by Nina-Sophia Miralles (Quercus £20, 352pp)
In 2006, I was at a screening of The Devil Wears Prada with a friend who was a senior executive at British Vogue. In the film, based on a roman-a-clef by a former Vogue assistant, Meryl Streep plays terrifying fashion editor Miranda Priestly, all put-downs, scathing one-liners and fierce black-rimmed spectacles.
It was widely accepted as a thinly veiled portrait of the equally terrifying Vogue editor Anna Wintour. I asked my friend what she thought of the film. ‘It was something of an understatement,’ she said.
Wintour, famed for her thinness and implacable silence, is capable of producing fear and fascination, even if you’re not especially fashion-conscious. Highly ambitious, she moved to New York in 1975 and after blistering through various magazines was appointed editor-in-chief of Vogue.
Malice and back-stabbing behind Vogue s glossy exterior
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Nina-Sophia Miralles: Glossy - debut author takes on Vogue and the Condé Nasties
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For 129 years, Vogue magazine has been the world’s most prestigious style bible. Nina-Sophia Miralles looks back at the moguls, models and eccentric editors that made it a success – even during the Blitz
The first edition of Vogue hit newsstands across America on 17 December 1892, priced at ten cents, with a black-and-white illustration of a debutante on the cover. It was the brainchild of Arthur Baldwin Turnure, a lawyer turned publisher and a member of New York high society.
Arthur dubbed Vogue the magazine ‘written by the smart set, for the smart set’. By making it a high-quality society magazine, he appealed to both middle-class readers, who would buy it to see what the rich were up to, and to upper-class readers, who bought it to feed their egos.