There is so much criticism in the press about the care sector, but these women, and they are often women in my experience, are among the kindest and least complaining people you could meet. They cater for people’s most basic needs with professional kindness so that the person being helped can maintain as much dignity as possible given the circumstances. Emptying commodes, dressing wounds, showering frail bodies and administering food or medicine is hardly glamorous work but it is vital and I admire their dedication. They make people’s lives better even if they cannot cure the ills. If I have a plea, it is to recognise this vital work that will never cease to be needed.

There are women in every walk of life who achieve little miracles daily – nurses, police officers, firewomen, teachers, classroom assistants. Then there are those who volunteer, running everything and anything, from sports clubs to food banks. The Women’s Institute, born in the second summer of the First World War, is one enormous body of talent and generosity whose work I found so inspiring I wrote a book about their work in the Second World War. The spirit that helped over a quarter of a million members to keep the countryside ticking in those difficult years embodies everything I admire about women of that time. To hell with red-tape and wartime bureaucracy, they got on with making jam, collecting herbs for medicine, knitting millions of items for the Home Guard, the Merchant Marine and evacuees. And they sang and smiled their way through it.

Community Singing at Flamstead WI in Hertfordshire during the Second World War

Archivists and librarians are people I admire enormously. They are often women who work behind the scenes safe-guarding history and thus the national memory. I have worked in archives all over the world and often the incredible collections they protect are underappreciated by the people whose histories are being preserved. Those of you who read my biography of Audrey Withers will know that she destroyed the entire Vogue archive in February 1942. Why did she do it? It was an act of fervent patriotism, urged on by her star photographer, Cecil Beaton, for paper salvage to help the war effort. What a loss, though, to future generations. She believed she was doing the right thing at that moment in history, and one cannot criticise her motives, but it does point to the value of original archive material to the memory of the nation. Material, I might add, that celebrated women far more than men.

This image appeared in March 1942 *Vogue* showing the pulping of photographs for the war effort

My current project, a biography of British Vogue, is full of stories about inspirational women from every decade of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, as well as some men. The magazine may be about fashion on one level but it is a celebration of the achievements of women on so many others. Over the last 105 years Vogue has covered every topic of interest to women of any given era. I find it life-affirming and hugely impressive to think about the achievements of women from every walk of life.

Much has been made recently of the value of friendship. It is something that is now understood to help to encourage healthier living and even a longer life. Studies in Australia established that women who have close female friendships are less likely to suffer from multiple serious conditions in later life. 7,700 women were tracked over twenty years to see whether they went on to contract diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer, depression and half a dozen other serious conditions. ‘Researchers found that women who reported the lowest level of satisfaction with their social relationships had double the risk of developing multiple conditions compared with those who reported the highest levels of satisfaction.’ I raise a toast to the women I row with four or five mornings a week in Oxford. We were out today despite the snow and we loved it. If it helps us to stay healthier longer, well that’s just a wonderful side effect.

With a dear friend in a double scull on the river at Oxford, December 2022

So yes to celebrating International Women’s Day on 8 March but I want to celebrate women every day of the year.

Coping in a Crisis

Posted on March 17, 2020March 14, 2021 by Julie Summers

Several people have asked me what Audrey Withers’ reaction to the current crisis would have been. I have thought about it a lot and it occurred to me that it might be interesting to compare 1940 and 2020.

Fashion is Indestructible by Cecil Beaton, June 1941 © Conde Nast Publications Ltd

At the beginning of the Second World War the government closed down the country. It banned all public gatherings, sporting events and race meetings. Theatres and cinemas were ordered to close and no group meetings of more than 100 people were permitted anywhere except at church. Does this sound familiar? The introduction of petrol rationing from midnight on the day war was declared and the blackout altered people’s lives even more directly. The shutdown lasted for just twelve days but it had the effect of changing people’s behaviour, the way they thought about being at war – even though the war proper did not affect them until the spring of the following year – and it changed the way people moved around.

Now, in 2020, we are in equally uncertain times but on this occasion we are not terrified of air raid or gas attacks but of an invisible virus. The government is not only protecting its citizens but our wonderful, precious but horribly overstretched NHS.

So what would Audrey have done? The answer depends of course on what period of her life we are going to imagine in this hypothetical situation. Let’s place her in London at the beginning of the Blitz, days after she has been named as editor of Vogue, when nightly air raids and daily warnings disrupted life in so many ways. Audrey wrote an article about living under those conditions for American Vogue. She described how every night she and her editorial and art staff packed up a large laundry basket with all their ‘treasures’ and every morning the basket was unpacked and work began again. ‘If the siren goes work goes on until the alarm warns that planes are overhead or that guns are firing with the result that we now take shelter less frequently but more rapidly.’

I find in here a hint of how in the very early days of the Blitz there had been a touch of panic but by early October, when she wrote this article, she had got used to the bombing.

We grab work and paraphernalia, descend six flights of stone stairs to the basement. We look as if we are going on a peculiar picnic: coats slung around our shoulders; attaché- cases with proofs, photographs, layouts, copy, mixed up with gas- masks, sandwiches and knitting. The Art Department men carry under one arm a stack of drawings and layouts; and under the other, a stirrup pump, a pick axe or a shovel. It’s a peculiar picnic all right.

Audrey working in the bomb cellar of One New Bond Street in October 1940. As usual, she was wearing a hat.

She described how they greeted each other every morning with ‘what kind of night did you have?’ and how gallows humour soon emerged and kept them sane even when the news was grim. ‘A feeble joke makes us laugh, and we’re glad of the chance to laugh at anything; and on the other hand, you get oddly insensitive and callous, and are amused by incidents that normally you would have found macabre.’ She concluded the article by saying that they lived day by day, not looking too far ahead but always trying to be organised and practical.

It would be wrong to paint Audrey as instinctively brave. She was not courageous like her fearless photo-journalist, Lee Miller, but she became brave through sheer hard work and a determination to keep going under any circumstances and she was organised. Another aspect of her personality was her deep and furious dislike of cheating of any sort. She railed against people who bribed shopkeepers to give them a little bit extra over the ration and she despaired about Vogue readers who cheated with their clothing coupons. I suspect she would have had something to say about panic buying and, worse still, the scalpers who clean out supermarket shelves and then offer the products for sale at a higher cost. Spivs are what those people were called during the war and Audrey despised them.

She was a caring person and I am sure that she would have worried about people being lonely and cut off. There was no compulsory self-isolation during the war but petrol rationing had more or less the same effect for people living in the countryside. Her parents, both in their seventies, had been socially active in the nineteen twenties and thirties. By 1940 they were living on the edge of a small village outside Banbury seeing almost nobody week in, week out. They were lonely and depressed by her father’s ill health. Audrey and her sister, Monica, tried to ensure they had visits or letters as often as circumstances permitted.

As we are today, so Audrey was overwhelmed by government advice. During the war it was called propaganda and it was sometimes issued three or four times a day. The Board of Trade published nearly 200 notices in one year on the subject of women’s underwear alone. The ministries of food, agriculture, health and so on were equally busy bombarding editors with information. Audrey had to decide what to publish in Vogue, a monthly magazine, and what could be ignored as it had already been dealt with by the daily press.

By the end of 1940, when London had been bombed for 56 nights consecutively, Audrey could be proud that she had managed to get the October, November and December editions of her magazine out almost on time. November had been two days late and December just one. One of her staff, Audrey Stanley, wrote to Condé Nast describing how they had coped during those difficult months:

We went through such a transitional stage and we did not know exactly what to strive for as everything was so precarious and atmosphere and feeling was as fickle as the wind, but now I really think a comprehensive pattern has come out of it all. Audrey Withers is a remarkable person. She has such balance and tact and we all admire her enormously as being editor just now must be a difficult job.

Audrey Withers by Cecil Parkinson, 1944 © Norman Parkinson Archive

As the war went on, Audrey became more confident in her role as editor and more impressive in the way she coped with the pressure. In 1944 the President of the Board of Trade, Hugh Dalton, described her as the most powerful woman in London.

If we can take a message from Audrey’s strategy for coping in difficult circumstances I suggest it would be to keep calm and play fair. And, if you fancy, wear a hat.

Setting Audrey Free

Posted on January 6, 2020March 7, 2023 by Julie Summers

There is a moment in a book’s life when it is no longer the personal, much-loved friend it was during research, writing and editing. This is when it goes to print and the powerful machine of publicity grinds into action. It might seem strange to express a book’s publication thus but it is something I and other writers have experienced. As the novelist, Diane Setterfield, said recently: ‘You care about your book. You love it deeply but it does not love you back. It would eat you alive if it needed to.’ I know exactly what she means. A book develops a life of its own. It goes out into the world as a published hardcover: Dressed for War will have an existence far beyond my desk – in bookshops, on shelves in libraries and private homes, as a second-hand ex-review copy on Amazon. It might be well reviewed. It might get a hostile reception – I have had experience of both – but it is out of my hands.

My desk on 7 January 2019 with notebooks, my favourite pen and Audrey to inspire me.

When I started writing Audrey Withers’ autobiography on 7 January 2019 I was still in that blissful state of privacy and intimacy with my subject. For three months it was just me and the material in my little office at the top of my home in Oxford. I watched the garden wake up from its winter slumbers as I wrote about Lee Miller and Cecil Beaton. I heard the first cuckoo of the year as I was describing the heart-breaking moment when Audrey’s beloved father, Percy, died. And I had my first glass of wine in the greenhouse the day I wrote the last sentence of the first draft. Eleven and a half months later I sent off the final proofs and the lovely picture section for the last time, having read the book sixteen times in draft and proof form.

A spread from Vogue, June 1957 by William Klein © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd

I shared all the writing stages in my quarterly blogs and as each one was finished, I experienced a different emotional reaction: relief at first, panic when the deadline was brought forward by six weeks, grief when the third proofs went off and now anxiety. At the end of this coming week the printers will run off the first copies. Of course I am excited about it but I am also nervous and there is so much still to do. As an author I have to work flat out with publicists and marketing people to make sure the book is noticed. And believe me, it really does matter.

I have my own publicist, Richard Leon, who works alongside the excellent team at Simon & Schuster led by Becky and Rich. Together they have cooked up a publicity and marketing plan that involves every possible media platform you can name and some that I cannot. I have been booked to speak at a dozen literary festivals already and there are bound to be more to come. I hope we might get some radio coverage and perhaps even a little bit of TV. This all sounds glamorous but it is hard work. We have been planning and talking about how to ensure Dressed for War gets a good start since October 2018, which is three months before I typed the first sentence of the first draft.

The book that I have always referred to as Audrey will be published on 6 February 2020 with a party at Somerville College in Oxford and an interview with Diane Setterfield, which I am very much looking forward to. Two days before that we will launch the book in London at a joint event with a small team from Italy who run a project called Mending for Good. Today there is a growing appreciation of the impact of fashion’s carbon footprint on the environment and I feel certain that Audrey would have been behind any project that challenged waste and encouraged good practice. After all, she presided over the most dramatic movement in wartime fashion, the Utility and Austerity scheme. This dictated skirt and shirt lengths; it limited the number of pockets on jackets and the width of the gusset in women’s knickers. It feels fitting to focus on the future as well as on the past as we celebrate setting Audrey free.

As Dressed for War leaves me bobbing in its wake, I will try to be sanguine about the reaction of the reviewers who will express their opinions, whether good or bad. It is a fact that writers, as other performers, tend to remember the bad reviews. But what I really long for, and what I think every writer longs for, is the moment when we come face to face with a reader who has got something personal to say about the book we have just published. It does not always happen but when it does it is as important as any review. And that won’t happen unless we get the publicity right, which is why Richard, Becky and I are working so hard behind the scenes to make it work.

This is the preview of the book https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEvw_APrtX8&feature=youtu.be

Announcing Audrey

Posted on October 7, 2019March 14, 2021 by Julie Summers

It is a very strange feeling when you hand over a proof of a book for the final time. This precious document that you have shared with an editor, a copy editor, a proof-reader and an indexer, is suddenly ready to be shared with others. There is a momentary feeling of loss that, for me at least, is comparable to a bereavement. Well, a bereavement over the loss of an animal, say, not a relative – let’s not be over-dramatic.

But when I pressed the final send button to launch Audrey back through the ether towards London I felt a terrible, almost physical sadness. She was no longer my private, treasured friend with whom I have spent the most intensive nine months of my life since I laid down my research papers and clicked out the first words of draft one on 7 January 2019. It seems a lifetime ago, as it always does, but it also seems to have gone far too quickly. In a strange way it is a lifetime. I have come to know Audrey over the course of most of her long and varied life, that is with the exception of the years of her retirement. I have found her fascinating, lovely, loving, amusing, passionate and ambitious but also private, infuriatingly self-deprecating and mischievous when it came to covering her tracks.

Now she is almost ready to be launched on the world in her final form. The book, with 416 pages including twelve pages of index and eight pages of photographic plates, will be available from 6 February 2020. Rather wonderfully that is my grandmother’s birthday, though she is no longer with us. She knew Audrey well as my grandfather and Audrey were cousins, born two years apart. My grandparents used to visit her on business trips to London and she and Victor stayed with them on the Wirral more than once.

The title for my book, which we have pushed back and forth for months, has been decided upon by the publisher: Dressed for War. The cover image took even longer to negotiate but what a stunning one it is. Undoubtedly the most beautiful cover I have ever had but then Audrey deserves nothing less. It was an American design used by Audrey for the September 1943 issue of Vogue with a list of contents on the left-hand side that included renovations, coupons and repairs. A stark juxtaposition but somehow a beautiful summing up of Audrey’s editorship during the second half of the war: beauty and excellence balanced with practical, no-nonsense advice.

For now Audrey is still under wraps at the publishers. I will get to see her one more time before she goes off to the printers to check the layouts and see the final version with plates, index, updated acknowledgements and footnotes. My job is to ensure this wonderful woman reaches as wide a public as possible. Audrey’s extraordinary life, her exceptional leadership and her championing of women’s causes in the middle of the twentieth century deserve to be better known, especially at a time when women’s rights are under threat as at no other time in our recent history. I want to celebrate her editing skills, her ability to attract, handle and maintain relationships with some of the most brilliant but tricky artists and writers of her time. And I want readers to understand that history has created a black and white portrait of a woman so colourful that it needs to be corrected.

You can pre-order Dressed for War at your local independent bookshop, at all other major bookshops in Britain, and online. The book will also be available as an e-book and an audio book.

Catapulting Audrey

Posted on June 10, 2019March 14, 2021 by Julie Summers

I was going to post this blog on 4 August after I had handed in the finished draft of my biography of Audrey Withers to my editor, Iain MacGregor, on 31 July, as per contract. However, on 25 April Iain asked whether I could bring the deadline forward by six weeks and deliver by mid-June. It is the kind of question that focuses an author’s mind in a way almost no other can. I agreed to have a go. My feelings on the way back from London that afternoon ranged from blind panic to the thrill of the challenge. Over the last six weeks I have gone from one to the other on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. But I met my deadline and delivered the book last Friday, a week before Iain was expecting it. That surprised even me.

My son pointed out that there are a lot of diet cokes in the bin…

The main reason it was possible to do what seemed almost unthinkable on the morning after my meeting with Iain was because I was able to clear the decks and my diary thanks to the support of my incredibly kind and understanding husband, Chris. He retired last year and was able to act as gatekeeper and cook so that all I had to do was to work. Sometimes that work involved thinking and puzzling over some knotty little problem or other so I did that while working in the garden or walking on the riverbank with the dogs or on my cycle ride to the library. But in the main I sat in my office, staring at a screen, thumbing through my notebooks with an exasperated ‘where the hell did I make a note of that?’ or looking out of the window at the sun-kissed garden wondering when it would rain.

This morning we did a cross comparison of the difference between draft one of Audrey and the final version which is at least draft seven. Here it is.

As you will see from the amount of red on the screen, not much of the brilliant first plan survived contact with the editing enemy. I was astonished, to be honest. I had not realised just how much I had changed in the last two months (I had started editing before my critical meeting with Iain).

When I finished the first draft, I had the weekend off, then sat down on Monday morning and read the whole book through from cover to cover and tried to get a feeling for the overall story. That took three days and by the end I realized I had got a book that could work and although it was in need of a great deal of editing, it was at least a narrative. The next time I read it was for facts. Had I got everything in that I wanted to include, such as the vital memos or the story of her first marriage or her relationship with Lee Miller? That took two weeks and involved me using both my screens, one for the draft and the other to double check my electronic files. That is when a lot of changes took place and I needed a couple of visits to Vogue House to check issues of Vogue from the nineteen fifties.

The third read-through was for cadence. It seems a funny word to use but it is the best one I can come up with. Every chapter has to have a certain type of pace. Audrey once described how the readers of Vogue had to be led through the magazine page by page and there should be no ugly juxtaposition of stories. She was once very critical of a piece in American Vogue shortly after the war which featured luxurious clothes in Rome opposite a photograph of a starving child. For a book it is sometimes helpful to be able to change the pace and go from a piece of high action or drama of, say, war reporting, to a completely different type of event, such as a family funeral. For it to work it has to be deliberately but carefully done. I want my readers to feel some emotion. I once got ticked off by a WI lady who accused me of making her cry several times when she was reading Stranger in the House and she was rather put out when I said I was sorry but very pleased too. It is a sad book, telling some terrible stories about the impact on women of men returning from the war. Good that she was moved, good that she cried. I cried when I was writing some of those stories. War is a terrible thing and it has a long, long tail. A psychologist from Germany once said to me: ‘Hitler wanted the Third Reich to last for a thousand years. He didn’t succeed but the fallout from his experiment will last for generations.’

By the time draft three was completed I had had my meeting with Iain and the pressure was on. It was fortunate that I had got to where I was in the editing process because I could see how it would be possible to accelerate the next iterations. I think Audrey has benefitted from very close and energetic attention because I was forced to keep up a cracking pace and it meant that any research I still needed to do had to justify the time spent on it. I had one fantastic day in May reading the diaries of Harry Yoxall, Condé Nast’s managing director in the UK. He wrote about 250 pages a year and had the pages stapled and bound in slip cases with the year on the spine.

I had read the Second World War years at his great-grandson’s house in Surrey but the rest of the diaries were with his grandson in Suffolk. I needed to read the years Audrey was at Vogue, so 1931 to 1938 and 1946 to 1960. Twenty-two years or 5,500 pages or, even more scarily, 1,375,000 words. How the hell was I going to manage that in ten hours? In the end I worked out a way to scan his handwriting for Audrey’s name. He had quite a distinctive way of writing A and it made it relatively easy to find mentions of her. Less easy when the diaries were in French, which half of them were! Sometimes he typed letters to his wife and then used them as diary pages. They were a joy, especially the one from March 1953 when he attended an investiture at Buckingham Palace the day Audrey was given her OBE by a very young and nervous Queen Elizabeth. He was worried that the knighting sword was so heavy she might chop off the head of one of her subjects. That was a great discovery, as was the moment when I found out for sure that Audrey had left Vogue of her own volition and had not been gently asked to leave, which is what I and others had assumed. She told him over lunch in June 1957 that she intended to retire at the end of the decade. The trip was more than worth the day and a half it took to get there and back.

There have been other finds too, in the bowels of the Law Library in Oxford and in the microfiche copies of the Daily Sketch at the British Library but this blog is already too long…

So that has been the process and I plodded, raced, panicked, wept, laughed my way through the next weeks as I beat and bashed my writing into some sort of shape which I hope Iain will be able to work with. The next months are crucial as Audrey will be edited, copy-edited, proof-read, fact-checked and finally sent to the indexers prior to printing in the autumn. I have no idea how many more changes will be made but I expect quite a few. I am both excited and exhausted, but most of all relieved that I made it.

Clearing the First Hurdle

Posted on April 4, 2019March 14, 2021 by Julie Summers

My very messy desk and one patient dog, Tiggy, who sits in her wine box behind the desk day in, day out, while I’m writing

Well, as promised in my last blog, here I am on 4 April 2019 with the first draft of Audrey under my belt. I kept a note of the daily word count to prove to myself that I was making progress so I thought I would be brave and publish it here. It shows, to me at least, the days when I struggled to get into the writing mode and other days when things went fluently. That is the nature of writing non-fiction in my experience: I get onto a roll and power through a segment, as I did on 19 February or get stuck up a blind alley as shown by the dismal figures on 4 March.

Do these figures actually tell me anything about my writing? To some extent they do. On 19 February I wrote the last half of chapter seven which covers the breathtakingly exciting period in Audrey’s editorship when Lee Miller was covering the battle of St Malo and the liberation of Paris. My diary entry from that day reads: ‘After gym spent all day writing 5384 words on Lee in France. All good stuff but utterly exhausting. Off to plan skiing clothes.’ Not very informative but the truth is that writing is exciting in my head but boring for the rest of my family. When I am locked up in my office for eight hours, I am hors combat to all and when I emerge my brain is so fried that I am not very good company. For what it is worth, I had returned from skiing on the first weekend in March so the reason for a small word count on the first Monday was not that I was stuck but that I had to spend the morning doing admin.

What next? I have 102,821 words in a draft and now the process of editing begins. For me this is the most exciting and creative part of writing non-fiction. I get to read the book for the first time as I almost never re-read anything while I’m completing the first draft. It is also a time of truth. The raw writing is full of repetition, facts that need cross-checking and an unhealthy number of adverbs. I could probably cut 1,000 words just by removing those unnecessary fillers which I know I put in to emphasise emotion or action but which add little to the work. So those will come out in the first edit, as will padding which inevitably creeps in when I am not entirely sure of myself, especially when dealing with family emotion. How do I know, for example, how Audrey felt at her father’s funeral? I do not know but I have to make an educated guess based on her relationship with him shown through her letters and her thoughts in her autobiography

Ah, the autobiography. Now there is a book I have had trouble with. Audrey published her autobiography in 1994 at the age of eighty-nine. She devoted less than half of it to her years at Vogue and a portion of the later chapters deal with her father’s correspondents and his art collection. In fact, that book is more interesting for what she leaves out than for what she includes. It is a prime example of her desire to cover the traces of her personal life. There is, for instance, no mention of any of her friends by name. Not a single one. But I know from her letters that she had many friends and was popular with her own age group and people of her father’s generation as well. The dramatis personae in her version of her life are her immediate family, her two husbands and about eight colleagues at Vogue.

My favourite example of Audrey taking control of her own story are the couple of sentences that she devotes to her first wedding. ‘Our friends had assumed that Jock and I would marry, and one day we did. From my parents’ point of view it must have been an unsatisfactory affair, to a man they had never taken to, and not in church but at a registry office.’ Hm. Not a very promising start to married life a reader might conclude. But Audrey was writing with hindsight and a divorce behind her. Through Percy Withers’ letters at Somerville College and Harry Yoxall’s diaries it is possible to build a richer and clearer picture of her nuptials. Far from disapproving of Jock, her parents accepted him readily and Percy wrote to one of his friends to say how pleased he was that Audrey was marrying at last. There was a huge party the night before the wedding, which took place on 2 September 1933 (thank you Somerville College archives), and a reception at the Savile Club in London which was attended by about 100 guests. It is true they got married in a registry office but that would not have bothered Percy Withers as he was an atheist. Mary Withers did have a religious bent but she bowed to her husband’s persuasion, as she did on so many other things… but that is another story. So, you see how I’ve had to read between the lines and take Audrey’s own record of her life with a large pinch of salt. A whole bucket load, in fact.

I interviewed Pam Makin who worked for Audrey from 1949 to 1952 and who spoke to me about her energy, passion and sense of humour.

One of the myths that has grown up around her is that of the intelligent but austere blue-stocking. A headmistress-type with little emotion but great strength of character. It is true that she was intelligent, formidably so according to some colleagues, and it is true that she could be headmistress-like at work, but what that hides is her true personality. She was kind and generous, giving every member of staff at the office a personal and carefully chosen Christmas present every year. She was ‘one of the quietest listeners now living’ according to her friend, the artist Paul Nash, while Maur Griggs, an older friend, wrote of the gleams of friendly fun in her eyes. Later in her life she showed her passion when she described her happiness in the early months of her second marriage. Those letters to Edna Woolman Chase (editor-in-chief of Vogue), carefully preserved in the magical archives of Condé Nast in New York, were a revelation in their honesty, sheer delight and surprise at finding herself so happy. Audrey was not austere but passionate, fun, adventurous, impetuous at times. She adored foreign travel and wild swimming, she wrote poetry and went to concerts and the theatre as often as her work would allow. And she loved cats. She described herself once as being like a soda stream, fizzing with pleasure. That is the Audrey who is beginning to appear in my work.

My next three months will be taken up with beating the book into shape, teasing out the development of Audrey’s personality over the decades and planting her firmly, enthusiasm and all, in her life’s work as editor of Vogue. Appropriately, as Audrey loved America, I will be posting my next update on 4 July, the day before I fly to Boston for my son’s wedding. How about that for a neat circle?