Why Vogue Continues to Disappoint Me

R. J. Cutler’s documentary The September Issue, opening nationwide tonight, is only the latest manifestation of America’s ongoing fascination—and dissatisfaction—with Vogue. In 1950 Mary McCarthy called it out on its aristocratic condescension. Gay Talese once wrote that the women of Vogue “speak in italics and swear in French.” Fast-forward to 2003 to The Devil Wears Prada [2], Lauren Weisberger’s bestselling roman à clef about her former boss, current Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. Steady mockery from Gawker.com and the 2006 release of the movie version of Prada only fanned the flames.

The problem with these critiques is that they treat Vogue like any other women’s magazine, attacking it mainly for frivolity. But Vogue is not just another women’s magazine—it would never have attracted this much attention if it were. Vogue has a history and a cultural weight that make it impossible to dismiss, and it has always had more serious ambitions than its rivals. It was one of the first magazines to publish photographs of concentration camp victims, taken by Lee Miller at Buchenwald in 1945 and printed under the headline, “Believe It!” This is the magazine that in 1972 ran a dialogue between Kathleen Tynan and Germaine Greer in which Greer states, “Women have no property because nearly everything in their houses belongs to their husbands.” It has profiled the female presidents of Chile and Liberia, female media moguls in India, and, in August, Google executive Marissa Mayer. [3]

All of these stories seem chosen to attract a thinking reader, and the fashion spreads themselves are often provocative as well as beautiful. See this month’s revised vision [4] of the Red Riding Hood fable, Red’s gray coif [5] challenging our sense of her as the child victim. What do we make of the wolf palming an apple as he accosts her? Is he about to offer it as a lure, à la the Edenic serpent, or is this Adam about to proffer the forbidden fruit to Eve, reversing that fateful setup that women have yet to live down?

A better way to critique Vogue is on its own terms, on how well it fulfills the dual mission it has set for itself: covering both surface and substance. Then we get a clearer sense of where it has failed.

In many ways the feminine ideal Vogue exalts today is even narrower than the confining one Betty Friedan criticized women’s magazines for promoting in the early '60s, an image of the fulfilled woman as “young and frivolous, almost childlike. ... In the magazine image women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and to get and keep a man.” To Vogue’s credit, it has never been very much about getting a man—maybe it assumes that’s no challenge for its readers. Unlike the magazines Friedan wrote about, it also has never celebrated the hausfrau. Instead, it continues to exalt women who have no career inside or outside the home.

Consider the September 2009 issue. (Cutler’s film focuses on the heftier September 2007 book.) It features stories on the possibility of a swine flu epidemic, Jenny Sanford, the upcoming Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit at the Whitney, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new enfant terrible conductor (there is an enfant terrible, as well as a jolie laide, and a femme fatale, in almost every issue of Vogue), and the Red Riding Hood spread, edited by Grace Coddington, the darling of Cutler’s film. But all of this follows several pages of Vogue’s enduring socialite coverage. Most are women born or married into money whose only occupations, apparently, are staying thin and beautiful and hosting photogenic garden parties. They have almost nothing in common with Vogue’s readers, most of whom work and have household incomes well under $100,000 a year. Yet much of the magazine’s copy takes a tone that would only resonate with the idle girls of unearned means—that of a spoiled child doling out advice, blithely unaware that others are not so fortunate.

Joan Didion, who once held the features assistant position I filled at Vogue my first year out of college, has referred to her time there diplomatically as an “eccentric and in some ways an exotic education.” For me, it was also an education in integrity. I never once heard the editors of Vogue question the image of American femininity that they promote. This would be understandable if they were silly, vapid people, but I observed them at Vogue as they appear in The September Issue. Unlike Weisberger and others, Cutler resists caricaturing these women (though one person interviewed does call Wintour the pope). Instead, he allows them to appear as they are—intelligent, pragmatic, and, with very few exceptions, fair. As far as I could tell, there is an empress-has-no-clothes situation on the 12th Floor of 4 Times Square, except that, of course, she has a legendary closet full.

The few times I did get a younger staffer to admit the contradictions that abounded at the magazine (what a relief not to be the only heretic in the church), the rationalization offered was, “It is what it is.” That is, no one expects more than “Let them wear Chanel” obliviousness from Vogue.

Except that I did. I never thought I would work at a fashion magazine, or a women’s magazine, for that matter. With undergraduate fervor, I objected to almost everything I took Vogue to stand for—materialism, the malnourished giraffe beauty ideal, paying top dollar to lure good writers into covering things that didn’t matter.

And yet when I was offered the job, I couldn’t turn it down. This was my first lesson in the roots Vogue has in American femininity—or mine, at least. Vogue, I discovered, meant something to me. I felt as if I was being invited into a whole tradition of women who cared about the way women live. And I cared that it was undermining that tradition, and that no one would say so.

I lasted only 10 months at Vogue. It turns out that having strong, unexpressed idealogical opposition to your product significantly influences your performance. How had Didion done it? I asked myself when I went, yes, to cry in the bathroom. (“Why do I always hear people crying in the bathroom?” managing editor Laurie Jones would ask no one in particular in her Kerrville, Texas twang.) The only answer I could come up with was that Didion was tougher, and that she must have known at that point that she was destined for great things. I couldn’t stand not believing.

When I was advised, quite accurately, that my work needed improvement, I opted to leave instead. Everyone expressed surprise; they hadn’t meant to get rid of me. They gave me a little going-away party of which I felt wholly undeserving. Laurie Jones stopped by to assure me that I would be missed and was destined for great things. I wanted to ask the talented, learned editor I worked for (and adored) what the secret was, how she could work for and defend a publication that so poorly represented her. I wanted just to hear her acknowledge that she recognized the problem. But I had learned that it wasn’t my place to ask this question. And I was afraid she would talk to me about the importance of continuing to celebrate beauty, and at the end of the day, accepting that Vogue is what it is.