The Vogue Factor

by Kirstie Clements

  It is a perception that is both positive and negative. On one hand, Vogue attracts people who are the best in their field, and who see the opportunity to work for Vogue as the pinnacle of their careers. It meant that you could hire the best and, sadly for them, pay the least.

  On the other hand, it is intensely alluring to poseurs, social climbers and those on a quest for personal glory. I would say one of my essential tasks as editor—right until the bitter end—was to spot the frauds. Vogue could open doors and offer remarkable opportunities to its staff and contributors, so it was vitally important to establish a culture that meant no one could abuse the system and take advantage. We needed to be exemplary in our behaviour, and have manners and standards higher than others in the industry. In 1999 we were going to have to build the brand, and its integrity, back from scratch. If you want to represent Vogue, and bask in the cachet that comes with it, you better make sure you can walk the walk.

  My first hiring was to poach fashion editor Tory Collison back from Bazaar, and she immediately got to work on the main story and cover for the December issue, shooting with Richard Bailey and featuring top Australian model Alyssa Sutherland.

  I then began recruiting a new editorial team, starting with the fashion editor from Marie Claire, Gabriele Mihajlovksi. I have huge respect for Marie Claire’s long-time editor Jackie Frank, and she is clearly wonderful at training staff; I would also steal Naomi Smith back from her a few years later.

  One of the best decisions I ever made was to retain the services of Leigh Ann Pow, who was already at Vogue as an editorial features assistant. With a background in newspapers, street magazines and the editorship of Smash Hits under her belt, Leigh Ann was everything you needed to be in magazines: hardworking, adaptable, honest, smart, a stickler for details and a team player. She also possessed a faultless bullshit detector. Leigh Ann went on to hold various editorial positions, eventually becoming associate editor. She was the most loyal of colleagues for my entire editorship.

  The next important appointment was art director, a role that is clearly crucial to a magazine. An accomplished art director is an editor’s best ally. The creative design of a magazine is the most important, and yet most nebulous element, because it is conceptual. As an editor you can easily recognise bad writing when you read it. The same goes for fashion styling—the mistakes are immediately apparent. But with art direction the evaluation becomes more complex. You know bad design when you see it. You may know what would improve it. But it can be difficult to articulate or even imagine what would make it great. That particular artistic process is intangible and limitless. Unless you suddenly turned into Fabien Baron overnight, you have to trust the instincts and abilities of your art department. There’s nothing that will cause an art director to shut up shop faster than if you walk up behind them, stare at their computer screen and opine: ‘You know, I think the type would look better in blue.’

  Editors can develop a God complex and believe they are the authority on everything, but it was not a position I ever assumed. I had learned certain truisms during my time in publishing, and I had an overall vision for the magazine, but I was also well aware there were people who were superior to me in other areas. The most pressing concern was to restore excellence and polish in every area, but there is no blueprint for that. There were key words we would follow that would guide our philosophy, such as beautiful, intelligent, first-rate. This approach stayed firm throughout my years as editor, but the execution of it would change constantly.

  Some of my ideas were a quick win, such as improving the fashion pages and the covers by hiring more appropriate stylists and photographers. Other initiatives were more trial and error, in terms of type and layout. I knew I would make some mistakes. Collaboration was essential. My mantra is to surround yourself with people who are great at what they do, have an informed opinion, and are willing to push back on you when they think it’s necessary. I don’t believe in micromanaging, and I have never seen people thrive under it, especially creatives. Staff need perimeters but not edicts. We were constantly seeking to improve every area, whether it was a tweaking of the headings and introductions, a new ‘run of book’ (the order in which the pages and sections run), a new columnist or a complete redesign. No issue is ever perfect; there is no foolproof formula. But if you think that the magazine is the best it could ever be, you should probably think about leaving.

  As the new managing director of Condé Nast, Robyn Holt was a firm believer in the power of harnessing and encouraging the staffs intellectual and emotional intelligence. That she was a savvy business person was a given, but her ability to make every one of us feel that we were on an important and ultimately successful path together was remarkable. Behind a closed door in her office, I would be aghast over the just-released readership figures and she would be tearing her hair out over numerous financial challenges, frantically chewing a Nicorette—but we never let the troops see that.

  One of her first steps was to have the offices evaluated for feng shui, and we took the recommended steps afterwards in the hope of achieving a more positive flow of energy. Whether anyone actually believed in it or not, the exercise went down extremely well with the staff as a gesture, and resulted in a logical redesign of the space that would allow different departments to communicate more freely with one another. She walked the floor every day, commenting and enthusing on whatever the editorial staff were working on, complimenting everyone when deadline was met, calling spontaneous meetings to congratulate us on every win, be it a piece of new business or an increase in circulation. Robyn used to joke with the executive management team that we had all thought we were coming to turn the ship around, but in reality we had to raise it from the bottom of the ocean floor.

  There were company seminars with behavioural psychologists, including one where Robyn herself had to undergo the terribly confronting 360-degree feedback exercise, when senior management critiqued her performance to her face, but she toughed it out with good grace. Where the company had once been divisive and disjointed, Robyn steered it to a place where every member of staff felt valued and empowered. She had sound business knowledge and editorial understanding. It’s a winning combination, especially when you throw in her humour, quick wit and taste.

  We once spent a good fifteen minutes at our Monday morning meeting settling on which Royal Doulton tableware we should order for the boardroom, an exercise which I’m sure finance departments would sneer at today. But these details matter when you are creating the Vogue culture, because the culture is what you are selling. The thickness of the stationery stock, the flowers on the reception desk, the handwritten thank-you notes, the napkins, the corporate Christmas cards, manners—all of these were an integral part of the brand’s DNA, and they were the reason you were charging premium rates for an ad page. Robyn instigated a shared goal of excellence for all, and the sales figures and advertising revenue slowly began to reflect the positive changes. It was an amazing era at Australian Condé Nast. For the rest of my career at Vogue I would never again feel so supported and understood by management as I did back then.

  There were other superb colleagues, including the inimitable Grant Pearce, who in 1999 held the position of creative services director just prior to his launching the upmarket men’s magazine GQ. Immensely stylish and charming—and most at home in a bespoke suit with a glass of pinot noir in his hand—Grant had worked at all sorts of jobs in the fashion industry, starting as a storeman and packer at John Kaldor Fabricmakers. Despite his predilection for high-end luxury, and his undoubted skill in this arena, he had a knowledge and appreciation of every area of the fashion industry. He and I became an almost inseparable duo in the marketplace, and he taught me invaluable lessons when it came to interacting with clients.

  Grant never over-promised. He would listen to what it was the business required and create a proposition for everybody concerned that was win/win. He was not interested in the dollar for the dollar’s sake; he was far more interested in
forging relationships that were built on trust and mutual outcomes. He wouldn’t agree to anything if he didn’t genuinely think it would benefit the client, as well as Vogue or GQ. He always kept the reader, or the customer, in mind during any deal, because he knew that ultimately they were the most important part of the equation.

  After Grant became the publisher of Vogue, we had a kind of good-cop, bad-cop routine going where it looked to an outside party that he had to convince me to compromise on certain editorial decisions, but in reality he didn’t. I agreed with pretty much everything he suggested because he was nearly always right. He worked hard, he played hard and he was all class. Added to that he was enormous fun to be around. I couldn’t have had a better mentor and champion and we had a fantastic partnership that would last more than a decade.

  Another central member of the team was events director Sally Bell, who had worked with Robyn for many years at both Vogue Living and at Yves Saint Laurent. Sally was another taste-maker, who knew precisely how to put the right layer of gloss and polish on events and promotions. She was also deft at handling PR in what was a very tricky transition period. There were ongoing issues involving Condé Nast and Vogue being skewered and gossiped about in the press, a habit that seemed difficult for the journalists to break. My feeling, and it remains so, is that it is dangerous and oftentimes counterproductive to court the press. They really have no interest whatsoever in promoting you—in fact, when it involves an elitist institution such as Vogue, it serves them better to lampoon you. They are clever and cynical: you cannot outfox them and they are impossible to impress.

  On the few occasions I picked up the phone to complain about something unjust or untrue that was written or aired about myself or the company, I also discovered—most bizarrely—that no one will claim responsibility for how it got in there in the first place. Apparently there are a whole bunch of furtive sub-editors who write and publish the paper while no one is looking. As the editor of Vogue I had to take the rap for everything, even a missing comma. My tactic was to just steer clear of them and if by some miraculous circumstance the press happened to write something positive or complimentary, send them flowers and pray to God you were off the hook for another six months.

  Any request to comment on models and female body image, which was frequent, was also a disaster poised to happen. The reality of that situation is difficult to defend, and the media, especially television, already have their minds made up about how negatively they intend to portray you. It was better to make no comment, endure the attack, and let them run with the story until it got tired.

  In general, the media are interested in maintaining the myth that if you edit a fashion magazine you are a privileged, pampered airhead, or as in the case of, say Anna Wintour, a she-devil. It comes with the gig. You have to develop a very thick skin. On one occasion a Vogue subeditor resigned to move, and a newspaper gossip column ran a piece the next day that said: ‘Perhaps Clements should stop worrying about what to wear to work and start managing her staff better.’ Normally I would ignore this level of crap, but for some reason the inane lack of reason and pettiness really riled me. I called the journalist, who predictably replied that he didn’t know how it got in there, despite the fact he edited the page. I told him that if he just let me get on with my job and not target Vogue or me, I would never ask him for one sentence of promotion in the paper. It actually worked out perfectly, and the bad press largely subsided.

  What you would hope would come with the gig was the secret formula for a winning cover, but that, unfortunately, is one of the biggest mysteries in publishing. Over time, I would learn the hard way what definitely doesn’t work, but a successful cover is, in the end, a throw of the dice. In most cases, if you set out to shoot a specific cover and have a preconceived idea about it, you won’t be able to make it happen. The team will feel the pressure and something about the resultant image will feel forced. The best approach is to plan that the cover will come from a predetermined shoot and then hope that one of the images will stand out and shout ‘cover’.

  There is also an overriding pressure from celebrity publicists and model agencies that if their talent is booked for a potential cover it will be a definite. If agreed to, you can find yourself in the unhappy position of being obliged to run a substandard or inappropriate shot because the cover was promised. Our way to circumvent this was to promise a ‘cover try’, but in current times that doesn’t fly anymore. Once magazine editors called all the shots, but the power balance has shifted.

  In 2000, the cult of celebrity was at an all-time high, with magazines such as In Style, with their star-studded focus gaining huge ground in the marketplace. I quickly found celebrity wrangling to be enervating, exasperating and at odds with what I thought Vogue represented. The Hollywood agents are such a powerful force: they would demand to choose the photographer, the location, the hair and makeup artists, and sometimes even the stylist. They would provide a list of designers that could be contacted for clothes, a list of what not to ask the celebrity in question, and then insist on sitting in on the interview. Of course, they expected to see and sanction the piece before it went to print, including layout. We were there merely to organise it and to pay for it all, along with the attendant car services, assistant manicurists, production companies and five-star organic caterers. If an invoice arrived for an astrologer and a dog minder, I wouldn’t have been surprised. There were so many hidden palms to be greased. Our overall contribution was that we could print and distribute a manufactured puff piece for them—lucky us. I didn’t see the value, neither financially nor creatively. You would need a caffeine patch to get through the simpering copy that was produced as a result of all the sanctions on the talent by their managers.

  This was not the case however, when dealing with the Australian celebrities, who were always a pleasure to deal with, understood our budget constraints, and were fully prepared to take the fashion journey with Vogue. I made the decision to focus on models, especially the top local girls, and Australian actresses.

  A major dilemma I needed to address however, was talent exclusivity. Being Vogue, it was imperative that we showcased the best Australian models, but given that the market is small, the girls were appearing everywhere. Alyssa Sutherland was a long-time Vogue model, but in one week I noticed her in a rival fashion magazine, a Sunday newspaper colour supplement, and an advertisement for a shopping centre that ran on the side of a bus.

  In order to ensure Vogue looked like a Vogue, I had to guarantee that the top talent in the country, including photographers and writers, aligned themselves with us exclusively. It was a necessary positioning exercise. My stipulation was that our chosen contributors could not work for any rival magazine or supplement (excluding the indie magazines like Oyster and Russh) unless I gave approval beforehand. It was a tough demand and it did limit editorial opportunities for certain people. I’m forever grateful that model agencies such as Vivien’s, Chic and Chadwicks saw the value in aligning their talent with Vogue. Dear Susie Deveridge from Vivien’s Models would sometimes call me almost in tears after a barrage of complaints from another editor, but she always held firm, and thus we showed loyalty in return by consistently featuring her models.

  Photographer Richard Bailey also maintained his lifelong allegiance to Vogue, and was our number one go-to guy. He never demanded a formal contract; our understanding was that he would always be given a main-page story per issue, and we worked that way harmoniously for a decade. Richard made an enormous contribution to the rebuilding of Vogue: always loyal, always professional. Widely considered to be Australia’s top photographer, he could be difficult and sometimes stubborn, but he was also dedicated and he delivered. He was a much-loved member of Vogue’s creative family and, even after a diagnosis of cancer which tragically proved to be terminal, he worked tirelessly for the magazine until he died in 2010.

  The January 2000 issue was to be the official relaunch of Vogue Australia, and I had hired two young women to work
on the redesign, Natasha Hasemer and Zoe Pollitt, who had established their own design firm called Eskimo. The cover, of actress/model Mila Jovovich wearing Prada, was shot by my long-time friend Patric Shaw, who had now moved to New York. I loved the attitude that Mila expressed: she looked knowing and confident and sexy. It was exactly the feeling I wanted for the new-look Vogue.

  What makes the perfect cover is amorphous; the quest for it, relentless. So much can go wrong: models can fall through, the photographer may not capture the exact moment, the clothes could get held up in customs and not arrive, the light may fail, the hair and makeup can turn out badly. Sometimes you were reduced to working with an image that you knew deep down was not quite right, but it was all you had. Because budgets were so tight, I could not drop or ‘kill’ shoots that I had paid for, so the best compromise had to be found in all situations. On the occasions we could not make our own material work, a lifted shot had to be found.

  Producing a good cover that also sells well every month is an editor’s greatest stress. Because everybody—and I mean everybody—has an opinion and is not afraid to share it. Every person is an expert. If it sells, they knew it was the right decision. If it doesn’t, you won’t be able to find them. In the early years covers were chosen by the editor and art director, with plenty of input from the fashion director. It was then shown to management because, in the case of Robyn Holt or Nancy Pilcher, I respected their opinion. A few years down the track more and more people became involved in cover decisions: circulation managers, marketing departments, publishers and advertising sales teams, each who came with their own largely unproven theories. I knew the major pitfalls to avoid—no black-and-white, no sepia, nothing too brown-toned. No dark backgrounds, nothing too dramatic or depressing. No bikinis (my personal theory is that covergirls in skimpy swimsuits make women feel fat). The subject needed to look glamorous, yet approachable; super-chic, but not too haughty. Happy but not deliriously so. Not overly made up, not wearing fur. Slim, but not too skinny. There was also the chance that the celebrity you were featuring may polarise readers. Gwyneth: love her or hate her? Angelina: haute beauty or home-wrecker? In addition, you had to listen to the breathless research findings with an interested face. Cover lines about hair really sell. The colour pink works on a masthead. Readers react to numbers like ‘678 hot new looks’. Women like words such as ‘shoes’. It’s brain-numbing.