Ex-Vogue editor ALEXANDRA SHULMAN: My situation with Disney documentary

To those not involved in high fashion, the new ­Disney+ blockbuster series, In Vogue: The 90s, offers an enjoyable dollop of behind-the-scenes glamour and a lot of fun revelations: Tom Ford camping it up outrageously for the cameras; Kim Kardashian declaring she was Madonna‘s dog walker in the Nineties; and Kate Moss claiming she didn’t realise the Stella she hung out with was related to Paul McCartney – until she saw her driving around Notting Hill in a Mercedes.

But, as Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue throughout the whole period, I found myself shouting at the screen: ‘Hang on, it wasn’t like that! Or at any rate, that wasn’t the way I saw it.’

On one hand I was frustrated to see the depiction of the era through the filter of American Vogue, which so often differed from my perception. On the other, although I would like to have been involved, I was relieved I wasn’t reduced, like many of the talking heads featured, to sounding so dim-witted.

The series concentrates on American Vogue, but no one on either side of the Atlantic should need reminding that the Nineties was the launchpad for Cool ­Britannia. And British Vogue was ­embedded in the tsunami of creativity that was happening in London.

I came through those doors to British Vogue in 1992, just when the era of the supermodels – who are made much of in the documentary series – was waning.

My predecessor, Liz Tilberis, had commissioned in 1990 the iconic supermodel cover of Cindy, Christy, Linda, Tatjana and Naomi by photographer Peter Lindbergh, that made these girls among the most famous faces in the world.

Over the next few years every designer, advertising agency and magazine wanted a piece of them. Their power was summed up in Linda’s, ‘We won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 dollars a day’ line in an interview for American Vogue.

But, of course, they did get out of bed for Vogue for less, as Grace Coddington, American Vogue’s brilliant director of fashion, drily remarks on screen. And I personally signed off budgets that show they got out of bed for £75 a day for British Vogue, just like every other model.

Anna Wintour set about making American Vogue more to her taste, with smiling supermodels striding out in Chanel mini suits, but within a few years that vision was showing its age.

Change was afoot in the name of grunge. And it was this change that enabled the premise of the documentary series to take hold, essentially that the Nineties was a period when fashion and culture dramatically moved on.

In the UK, we were in a recession and the demands of these supermodels’ agents and the heat around them had become difficult to navigate. It was one of the reasons we embraced a new cadre of models – Kate Moss, Amber ­Valletta, Shalom Harlow, Kristen McMenamy – who not only encapsulated a new, more youthful aesthetic than the Park Avenue princess style, but were frankly easier to get time with.

One of the moments in this series that genuinely can claim to be pivotal was the grunge show that designer Marc Jacobs did for Perry Ellis in New York in 1992, just as my editorship began.

The fashion industry went crazy – divided between those who thought seeing the girls come down the catwalk in beanie hats, Converse sneakers, lank hair and scarves was simply horrible; and those, like me, who loved it.

It reminded me of my classmates in the Seventies, who looked just like that on the school bus. But its power was that it was rooted in something broader than fashion – the disaffected youth, their music and dark energy.

I came back to London after the show and commissioned Kate Moss’s first Vogue cover by photographer Corinne Day, published with the cover line London Style, London Girls.

The Disney+ series suggests only magazines such as i-D, dedicated to youth culture, appreciated what was going on . . . but I beg to differ.

British Vogue ran Corinne’s then infamous, now famous, images of Kate posing in underwear among a tangle of phone leads in her flat.

For reasons I don’t remember (I think many of my fashion editors were on maternity leave) we had asked freelance stylist Cathy Kasterine to do the shoot. In the documentary, she refers to ‘somebody from Vogue’ calling her up. That was my very chic deputy Anna Harvey, who was also style adviser to Diana, Princess of Wales.

When the Corinne Day pictures came in of Kate in skimpy knickers and a vest, posed under a string of fairy lights, they were very different from the black lace and camisoles we had previously run in lingerie shoots.

The approach may have been different, but the shoot featured the same expensive brands, such as La Perla and Janet Reger.

In the documentary, Cathy says she didn’t think we knew what we were getting – but she was wrong. Where she was right was that I didn’t know how good the ­pictures would be or what effect they would have.

Advertisers threatened to ­withdraw their patronage – but didn’t – and some newspapers filled columns with invective against the way Kate looked, hanging on her slender frame accusations of propagating eating disorders and paedophilia (Kate was 19 at the time).

But I loved the pictures and thought this was nonsense. It was a maelstrom in an eggcup and passed quickly; the photos are now in the V&A.

Crucially though, and core to this new documentary, is the fact that it was because they were in Vogue that made them so controversial. Vogue, the bible of high fashion, the place you could rely on to feature an aspirational lifestyle had let everybody down and run a story with a skinny little model in a downbeat flat.

‘Where’s the glamour in that?’ the naysayers screeched.

‘Anna was frankly, appalled,’ says one of her lieutenants Hamish Bowles of this movement. And ­former US president Bill Clinton criticised the fashion industry in a White House address for ­embracing so called ‘heroin chic’.

But, ultimately, it was because luxury shoppers weren’t keen on paying big prices for lumberjack shirts and skimpy slip dresses, that another ‘moment’ arrived.Vogue has always documented, and to some extent helped create, the zeitgeist but this documentary intimates that it inhabits a narrower universe than it does.

Putting Madonna on the cover of US Vogue in 1989 is hailed as a groundbreaking event, but Liz Tilberis had already featured the singer on the cover of British Vogue in February that year.

In 1992 I paired Bono with Christy Turlington on our cover for a fashion and music themed December issue. Paris Vogue had commissioned David Hockney to do a cover for them.

There is a suggestion that it was only during the mid-Nineties that there was a convergence of movies and fashion, but they had frequently been bedfellows.

Take Luis Buñuel’s 1967 classic Belle du Jour for which Yves Saint Laurent designed Catherine Deneuve’s entire wardrobe. Or Giorgio Armani’s contribution to American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere, in 1980.

However, to create the narrative of Anna Wintour desperately seeking glamour, a rejection of grunge is shown as a reason she started to embrace actresses as cover stars.

In the six-part series, Grace Coddington complains about being made to shoot celebrities instead of models as did her London counterpart Lucinda Chambers in my team, who also much preferred working with models.

Models are professional clothes horses who understand the whole business, not actresses who understandably want their own identity.

There’s a delightful cameo from Gwyneth Paltrow discussing her first cover for US Vogue in 1996, which actually had to be shot four times before they got a picture that worked.

By 1995, Britain – not America – was the heartland of Nineties culture. Not only was the industry spotlight on the fashion designers coming out of London’s Central St Martins, including Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Hussein Chalayan and Stella McCartney, but we had the new Young British Artists (YBA) movement and Britpop stars Oasis, Blur and Pulp.

It was an exciting period to edit British Vogue, and it often felt like the world was playing catch-up. One instance is the premiere of the film Four Weddings And A Funeral to which Liz Hurley wore ‘that dress’, the Versace safety pin showstopper which features prominently in the documentary.

My editor-at-large Fiona Golfar recalls: ‘My friend’s husband [Working Title’s Eric Fellner] called me and said he was making a small film which had ex-model Andie MacDowell in it and would Vogue be interested in covering it.’

There was no buzz about the film at the time, but we did the story. When the pictures of the premiere and Hurley’s Versace dress went everywhere, we had a self-congratulatory moment at being in early, priding ourselves on documenting new talent.

But, in the end, big stars are big business and, as this documentary continually shows, there is no ­bigger star in this firmament than Anna Wintour.

Tonne Goodman, a US Vogue faithful, sums it up in the hagiographic sentence, ‘Vogue is Anna Wintour. Anna Wintour is Vogue.’

While other interviewees are reduced to gushing hyperbole, Anna manages to come across as intelligent and concise.

Her desire to use Vogue as a ­platform for causes she believes in, such as the launch of her Seventh On Sale fashion event in 1990, which raised money to combat Aids, was inspirational. And ­currently she is relentlessly banging the gong for the Democrats in the forthcoming US election.

Harnessing the power of the magazine to do good was one of the pluses of the job. I remember pulling together in days a vast jumble sale with Jemima Goldsmith, previously married to Imran Khan, to raise money for Pakistan after the major earthquake of 2005.

My chief quibble with the Disney+ series is the lack of awareness shown of how fashion became such a significant part of the cultural conversation in the Nineties.

It would have been helpful to have more context and the series surely could have included some more articulate opinions on the subject rather than having so many people gushing about fashion ‘moments’.

The Nineties was a time when the big brands were expanding globally to cater for the new markets in Asia, Russia and South America. In the UK, it was the decade that democratised fashion, with the expansion of the High Street along with a huge interest in the world of designers and their lifestyles.

It was exciting to be part of the industry that was increasingly important in people’s lives, not just because they could see Gwyneth Paltrow in Ralph Lauren couture on the red carpet, but because they were so much more informed about it, by both Vogue and the vast expansion of fashion coverage generally.

Anybody watching a programme that features as large a part of their professional life as this does mine is likely to think that it fails to reflect their ‘truth’. But, in the now famous words of our late Queen, ‘recollections may vary’. Mine certainly do.