The Vogue Factor

by Kirstie Clements

  One afternoon, as I was hunched over a stupid pinwheel trying to embroider a chain stitch, she turned on me and demanded I do it all over again because it wasn’t straight. I made the mistake of admitting that I hated the whole exercise and I didn’t envisage a future that included embroidery anyway. This made her so angry she kept the whole class back after the bell rang until I completed the task. All the girls were hissing ‘C’mon Clements’ and throwing things at me, as my tears plopped down on the pinwheel and Mrs Smith stood over me with a malevolent grin. I distinctly remember having a Scarlett O’Hara ‘as God is my witness I will never pick up a sewing needle again’ moment, and went straight home to tell my mother about my humiliation. My dear mum immediately wrote a letter to the school, reminding them of my academic prowess (Year Four spelling bee champion) and demanded that I be excused from sewing classes. I also made her put in a paragraph stating that a girls-only sewing class was sexist. It may have been the headmaster’s little joke, but as a result I was sent to woodshop lessons with the boys. That too was tedious, irrelevant and possibly cancerous, because the tough guys in the class were constantly setting fire to whatever useless knick-knack they made, but I stayed just to prove a point. Eventually the teachers allowed me to go to the library, where I read and wrote ghost stories instead.

  As luck would have it, sewing was compulsory in my first year of High School. There was just something about sewing machines and me. It was as if I attracted a poltergeist every time I went near one. By the time I had clumsily threaded the needle and then jammed and unjammed the bloody thing ten or so times, the rest of the class would have run up a wraparound maxi skirt while my fabric would be in shreds. My high school teacher eventually took pity on me and just let me watch the other girls. To this day I have never so much as sewn on a button and I never will.

  There was a very strict dress code at my high school that none of us dared to stray from, mostly revolving around high-waisted shorts with front pleats in Hawaiian-print cotton. I had to pay friends who could sew to make some for me. The shorts were accessorised with ‘slaps’ (velvet thongs with a rattan base that smelled like a wet dog after one wear), clunkies (a wooden platform wedge sandal), or a platform Dr Scholl’s sandal. I desperately wanted a pair of Scholl’s, but my mother, who owned an upmarket children’s clothing boutique called Minnie’s Inn Shop, refused to buy me any. She had noticed all the surfie (Australian slang for someone who surfs all the time) chicks shuffling down the street in them, and had apparently been revolted by their dry cracked heels.

  My girlfriends and I also shopped in the hippy stores, for long Indian-print wraparound skirts (perfect with aforementioned clunkies), stacks of thin, multicoloured and patterned plastic bracelets, and strawberry musk oil. Jeans were flared and high waisted, worn with boob tubes or a satin handkerchief top. Bikinis were crochet. Eye shadow was bright sky-blue.

  When I think back, my local shopping mall perhaps shaped my future more than I could ever have predicted. There was a newsagency at the front of the centre that imported a UK magazine for teenage girls called Pink. I was obsessed with it. Pink covered fashion, beauty, pop bands, the tone was clever and fun, and I was completely addicted. Whoever edited it was a genius. The newsagency only ordered one or two copies, so every Saturday morning I would walk the three kilometres to the mall and sit outside by myself, often in the cold, waiting for it to open so I wouldn’t miss out. That I ended up being the beauty editor of Vogue now makes such perfect sense.

  By the age of fifteen, my girlfriends and I had started going to local pubs and discos, dressed to kill (and get past the doorman) in harem pants, lip gloss, stiletto mules and clutch bags. But I hated the music. I had always liked glam rock: the first single I ever bought was ‘Jeepster’ by T Rex, I’d seen Bryan Ferry and Gary Glitter, I was a member of the David Bowie fan club and I made my own Bowie scrapbooks. The longer I lived in my town, the less I fit in. I couldn’t stand the beach culture, and all the abuse that would be hurled at you when you walked past a gang of surfies. Everyone was stoned all the time, listening to The Doobie Brothers or the Eagles. Nobody wanted to go to university, travel or even read. The mere sound of rugby league commentary on the radio on Sunday afternoons depressed me and reminded me how out of place I was.

  In 1978 I began working at a shoe store for a few afternoons a week after school and on Saturday mornings. It was also a ballet supply store. I absolutely loved that job; unpacking all the new shoes when they came in, and just being surrounded by the gorgeous pale-pink satin-pointe slippers and headbands.

  The owner’s daughter, Leonie, was a year or so older than me, and had a boyfriend with a car and great taste in music. One morning, when we were both working together in the store, she told me that she and her boyfriend were going into the city to see a band. Would I like to come? Saturday night, I was sixteen years old and we were headed for the Grand Hotel in the heart of Sydney.

  The front of the bar was your average rough Aussie pub, with a ragtag bunch of drinkers of all ages. You had to walk through to the back and down a few steps to a windowless room that had another small bar. This is where the bands played. No one checked ID. I walked into the gloom nervously and looked around. It was full of punks with safety pins in their noses and ears, studded leather jackets and skinny black jeans. There were hardly any girls, and the ones that were there looked formidable. The support band started, a sort of punkish/rockabilly outfit called Tommy and The Dipsticks. Then came the more hardcore punk band: Johnny Dole and the Scabs. The crowd was drinking and spitting and pogoing. It was the most exciting thing I had ever seen. The music, the energy, the clothes. I had discovered like-minded people from all backgrounds; people who loved music, film and fashion. That night changed my life.

  After my epiphany at The Grand, I became obsessed with the punk scene. Luckily, I could stay at my Aunt Fay’s house, which was central to all the venues, and she didn’t care what time I came home. She would also let my best friends from school, Robyn and Jenny, stay. That was the end of the horrible disco clothes.

  Our new uniform consisted of black or blue jeans that we had to have taken in by Jenny (who could manage a sewing machine) to make them into super-skinny stovepipes. We wore black sneakers, t-shirts and khaki army disposal jackets with red lipstick, black nail polish and loads of eyeliner. We made friends with a lot of the guys in the bands, who were really very sweet when they weren’t spitting and pogoing. All the pubs had live music, and no one cared if you were underage. There were never any problems. We were there for the music and the fashion, not to smash glasses.

  Once I fell into the band scene there was no going back to my old neighborhood. My mother knew I had a thirst for adventure, and she trusted me. Mum had travelled a great deal as a young woman, taking the ship to London and having numerous European adventures before she met my father Joseph. She always encouraged me to follow my instincts. So a few months later I had the clerical job at a stockbroker’s office, and had moved into my first apartment in Kings Cross, which I shared with a girlfriend. I had escaped from the stifling conformity of the suburbs! Now the fashion experimentation really kicked in.

  Everybody in the punk music scene had no money to speak of, as they were all in bands and on the dole. Over the next few years I would live in shared accommodation in many dubious terrace houses and apartments, listening to Iggy Pop and the Buzzcocks while various aspiring bass players practised the opening riff to ‘Public Image’ in the living room. The girls, rather than the boys, tended to have jobs, as for some of us it was important to have milk, tea and toilet paper in the house. Because we were all broke, clothes were trawled from thrift stores and customised to suit. Everyone looked amazing. We became terrible image snobs. I suppose in some way I had merely swapped the uniform of the suburbs for another tribal code—but this one was far more cool.

  The boys were all super skinny because they lived on cigarettes and wine, and only ate the day their dole cheques came in. They all had whippet
-thin black suits, with dyed black hair à la Bob Dylan in his heroin period, or were bleached blonde in leather jackets like Paul Simonon from The Clash. We had very specific groups we would cross over with: rockabillies, punks, mods, New Romantics and weird, arty New Zealanders in vintage clothes, yes; hippies, long-haired pub rock kids and surfies—good God no.

  My girlfriends and I adopted another look that was based around black mini skirts, fishnet stockings, ripped sweatshirts, hoop earrings and bleached blonde hair, later dyed bright pink. On one trip to visit Mum she refused to walk through the local shopping centre with me. I think I was also wearing white, short gumboots with matte black tights—probably not my sartorial zenith. Then a boy I was mad about told me I looked like a fifties B-grade movie star. I was thrilled with this (now I come to think of it) somewhat backhanded compliment. My new fashion predilection was for full fifties skirts, angora sweaters, stiletto heels and diamante drop earrings. The thrift shops were a treasure trove, because at that time they were full of fifties and sixties originals that didn’t cost the earth. My fashion icon was Ava Gardner, and the mother, Nancy Kelly, from the 1956 horror thriller movie The Bad Seed. The forties and the fifties have always been my preferred style decades, and in later years I would shop at Prada to achieve a similar effect.

  Makeup was of course crucial to our sense of theatrics. The punk era required us to be porcelain pale, so that was the end of sunlight for me. I retreated indoors at the age of sixteen and never tanned again. My friend Gabriel Wilder and I used to save up to buy Shiseido foundation No. 1, the lightest and most matte base on the market. We wore thick brush strokes of black liquid eyeliner, false lashes, bright-red lipstick and hot-pink blush. The general effect was probably something near Kabuki makeup, and five shades off the right colour for our natural complexions, but it’s a look I love and have never quite gotten over. I’ve toned it down a bit now as is appropriate for my age, but I fully intend taking it back up again when I’m seventy, along with blood-red nails and men’s silk lounging pyjamas.

  Our fashion sense was also strongly influenced by many of the international bands that were touring; the scene was so small and we normally met them somehow. Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Cure, Simple Minds, The Pretenders, The Stranglers, Lou Reed, Nico and Elvis Costello all came into our social orbit and so we seesawed between Goth (all black), New Romantic (pirate shirts and high-waisted black pants) and Buffalo Girl (brown leather distressed men’s jackets with long full cotton skirts). At Paddington Markets one Saturday morning in 1982, Gabriel and I spotted the real Paul Simonon, bass player of The Clash, buying a fifties lamp. We bowled up and nervously introduced ourselves to him, and he very generously put our names on the door list for every one of The Clash’s Sydney concerts at the Capitol.

  Music informed everything I chose to wear as did, increasingly, cinema. If we weren’t seeing bands, we were at the movies, getting an education in seminal film. It was around about this period I decided that if ever in doubt, dress like Anouk Aimee in La Dolce Vita. Or Grace Kelly in Rear Window.

  I made two extended trips to Europe in the early eighties and my fashion recollections are reflective of the trends at the time—black jeans, a black overcoat, Cuban-heeled boots and a keffiyeh scarf was something of a uniform in London. Another extended stay in Greece involved cheesecloth goddess dresses, gold chain belts and—I shudder to admit—I may have even tied one of those gold leather plaits around my forehead, but that was a momentary aberration. On a trip to Italy in 1984 I finally cemented what is pretty much my style up until today.

  I was travelling through Rome with my friends Bernard and Michael. Bernard was a huge fan of Italian culture. We had been to all the Italian film festivals together back in Sydney. One afternoon, we walked into the Fiorucci store and I spotted a cream overcoat. It was a perfect fifties duster coat, with printed lining. Add black cropped cigarette pants, ballet flats and cat-eye glasses and that was it. I don’t stray far from this style right up until today. Fiorucci was quite trendy then, and not inexpensive. Considering I had shopped vintage all my life, this was the first real ‘label’ I had ever bought. I had that coat for years; it never dated. Bernard bought one very similar. He wore it with loafers and no socks, with his black hair in a quiff, and in doing so managed to look like Marcello Mastroianni.

  It was liberating to spend the early part of my youth playing with clothes and finding my own style, without the tyranny of being influenced by expensive labels. I feel sad when I hear young girls today—especially teenagers—saying, ‘I love Givenchy and Balenciaga’, and you know it’s unlikely they have ever read a book about the original designer. I think an eighteen-year-old with a luxury designer bag has missed out on a lot, not the least the excitement of it taking fifteen years to save up and buy one for yourself.

  It was this fifties-Fellini vibe I was channelling when I started at Vogue. Judith Cook appreciated what I was trying to achieve on my very limited budget (my salary on the reception desk was $87 per week). She still reminds me that I used to wear ballet slippers and headbands and red lipstick. All the editors at Vogue understood that style is not a slavish devotion to labels. When you work in fashion, it stands to reason that you are going to follow trends, but where it goes wrong is if the trend doesn’t suit you personally.

  When I moved to Paris in 1994, I moved into what I now think of my post-war Paris period. I had it all: the red lips, my hair up in combs in a Victory Roll. I wore silk crepe, forties floral-print dresses by Cacharei, with Robert Clergerie forties-style black suede sandals and black fishnet stockings. My perfume was Shalimar by Guerlain or Chanel No. 5, as they were redolent of the period. One afternoon, I noticed a good-looking young man had been following me for blocks. He finally approached me at the traffic lights and said timidly: ‘I’ve been walking behind you for a long time. You are like a woman from another era, the smell of your fragrance, the way you are dressed, your stockings, the sound that your heels make on the cobblestones.’ I was thrilled he understood my intention. He then asked if I would have a glass of champagne with him. I did, of course. It’s heartening when someone appreciates that you put some thought into how you look.

  8

  THE EDITOR’S CHAIR

  I began at Vogue as the receptionist just as the September 1985 issue was on stand. Now here I was starting as editor, with the September 1999 issue just about to launch.

  September issues are traditionally the biggest during the calendar year because they contain the most advertising and editorial pages. This one also happened to be Vogue Australia’s fortieth anniversary issue, and two parties and exhibitions had been planned for both Sydney and Melbourne. I literally walked into events I had made no contribution to whatsoever, which felt terribly awkward. All I wanted to do was get to my desk and fix the magazine. The way it looked, there was nothing to celebrate. Circulation had taken a massive drop and there were no forward ad bookings. There was one page for the October issue, but it was FOC (free of charge) to compensate for a mistake made with the client in the previous edition. At least Robyn Holt had a sense of humour about the state of affairs. We spent a few minutes in her office grimly amusing ourselves by moving the single ad around the empty magazine grid, seeing where it looked best.

  I had no time to start the November issue from scratch, so I kept and cleaned up what had already been commissioned, submitted and was passable. The rest of the magazine I filled with lifts. ‘Lifts’ are stories that have already appeared in other Condé Nast magazines that are usually available for free, or at a much less expensive rate than it would cost to produce yourself. Financial controllers are big fans of lifts, for obvious reasons. Readers hate them; a savvy reader also buys international magazines, so there can be an overlap in what they are being presented.

  There was also—rightly so—an element of reader indignation about us not using enough homegrown talent, and we were sometimes accused, unfairly, of lacking our own ideas. Lifts have become almost obligatory for most l
icensed titles now, as editors are no longer allocated editorial budgets that can cover the costs of creating every page from scratch. Vogues that are owned and operated by Condé Nast tend to produce all their own material, whereas titles that are under licence to proprietors in other regions, such as Australia, are generally a mix of original material and lifts. I believe there is a place for well-chosen lifts in a luxury title, to make sure all the talent represented consistently remains first-rate. It was not always possible for us to secure the top international models or celebrities of the moment, which is why we sometimes needed to rely on republishing fashion stories and articles from our sister publications such as US, British or Paris Vogue. But now the cost pressure in the magazine industry to repurpose non-original material is enormous. The day is fast approaching when a magazine and its website will only be full of lifts, promotional shots handed out by clients, and staff Instagrams. And there will be a whole tier of upper management scratching their heads, wondering why circulation is tumbling and blaming the editor.

  It would never occur to them that the reader had been shortchanged.

  The first steps in setting Vogue on the right course was to appoint an ace team, which in turn meant letting go of some of the incumbent staff and contributors. I will be eternally grateful to the then editorial business manager Georgette Johnson, and Nancy, who both helped me through the awful process that is terminating someone’s employment. While never pleasant, there is an added level of emotion that surrounds working for Vogue. It has been successfully positioned over the years as so elite, and so special, that staff can lose their own identity and become overly attached to the brand.