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The Met Gala is the one night each year when the fashion industry lives up to its potential, when Rihanna sweeps up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a fox fur–trimmed robe the color of an egg yolk, its train pooling yards behind her, and all you can do is gasp, or laugh, or melt into a puddle because you just can’t believe this is real life.
A white tent goes up over the museum’s wide steps and a red (or blue, or pink) carpet is thrown down, creating a perfectly manicured universe that in the coming hours will be packed with all the ingredients for an Important Media Moment. Dozens of photographers and camera operators assemble near the entrance, and just as many reporters take their assigned spots on either side of the staircase, prepared to shout and tweet and Instagram until their throats go hoarse and their backup batteries die. The railings they stand behind are tastefully dressed in greenery. Everyone is in mandatory black-tie.
The first guests start to trickle in, and before long, the scene is a flash flood of musicians (Beyoncé!), actors (Blake!), athletes (Serena!), models (Kendall!), and fashion designers, who pose and preen and recline on the stairs if they’re Diddy. It’s like the Oscars, plus the Grammys, Emmys, and ESPYs, but frothier fun than any of them. As far as spectators are concerned, the red carpet is the entire point.
The annual fundraiser for the Met’s Costume Institute is an irresistible, often viral soup of celebrity and over-the-top style, and it’s all engineered by Met trustee and Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, for whom the Costume Institute was renamed in 2014. She oversees who gets to come, where they sit, and, frequently, what they wear.
Few institutions are as synonymous with a single person as Vogue is with Wintour, and because the Met Gala is Wintour’s show, it is Vogue’s show. Beyond the red carpet, access is limited for journalists from other publications, but inside the Met, Vogue’s editorial staff is busy directing traffic, seating guests, churning out bite-sized celebrity videos (most recently, a collaborative effort with Instagram), and editing blog posts and visuals from a war room in the basement. Though the gala is a major traffic driver for Vogue’s website and social media channels, these activities are carried out discreetly — invisibly, if possible — out of respect for the museum and the attendees, some of whom pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to be there. Roughly one week later, Vogue releases a special Met Gala issue of the magazine.
American Vogue is known as fashion’s “bible,” and the Met Gala, compared as often as it is to the Super Bowl, reinforces that near-religious status every year. This year’s party drives that idea home with particular force: It marks the opening of the Costume Institute’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” show, a look at Catholicism’s influence on fashion that was curated with cooperation from the Vatican. The seat of the Roman Catholic Church loaned more than 40 liturgical vestments to the Met for the exhibit.
Clearly, the Vatican is convinced that the show will treat its property with reverence, and indeed, those garments will be displayed separately from Versace and Dolce & Gabbana’s riffs on Catholic aesthetics. In a way, this understanding between subject and editor brings to mind Vogue’s May cover story on Amal Clooney, the high-profile human rights lawyer who married George Clooney in 2014 and who also happens to be a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala. The photos of Clooney are beautiful, and she comes off as impossibly smart, glamorous, and talented, just as we always believed she was. Yet as Washington Post fashion critic Robin Givhan observes rather pointedly, the profile reveals “absolutely nothing” about her interior life, which says as much about Clooney’s press strategy as it does Vogue’s editorial vision: For the best access in the world, you take what you get and polish it to perfection.
Clooney, who routinely appears on red carpets with her husband but is otherwise press-shy, is a coup for Vogue, further elevating its brand and affirming its status at the top of the heap. That is, as sturdy as top-of-the-heap status can be in the shaky industries of fashion and publishing right now.
In recent years, major design houses have been revolving doors when it comes to creative direction, and brands and editors alike are rethinking the purpose of fashion week, the heartbeat of the fashion calendar. Last year, models started airing stories of sexual harassment and abuse in their profession. The accused include industry giants like Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier, and Mario Testino, all regular photographers for Vogue and other top publications. This winter, Vogue publisher Condé Nast announced that its titles would stop working with them until further notice.
Meanwhile, traditional print publications grind through their digital transformations, and seemingly ascendant digital news organizations pivot this way and that, twisting to reach readers as the platforms that bring them those precious eyeballs change their own strategies. Last May, the New York Times offered buyouts to newsroom employees, and BuzzFeed cut 100 positions in November; Vox Media let go of 50 staffers in February, including some at Racked. Layoffs at Condé Nast titles like Vanity Fair, Glamour, and GQ are no more surprising than the return of seasonal allergies, and are much worse. Last year, the company stopped publishing Teen Vogue in print and reduced the number of print issues of GQ, Glamour, Architectural Digest, and Allure.
Vogue has largely been left intact, but we find it in a rare moment of vulnerability. That’s not just because of recent rumors, shut down by Condé Nast, that Anna Wintour is planning to step down soon. It’s because Vogue is American fashion’s most enduring cultural touchstone, and its efforts to modernize necessitate heightened experimentation, iteration, and engagement with readers. Increasingly, fashion’s bible feels like a living, breathing document. Its edicts are not handed down from on high anymore; it wants to know, via Snapchat poll, whether you could ever be friends with an ex.
Is Vogue still powerful? Of course. But what does that influence look like today? What does it look like tomorrow?
Vogue began its life in 1892 as a weekly journal dedicated to the tastes and motions of New York society life. Less than two decades later, Vogue was acquired by Condé Montrose Nast, founder of the publishing empire, and under Nast’s direction, it refocused on women’s fashion, spending much of the 20th century duking it out with Harper’s Bazaar for primacy in that arena. Vogue’s editors in chief (just seven of them in its history, all women) documented and guided the changing tides of fashion, from the swanlike elegance of the 1950s and the swinging ’60s to the colorful ’70s and glamorous professionalism of the ’80s.
The Anna Wintour era of Vogue began in 1988, when she replaced Grace Mirabella as editor. Vogue was in need of revitalization and losing ground to the more youthful Elle magazine, the New York Times reported at the time. Upon arrival, Wintour upended the prevailing Vogue cover aesthetic of the ’70s and ’80s, a glossy close-up of a model, shot in a studio, and took her first cover star out on the street. Wearing a cross-embellished Christian Lacroix jacket (soon to be on display in the “Heavenly Bodies” exhibit), acid-washed Guess jeans, and a big grin, model Michaela Bercu looked totally at ease. It was a breath of fresh air.
“The jacket with a pair of blue jeans, which today seems not all that revolutionary, was pretty damn revolutionary when it was done. Prior to that, you’d only show a [designer] outfit all together,” says John Demsey, the executive group president of Esteé Lauder Companies, which advertises heavily in Vogue. “You wouldn’t show how people actually lived their lives.”
Wintour also cemented the practice of putting entertainers, rather than models, on the cover of the magazine. Her outfit may have been designer, but nothing could hold wider appeal than Jennifer Aniston, at the height of her Friends fame, smiling at the reader from the cover of the August 2002 issue.
“I credit Anna Wintour positively for a lot of things,” says Patricia Mears, deputy director of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s museum in New York City. “She understood that she needed highly creative people like Grace Coddington, who is one of the most creative people in fashion. There was still this fantasy and creativity at the highest level. But she also brought in the concept of popular culture — the importance of actors and performers.”
Wintour did so early in her tenure: in May 1989, to be exact, when she put Madonna on the cover of Vogue.
“I remember getting quite a bit of criticism for my first Madonna cover,” Wintour said in a 2011 interview with CBS News. “You know, ‘She’s not Vogue, she’ll never sell,’ and it was a little bit risky. And it was up something extraordinary, like 40 percent on the newsstands. So that was an eye-opener to all of us.”
The industry caught on. When InStyle launched in 1994, celebrity was core to its mission, with Barbra Streisand on its first cover. By the late ’90s, Elle, Glamour, and Marie Claire had gone all in on celebrities as cover models.
“I think Wintour had her finger on the pulse and understood that the times were changing,” Mears says. “She read the landscape and she moved forward.”
The reaction to Vogue’s April 2014 issue was not unlike the response to Wintour’s first Madonna cover. That was, of course, the Kim Kardashian and Kanye West cover, released just a few months before their wedding. The rather clunky hashtag “#worldsmosttalkedaboutcouple” ran along the bottom of the cover, and indeed, everyone on social media started talking about the issue when it dropped online. The feedback came swiftly and without mercy, mainly because the Kim half of Kimye seemed so downmarket for Vogue at the time. That was way back before the rest of the fashion establishment had embraced the reality star, before Kendall Jenner was a ubiquitous fashion model and her sister Kylie was a veritable beauty mogul. Vogue hopped aboard the Kardashian train before anyone expected it to, and in doing so normalized Kim for the rest of the industry, just as it validated Kendall’s modeling career by casting her early and often.
Long before Wintour arrived, the magazine had walked the line between mass appeal and expensive, elitist taste. Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva, authors of In Vogue, a history of the magazine produced with Condé Nast’s cooperation, write of Vogue’s origins: “Its creator was Arthur Baldwin Turnure, an impeccably credentialed member of New York society and a friend to the city’s most distinguished and privileged families. The publication had the stated aim of representing the interests and lifestyle of this class, which during the last decade of the nineteenth century felt invaded by parvenus who, with little lineage but plenty of money, attempted to join its aristocratic activities.”
Yet early editions of Vogue contained such articles as “Vogue Designs for the Seamstress” and “Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes,” along with dress patterns that one could use at home — features that were clearly aimed at women of more average means. Without targeting an everyday reader, “there’s simply no way they could have made money,” says Mears. “The patterns weren’t for the rich lady on Park Avenue.”
The Vogue of pop culture mythology is also animated by the push and pull of accessibility and exclusiveness. Over the last three decades, Wintour and Vogue’s intertwined public images have gone through repeated cycles of demystification and fictionalization by the media.
A 1999 New York magazine cover story titled “The Summer of Her Discontent” contended that, following the public airing of an extramarital affair, Wintour’s intimidating reputation had suddenly softened. New York quoted an unnamed Vogue editor as saying, “It’s kind of chipped away at her whole persona. Like she’s been caught in the act of doing something ... human.”
Then in 2003, like a tidal wave, came The Devil Wears Prada. Lauren Weisberger’s dishy, fictionalized tale of a frumpy young journalist who takes a job as an assistant to a fantastically difficult fashion editor — clearly modeled on Wintour, Weisberger’s former boss — performed the magic trick of seeming to expose the machinations of the fashion industry while also whipping Wintour into a larger-than-life pop culture icon.
“It’s a lot of, ‘What’s that like? What’s she like?,’” a former Vogue employee says, describing the experience of telling people where she worked. “You wonder if The Devil Wears Prada never happened how much that would exist, especially for a younger generation.”
Penguin Random House, the book’s publisher, says that it has sold nearly 3.5 million copies across all formats. According to Box Office Mojo, the movie made more than $326 million globally when it hit theaters three years later.
In 2007, the director R.J. Cutler filmed The September Issue, a documentary that followed Vogue’s editors as they went about making the biggest issue of the year. When the film came out in 2009, not only did it pull back the curtain on Wintour’s daily activities (of particular interest since The Devil Wears Prada), but it made cult heroes of figures who were previously known only within the industry, like then-creative director Grace Coddington, a romantic dreamer to Wintour’s hard-edged business mind.
“I think one of the reasons that the film became a little bit of a cultural phenomenon is because this thing that was important to so many people was no longer shrouded in mystery,” Cutler says. “When you watch a documentary for 90 minutes, you feel like you’ve been with that person. They’ve been talking to you. You feel like you made the issue with her.”
After the release of The September Issue, Cutler noticed a shift in how people approached Wintour in public. During production, strangers wouldn’t dare say hello when she was sitting alone before a fashion show, but once the film was out, he saw more people coming up to her, as though some invisible barrier had been broken down.
Our thirst to understand Vogue — or get the dirt on it — was evident in the film’s reception. The September Issue took in more than $3.8 million domestically and $6 million worldwide, which is small for a major release but colossal within the relatively small niche of fashion documentaries.
Valentino: The Last Emperor, also from 2009, grossed $1.75 million. Others make closer to $500,000.
When you’re talking about the reality of Vogue, the idea of it matters, too. Even as you leaf through a copy of the magazine, the type firm and clean on the page, you’re seeing it through the lens of what you’ve heard: that it’s a rigorous, aggressively chic place run by an imperious, powerful editor. Vogue’s legacy — those 126 years on top, making iconic images with some of the world’s best-known photographers — is the source of its power, but it’s also something of a burden. Wherever Vogue goes next, our assumptions about it follow.
On a recent Wednesday night, Vogue creative digital director Sally Singer got up in front of a few dozen people at an event held by the Society of Publication Designers to talk about the last four years. Dressed in a white collared shirt rolled to the elbows and a full gray skirt, a bit of gold dust dabbed on her eyelids, Singer addressed her audience with a self-deprecating slouch, one hand in her pocket.
Vogue launched its website in 2010, the same year that Singer, a longtime Vogue staffer, decamped to run T, the New York Times Style Magazine. She returned to Vogue two years later, on the back of reports that the Times had trouble selling Singer’s T, more intellectual and downtown than her predecessor’s, to advertisers.
“It was a very beautiful site that was up and running, and quite successful in its way,” Singer told the SPD crowd, speaking about the first iteration of Vogue.com. “It was a digital expression of the brand. It was beautiful, it was lofty, it was composed, and it had a lot of BTS [behind the scenes] with the photo shoots that were done for the covers.”
“That was the cutting edge of what a website should be,” she added. “For advertisers, it was the most impeccable way you could showcase your brand in digital.”
That was then. In 2014, Singer led an overhaul of Vogue’s site. Its new mission, she told the New York Times, was to extend the magazine’s coverage, rather than simply mirror it. Daily articles ramped up, as did original photo shoots.
Today, that machine is churning at high capacity. Like the magazine, Vogue.com’s concerns extend well beyond fashion and beauty into food, entertainment, travel, culture, and politics. But in large measure, it offers exactly what other sites do: a take on the day’s news.
Though the site is very much on the celebrity gossip beat — a big traffic driver for many websites — it steers clear of salacious language, instead using a rather high-minded tone and often approaching the news indirectly. Coverage of Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber’s latest split focuses on his-and-hers breakup haircuts, for instance, and an article about a Victoria’s Secret model’s pregnancy is about self-image (“Candice Swanepoel’s Nude Pregnancy Snap Is Body Confidence at Its Best”).
Vogue threw its support behind Hillary Clinton in October 2016 — the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate — and like literally every other website, its political coverage swelled after the election. Today, it often arrives with a dose of un-Vogue-like acidity (“All the Ways Celebrities Are Doing More for Puerto Rico Than President Trump”). Being the outlet of record for the American fashion industry, however, Vogue still covers Melania Trump’s outfits at official functions.
All told, these changes and investments have propelled Vogue.com from 3.9 million unique visitors in September 2015 to 8.8 million in February 2018, according to data gathered by ComScore. A rep for Vogue says that the website surpassed the 10 million mark in March, hitting a new record. (Those numbers are only for the United States, and Vogue says that its international readership is substantial, declining to give exact numbers.) Comparatively, that’s not huge: Vanity Fair, GQ, and the New Yorker saw 18.4 million, 15.2 million, and 13 million uniques in February. (All three are owned by Condé Nast, as is Glamour, which hit 6.4 million in February.) Hearst’s Cosmopolitan logged 15.2 million that month; Refinery29, a digital player that launched in 2005, saw 17.3 million uniques.
What Vogue lacks in stateside web traffic, it makes up for on other platforms. The magazine has 17.9 million followers on its main Instagram — more than 22 million including its separate beauty, living, and runway handles — which far outstrips GQ’s 4.1M, VF’s 3.5M, and Refinery29’s 1.9M. Another 2.3 million people subscribe to Vogue on YouTube, again putting it ahead of the pack.
Based on these stats, you might suppose that Condé Nast wants to beef up Vogue.com, which could explain the presence of quick, search- and social-optimized stories that, for readers, can feel like a waste of time. (“Gigi Hadid Has a Chic New Way to Wear Your Hair at the Gym” turns out to be about a braided ponytail.) Of course, as any person who has spent any time on the internet knows, Vogue is not exceptional in this way.
Singer contends that Vogue.com never publishes clickbait. Speaking to Racked before her SPD presentation, Singer said that she encourages the digital team to write to their personal passions, and for some people those interests are traditionally high-traffic topics like celebrity hairstyles. That said, some of the more straightforward posts about celebrity breakups, pregnancies, and baby name announcements don’t always come with a byline.
“You should do stuff you love and care about regardless of what traffic you get, because you just have to do it,” Singer says. “You trust that you’ll do enough stuff that you also care about, but in a different way, to make your numbers. What you want to do — and we’ve been fortunate enough at Vogue to do — is have a staff who are so fanatical about certain areas that for them it’s never a cynical or easy act.”
Indeed, while the print magazine still feels like Wintour’s domain, Vogue’s digital wing feels like the work of many minds plumbing the weird, wonderful depths of the internet for inspiration.
Traffic is valuable for digital media companies, but so is publishing stories that nobody else is running — the stuff you could put behind a paywall and still get people to buy. What really sets Vogue.com apart are ambitious, visuals-heavy packages that show off its production savvy and access to talent. For the “VogueWorld 100” this year, the staff covered people from all corners of the internet and real world “who are inspiring us right now”: Kim Kardashian doppelgängers, queer activists in South Africa, modest style bloggers, and tattoo artists from Mexico City to Seoul. Now several iterations deep, Vogue’s “American Women” series highlights women from coast to coast, including drag kings, criminal justice activists, skateboarders, and soldiers.
Features like these have surprised some readers by introducing what they see as a more diverse and approachable side of Vogue.
“When they relaunched it felt like online had a different type of voice than the print,” says Samantha Powell, a fashion writer and longtime reader of the magazine. “‘American Women’ went to places they would not have covered in the magazine. The magazine is still very much of a certain class and level, and this felt more egalitarian, which is not something I would usually associate with that brand. It was really cool, and they obviously spent a lot of time and thought on it.”
When I ask about the perception that Vogue is representing a more diverse range of experiences online than it did before, Singer says that it owes less to an intentional shift in attitude than to the internet’s infinite real estate.
“We have more space, scope, and latitude to show a greater range of stories because we’re not limited by the real estate of a print book,” Singer says. “[In print] you spend all your time perfecting the experience of flipping page to page, of bringing the reader along for an experience that’s curated. On a website, you’re doing that minute by minute. It can allow you to tell so many more stories in so many more ways.”
Where there is plenty of criticism for Vogue.com’s news posts, its videos are almost universally lauded. It’s not surprising that Vogue would excel at visuals — rich, beautiful images are its specialty — but this reaction is notable because Vogue is succeeding where so many media companies have stumbled recently. The last few years have been a mess of digital publishers laying off writers and “pivoting to video,” the results of which have been grim (“For Digital Publishers, the ‘Pivot to Video’ Bloodbath Is Here”; “The Secret Cost of Pivoting to Video”; “Why the Pivot to Video Has Failed”).
Vogue’s unparalleled relationship with the entertainment world certainly has something to do with that success. The site’s top video franchises are “73 Questions” (a playful, highly choreographed single-shot video in which a celebrity answers 73 questions) and “Beauty Secrets” (a more lo-fi video in which a celebrity does her makeup in front of the camera). Kendall Jenner, Taylor Swift, and Selena Gomez’s “73 Questions” are Vogue’s most-watched videos on YouTube (at 18.7 million, 18.2 million, and 16.7 million views, respectively).
“What makes this work so well is access to celebrities over time and access to their homes,” Singer said of “73 Questions” during her SPD presentation. “The more in their space we can be, the better.”
“Beauty Secrets,” which can be shot relatively inexpensively on an iPhone, also benefits from its access to performers. “But it’s also about the honesty of the whole situation. The best-performing ones, someone starts with splotchy skin. You just need a pimple, and then you’re fine,” Singer said, to laughter from the audience.
As a publisher on Snapchat Discover, Vogue floats still further away from its traditional brand identity. A small team dedicates its time to producing original content for Snapchat, which is even more youth-oriented and friendly in its tone than the website. On it, you’ll frequently find quizzes (“How Well Do You Know Gigi Hadid?”), reader polls (“Do you still check your ex’s social media accounts?”), and service-oriented articles (“How to Save Money Without Sacrificing Your Style”). Singer describes Snapchat as “a complete laboratory”: The team’s work with motion graphics, for instance, has filtered onto the website and other social platforms.
(It’s worth noting here that Snapchat may draw teens into the Vogue universe, but Vogue and Teen Vogue’s channels are markedly different. For example, Vogue’s spring break guide suggests vacationing in Nairobi, Sydney, or Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives. Teen Vogue’s version includes a party safety checklist — fitting, given its sudden, widely applauded pivot into socially conscious, politically aware territory in the wake of President Trump’s election.)
The idea that Vogue could ever be accessible is striking to some because a significant portion of its magazine content is very much not. Lives of extreme privilege still get plenty of page space, in the form of Princess Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis’s personal column and photo spreads of rambling English gardens and Croatian “retreats.” Online, Vogue wedding features tend to highlight events so extravagant that one fashion publicist identified them as a regular “hate-read.” (Weddings do gangbusters traffic, Singer notes.)
The criticism that Vogue can be out of touch is not new. As fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote in a 2009 New York Times article: “It’s embarrassing to see how Vogue deals with the recession. For the December issue, it sent a writer off to discover the ‘charms’ of Wal-Mart and Target.” Nor is it without grounds: In 2011, Vogue ran a glowing magazine profile of Asma al-Assad, the thin, well-dressed wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, poetically titled “A Rose in the Desert.” The feature, written by former Paris Vogue editor Joan Juliet Buck, ran right as Assad escalated his crackdown on protesters and incited an outcry over its glossy treatment of the Syrian first lady.
Last year, Vogue sparked another firestorm when its August cover story declared Gigi Hadid and her then-boyfriend Zayn Malik, both of whom are cisgender, “part of a new generation embracing gender fluidity,” mainly because they liked to borrow each other’s clothes. Just a few months earlier, Karlie Kloss, a white model from Missouri, appeared in the magazine’s “diversity issue” dressed as a geisha, prompting a wave of criticism and an apology from Kloss. While there has been an uptick in the number of women of color featured in the magazine, either on the cover or in interior editorials, there is still much more work to be done for the title to achieve true diversity. The staff, too, remains largely white.
Today, savvy media consumers are increasingly wary, or at least aware, of the problems inherent to power structures that run along the lines of race, gender, and socioeconomic status in America. This is the environment that allowed a flagging Teen Vogue to reinvent itself as a voice in the Trump resistance. Vogue has clearly evolved too, especially online. But as a magazine and as a brand, it’s still associated with products that only the 1 percent can afford. As a high-profile publication, its mistakes on issues like race and gender identity are quickly spotted and not easily forgotten.
“Your generation is one that’s conscious of the environment, extending human rights, and not limiting the visual ideal or financial ideal within narrow parameter,” says Mears, speaking of millennials. “Body image is a completely different conversation than it was. Your generation has completely upended what Vogue stood for. You still want cachet, but in your own terms.”
As media companies shift their business models to keep up with changes in digital technology, you wouldn’t be wrong to ask: What does Vogue sell? As it turns out, a lot.
Yes, print magazines are still part of the picture, though sales have moved in two different directions. According to circulation numbers gathered by the Alliance for Audited Media, monthly print subscriptions to Vogue grew from 801,557 in December 2007 to 1,041,126 in December 2017. During that time, newsstand sales dropped from 415,214 print issues a month to 108,305.
Online, Vogue sells sponsored videos and articles to brands like Michael Kors and L’Oreal, which its editorial staff produces and publishes independent of the branded content studio Condé Nast launched in 2015, 23 Stories. (Vogue does occasionally host work made by 23 Stories, however.) This practice is controversial in the media industry, where a sharp divide exists between publications like Refinery29, which have their editorial teams contribute to advertising products, and those like the New York Times, which maintain a strict church-and-state separation policy. In early April, Business of Fashion reported that by the second quarter of this year, Condé Nast’s digital revenue is expected to equal print revenue for the first time, thanks largely to video.
Vogue also dabbles in selling consumer products, through collaborations with established brands. For its 125th anniversary last year, Vogue curated a selection of beauty products for Birchbox and limited-edition lemonades for Pressed Juicery. In January, it started selling a range of editor-designed bouquets in partnership with UrbanStems and launched snowboarding gear with Off-White and Burton. It introduced a range of sofas and chairs for the furniture brand Dorya in April.
Last fall, 300 people attended Vogue’s first-ever Forces of Fashion conference, which boasted an impressive lineup of speakers like Rihanna, Marc Jacobs, and Victoria Beckham. (A second conference is already planned for next October.) Tickets cost $3,000, though Vogue’s PR rep notes that the brand also sold 100 student tickets for $150 a piece.
Of course, the Vogue economy isn’t just about money coming into the magazine. Wintour wields capitalist power felt throughout the fashion industry. Since 2003, the Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue have jointly awarded money to industry upstarts through the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. A subplot in The September Issue involves Wintour helping the young designer Thakoon Panichgul land a collaboration with Gap.
For an entrepreneur, there’s nothing like being featured in the magazine. Outdoor Voices has been written up on Vogue’s website numerous times, but that didn’t stop CEO Tyler Haney from buying a stack of magazines as Christmas presents for her family members when she appeared in the January issue this year.
“It’s a little shocking and hard to believe,” says Haney. “You’re like, ‘Holy shit! That’s with me forever! That’s with OV forever!’”
“It’s social proof,” says Quang Dinh, the co-founder of Girlfriend Collective, a line of recycled plastic leggings that was covered on Vogue.com. “It’s like being carried by Colette. They could order two units, but it doesn’t matter. You got picked up. It’s the same with Vogue.”
Multiple brand founders say the value of a Vogue article lies in the street cred it confers, not the sales it inspires. Dinh says that sites like Refinery29, as well as small personal style blogs, drive significantly more traffic to Girlfriend Collective than Vogue.com has. Maggie Winter, the CEO of the denim brand AYR, believes that simply measuring Vogue’s impact in direct clickbacks would be “understating it so grossly,” given how often the brand has used a choice quote from its first Vogue.com story in marketing materials and physical signage (“A gift from the denim gods”).
Though Najeeba Hayat has found that large fashion titles don’t drive consumer sales for her shoe brand, Liudmila, she says that a Vogue.com article was the buoy that kept her business afloat. Before it happened, she hadn’t gotten any celebrity placements and was terrified that her momentum had stalled.
“When the editor called, I had spent my last dime on making this huge, crazy collection and had no lifestyle to pitch,” Hayat writes in an email. “It made me very happy to know that during these clickbait times, there was a magazine out there that was genuinely interested and inspired by my physical creative output.”
After the story went live, Hayat landed two retailers. A Vogue article has the power to make stores feel like a young, unproven brand isn’t such a risk, she says. But make no mistake: A Vogue endorsement is only as good as what you do with it.
“It is not by any means a passive process,” Hayat says. “If I hadn’t used the Vogue article as leverage in a very active strategy after it was published, it wouldn’t have actually helped my brand very much.”
Hayat and Dinh’s comments are a far cry from what Calvin Klein told New York magazine in 1999: “Whenever Anna gives us an editorial, we get a direct sales increase in the stores immediately … It always happens.” The publicists and brand founders I talked to said that it’s all but impossible to track sales from print articles; those numbers can be measured much more precisely online.
One fashion publicist says that she doesn’t believe Vogue is as powerful as it was a few years ago. She no longer bends over backward when the title requests clothing for a photo shoot, especially if the item is a T-shirt that’s likely be to layered under a more eye-catching piece from another brand or a pair of jeans that probably won’t get prominent placement. Her team used to fly into action when the call came in, even if it was late on a Friday and the editors needed product ASAP. Now she usually tells staffers not to worry about it, unless Vogue is asking for a standout item.
Vogue still has the authority to anoint and legitimize brands, but the power doesn’t flow in a clear top-down direction. The idea of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue vying for first place doesn’t fit what’s going on now, which is that fashion and media are sprawling, diverse ecosystems made up of old-school titles, young blogs, social media influencers, and everyday product reviewers. Brands can speak more directly to consumers than ever before.
“You look at the engagement levels or the reach of some of these stand-alone blogs or style influencers, and they rival the circulation of traditional magazines,” says Esteé Lauder’s John Demsey. “But the thing that’s super interesting about the most successful ones is that they use the old media to establish the new media. If you’re reading Leandra [Medine, of Man Repeller] or following these people, they’re also [being featured] on Vogue.com. It becomes a continuous circle.”
In other words, Vogue mines interesting, influential people for content, and those people enjoy Vogue’s legitimizing effect. No longer bound by the confines of a monthly book, the Vogue universe grows ever wider.
Though Condé Nast’s PR team staunchly refutes the rumor that Wintour’s time at Vogue is nearly up, it will eventually end. In a half-humorous story about who could possibly succeed Wintour, WWD surfaced a few serious suggestions, including Singer; British Vogue’s new editor Edward Enninful; Architectural Digest and founding Teen Vogue editor Amy Astley, a Wintour protégé; Stella Bugbee, the editor and president of New York magazine’s The Cut; and Eva Chen, the former editor of Lucky and current head of fashion partnerships at Instagram.
It’s hard to say what media will look like in a few years’ time. Mere months ago, everyone thought Facebook was the future and then, well. What we do know is that Vogue will look different under new leadership, as it has with each of its editors in the past. What seems now to be unthinkable will happen, and Vogue’s identity will lift away from Wintour’s.
In some ways, it’s already happening. A print magazine and the many, many legs of digital are more than any one person can govern with total oversight, not that Wintour’s trying to do so. That’s not what the internet is about, anyway. Online, publications aren’t monoliths. They’re choruses of voices, each one singing its own little tune.
Eliza Brooke is a senior reporter at Racked.
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