When The Devil Wears Prada was first published, in 2003, it was seen as a nasty little take-down of the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Its author, 26-year-old Lauren Weisberger, had been one of Wintour’s assistants for a year, and had turned her fish-out-of-water experience into an acerbic fictional account of the magazine world at its most hierarchical and glamorous.
The New York Times’s po-faced review called it “a mean-spirited Gotcha! of a book” while at Condé Nast Wintour denied she’d even opened it. But three years later, when it had been made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, everybody laughed and loved it. Wintour wore Prada to the premiere and the film went on to inspire in the hearts of thousands of starry-eyed young women the dream of finding a job in such a demanding and glorious workplace.
I worked on British magazines from 1983 to 2012, spanning Just Seventeen, Elle, Vogue, In Style, Good Housekeeping and Psychologies. I was features editor or director on the first three, and edited the last three. It makes me feel like a dinosaur to draw attention to my once-glittering CV, as so much of the knowledge, research, teamwork, connections, creativity and time those publications required is completely unnecessary now. Reading magazines like these – many digital only, produced by a skeleton staff – is strictly a niche activity.
We didn’t realise then that the nineties was the high-water mark of the circulation and power of the glossy magazine industry. Of course, we have the internet to thank, and blame, for what happened next. Social media and smartphones enabled individual and lucrative brand-building. A focus on relatability fostered the idea that glossies were elitist, even harmful to women, with their diet plans, narrow beauty ideals, airbrushing, size-zero models and lack of diversity.
But in comparison to the far more invasive, pervasive and pricey beauty “tweakments” and body modification of today, I would say women’s magazines at the end of the 20th century were far less damaging. They introduced new people and new ideas about what a woman could be in a fast-changing world. Many women loved these monthly treats. They might come wreathed in perfume ads and sleek models, but they packed a feminist message that is hard to find in the cacophony that has taken their place.
My first staff job on a magazine was at Just Seventeen. Its creator David Hepworth told Stylist on what would have been the magazine’s 30th birthday (it closed in 2004): “Within a few months we were a bit of a phenomenon, selling a couple of hundred thousand copies every fortnight, tempting new readers with promotions – Duran Duran poster, pink wrist band, tiny book called The Facts Of Life – and turning a lot of them into loyal readers. These girls didn’t simply like Just Seventeen. They felt the need to boast about liking it.”
Just Seventeen didn’t dismiss its readers as children. It took their passions and worries seriously. These teenagers trusted you not just with the choice of mascara or whether jazz shoes could still cut it. They wanted to know about boys and sex and parents and life. It was fun, but it was also serious. This was a time when teenage pregnancy was tabloid catnip, and mother-of-ten Victoria Gillick was pushing the House of Lords to stop contraceptive advice being given to under-16s without parental consent. We were on the side of information, but we had all the gossip about Boy George and Madonna too.
Elle magazine was launched in the UK in 1985. A co-production between Rupert Murdoch and the French publisher Hachette, it was big news, with high expectations. While Just Seventeen’s staff came via poly courses and beauty school, with heaps of nous and street style, the calibre of staff at Elle was broadsheet-heavy, and joining the team one year in felt intimidating.
Elle’s launch editor was Sally Brampton, ex-Observer, and she wanted to create a modern, thoughtful title that didn’t stereotype women as superficial and self-obsessed. While the clothes were mostly affordable and photographed on young, fresh models, often leaping about, Elle’s features verged on the radical.
Writers included Germaine Greer, Martin Amis, Tony Parsons, Susie Orbach, Tim Page (on whom the Dennis Hopper character in Apocalypse Now was based). After the disappearance of estate agent Suzy Lamplugh, we published a 12-page special on sexual harassment and violence against women. There were pieces on addiction, debt, gambling and an interview with a woman with Aids – so pioneering that the NHS requested the use of Elle’s fact box.
As one of the staffers, Nilgin Yusuf, employed then as a fashion writer and now a playwright, told me, “There was something genius and subversive about slipping these things in, with deep coverage, between fashion, beauty and interviews. It showed how our readers were regarded – as intelligent, complex women, interested in the world around them.”
We treated culture – theatre, dance, art, literature – much more seriously than other women’s magazines did at the time. Writers like Rachel Cusk, Alexander Stuart and Jeanette Winterson were commissioned to write on subjects that we unearthed over a long, convivial lunch. In fact, the whole experience – lots of parties, meetings in the Groucho Club, celebrity sightings in the office – could make it seem like nothing but fun, but Elle also spearheaded ethical practices, like banning fur editorial and advertising, and models under the age of 16.
When Brampton decided to leave I did too, to edit the women pages of the Guardian. With a potent feminist tradition, those daily pages had become something of an albatross around the necks of the all-male senior team at the paper. In Ian Mayes’s recently published history of the Guardian, Witness in the Time of Turmoil, he writes that the pages’ image was not aided by a scene in Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, a hugely popular BBC2 series starring Michael Gambon. “He believed that thinking of ‘something very very boring [like] the Guardian women’s page’ might help him control himself when the gorgeous young nurse (played by Joanne Whalley) slathered his psoriasis-affected lower regions as he lay in hospital.” I can’t tell you how many times I was told that story.
I brought Andrea Chapman, chief sub-editor of Elle, to the Guardian with me and according to Mayes with our black lycra dresses and red lipstick we “struck an exotic note in the male-dominated domain… as if they had stepped from the glossy pages of Elle”.
I eventually came to suspect that they chose me, a New Zealander who hadn’t grown up reading Jill Tweedie, in the hope I would destroy the section for them. I commissioned pieces that ran from the battle for women priests in the Church of England and the early experiences of IVF to the use of the word “cunt” and a survey of married women’s level of sexual satisfaction with their partners (biggest mailbag ever). Peter Preston and Alan Rusbridger might have been right that the 70s flavour of feminist politics and debate wouldn’t win new fans, but there was plenty of room for female-focused interviews and features.
As for working in an office where 80 per cent of the staff was male, it was predictably sexist. When I went to one of my bosses to complain about a handsy co-worker who had groped several of the younger members of the team, I was advised to write a feature about it for the women’s pages. Of course, the assailant didn’t read it, and we simply fumed.
After four years I returned to women’s magazines when I was headhunted to go to Vogue. I had two young children and was newly divorced. Alexandra Shulman was offering four days a week and a job in the features department, and after a year I became features director.
Obviously Vogue is not “just” a women’s magazine, but during the 90s, with Elle building and Marie Claire scooping up readers and awards, women were looking for more than just fashion and beauty in a glossy. While the standing of the Guardian meant that I was rarely turned down by writers, Vogue had bright lights and a big budget. It was no big deal to do a life swap where war reporter Janine di Giovanni and Wimbledon wife and mother of three Zara Metcalfe traded places for a week, one fretting over south-west London school drop-offs, the other being posted to battle-weary Sarajevo.
The Vogue crew were not run-of-the-mill journalists. One lunch hour a figure in an enormous wide-brimmed hat, snowy white bosoms atop a lacy bustier, a big jacket, very long legs (if there was a skirt I couldn’t see it) with towering stilettos came into the features area breathlessly looking for the managing editor to approve her expenses. It was the legendary fashion editor Isabella Blow. She’d taxied in to discuss her use of taxis, but couldn’t believe how rude the driver had been to her about her outfit. I could only empathise.
While the fashion and beauty departments of magazines like Vogue or Elle came under commercial pressures, features was fantastically free. You wouldn’t want to over-do the heavy reads or high-minded culture, but at neither place was I edged toward “major or minor emotionals” or “triumphs over tragedy” like some of the more mainstream brands, such as Cosmo and Good Housekeeping. Along with Marie Claire, in the 90s there was a real appetite for grit among the glamour, though some of it would probably not get commissioned today, like Anne Billson’s interview with Roman Polanski (Vogue), or Tony Parsons’ night out with the vice squad in Soho (Elle).
So why did they stop selling, these brave, clever, beautiful monthlies? There’s a clue in the name. You might have an idea for a story, which could take a week or so to discuss with the team, the editor, the art department, the picture editor, and then get it commissioned, by phone or even over a lunch or drink. It would take at least another two weeks to be written, then the same time again to be subbed, pictures sourced or taken, the spreads laid out, and then proofed. The hundreds of pages of layouts and ads went off to press a good couple of weeks before they hit the newsstand. That’s almost two months between the seed of the story and it appearing. And often it was longer.
When I went to In Style at the beginning of the 21st century the mood in publishing was starting to change. It was clear that risky experiments were not part of the In Style brand. A magazine was to reassure readers by giving them a tightly packed version of what they had consumed the month before. In Style excelled in templated content, with definite rules and exact information on trends. Serendipity was for the birds.
By the time I left In Style in 2005 all the London magazine publishers were trying to work out what to do about digital. Because advertisers buy space based on audience reach, shrinking readerships led to cuts in budget and staff. Marie Claire for example sold 450,000 at its height but 20 years later went digital only. Vogue is still available in print, but it is very much a calling card for advertisers, rather than the magazine that once sold 140,000 on the newsstand.
Many of my former colleagues are no longer working in print journalism. Some are influencers, podcasters or on Substack; some are very successful, with tens of thousands of followers or subscribers; some not so much, and their LinkedIn profiles say Open to Work. There’s a lot that is positive about the way this new world works. You represent yourself, you can interact with your reader or listener, you get to choose your subject, or angle, you take and edit your own pictures, you may do deals with advertisers. The individuals are in some ways doing every job that was listed on an old magazine masthead.
But there is another way to look at it. When you get several dozen people (mostly women in this case) together to create content for 100-odd editorial pages of a monthly magazine, you are taking in a broad range of opinions, talents and voices. Writers didn’t have to be popular or beautiful, slim or well-dressed, zany or good in front of a mic or camera. In fact many of the best were quiet, introverted types. Over the weeks of putting a magazine together, everyone rubs up against each other, almost like the process of polishing rocks, or diamonds.
I really can’t see how a world full of Kardashian Insta inspo is kinder or more supportive than the women’s magazine. Looking back at features in Elle and Vogue, I can see remarkably little that would count as unrealistic models to batter readers. At Vogue I edited an anonymous facelift diary by a fashion designer, with no before and after photos, and certainly no exhortation to repeat her decision (which she appeared to regret anyway). I was at In Style when Botox began to be available from dermatologists as a beauty treatment. Injectables were expensive and, at the time, seemed extreme and intrusive. Nobody flinched when I announced to the team that In Style wouldn’t cover them.
Clearly that wouldn’t fly now that 20- and 30-somethings opt for “pre-emptive” Botox, and lip jobs and cheek implants are available on the high street. To each her own. We must all be aware of the irresistible temptation to glorify the past, to look back on our more youthful days with rosy nostalgia, firm in the knowledge that “things were better then”. Before my generation sinks into finger-wagging despair, it’s worth remembering that there’s bound to be something coming along soon to disrupt what disrupted us.
[Further reading: What the CIA’s “Queen of Torture” did next]
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