This week sees the publication of Vogue: The Biography of an Icon , the fascinating story of British Vogue as told by historian and author Julie Summers. Over the last three years, Summers has pored over 1,768 issues, read close to 5,000 articles, and scanned almost 9,000 fashion shoots in the name of research. The resulting book is a biography rather than a history, she says, because Vogue had its own voice on both sides of the Atlantic from the very beginning.
The British edition of Vogue launched in 1916, perhaps as inauspicious a time as any to found a luxury magazine, as tanks rolled out over the plains of the Somme, but it was an instant success – not to mention the second most widely read magazine in the trenches. (Quite what could top Vogue on the Western Front remains elusive.) It’s been said before, but Vogue holds up a small yet dazzlingly bright mirror to history while relentlessly searching for what’s next.
“Sometimes it looks over its shoulder,” says Summers, “but [really] every single issue is about the future, and about interpreting the world around us. I think that’s extraordinarily impressive, and that’s really what my joy was: to get hold of each issue and say, ‘What was Vogue trying to convey here?’” British Vogue sped through the age of Modernism, bringing readers early glimpses of Picasso and Cocteau. It tripped through the Jazz Age, the sunlit and snow-blind sportiness of Chanel, and Schiaparelli’s remarkable feats of Surrealist .