KEY POINTS:
I found myself sharing a sofa with Alexandra Shulman at a party and thought, "Now is my chance to solve one of the great mysteries of life, the conundrum that has been bugging me for years." So I said, "Alex, tell me, because you will know - what is it with handbags?"
I hoped she could explain how and why women suddenly became prepared to pay ludicrous amounts of money - as much as a car sometimes - for ugly shapeless bits of tat with fringes and buckles and studs and straps made from the hides of obviously diseased animals. Do men find them attractive? Do they think, "Oh look, she's got a floppy pock-marked yellow one with studs on - I really fancy her?"
"Dunno," said Alexandra. "Beats me."
"But you're the editor of Vogue!"
"Yep. It's still a mystery."
This is what is always so startling about Alex Shulman: she is the editor of British Vogue but she's completely normal. She is not remotely like Miranda Priestly, the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, or indeed like Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue.
She is a 50-year-old divorcee who lives in Queen's Park, takes her 12-year-old son Sam to Queen's Park Rangers matches, spends Saturdays trawling Portobello Rd market, enjoys cooking big suppers for friends and talking about almost anything except fashion. She says it is a vile slur that she reads books during fashion shows, but admits she does always take a book to fill the long gaps between shows.
Her partner is the journalist David Jenkins whom I remember as a drugs-crazed youth on Penthouse who could be relied upon to deliver brilliant copy several months late. Their friends tend to be other journalists, writers, artists, many of whom Alex has known since her twenties.
She says she'd rather die than go to a health spa - "I hate spas. And treatments. All these places keep offering me a complimentary massage and it's very kind of them but there is nothing I want less.
"I'm a real hedonist but not for spas - I like sunbathing, I like food, I like alcohol, I like cigs, and for holidays I like staying with a pack of friends."
Not exactly the Vogue lifestyle, then?
"No, probably not, but I mean I used to edit GQ and my life then wasn't about Formula 1 cars, or pin-up girls. I don't think actually as an editor you have to lead the life you write about."
She still thinks of herself as a journalist rather than a fashion maven. She doesn't even dress particularly fashionably.
At her best - with her wonderful dark eyes, dark hair, imperious carriage - she can look like Isabella Rossellini, but at her worst she worries about "looking like an awful old fortune-teller".
She is five foot four with a curvaceous figure that is size 12 on a good day, size 14 on a bad one.
She falls far short of immaculate. Her hair is often a mess, her fingernails unmanicured, stray buttons missing. One day at Vogue House I noticed her wearing a very blodgy purple T-shirt and she said proudly that she'd dyed it herself. I bet Anna Wintour has never dyed a T-shirt in her life.
But Alex's answer to anyone who says she doesn't look like the editor of Vogue is essentially, she is the editor of Vogue, so this is what the editor of Vogue looks like. Get used to it.
Moreover she is a supremely successful editor, having seen the circulation climb steadily from 170,000 when she started in 1992 to over 220,000 now. She was rewarded with the OBE in 2005.
But a lot of people in the fashion world were shocked when she first got the job. They knew she was a good journalist herself, but she had never worked as a fashion editor; she had never even been to the collections. Her previous job was editor of GQ. Before that she worked at Tatler and as women's editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
The day before she started at Vogue her sister Nicola (who is now the Marchioness of Normanby) took Alex to Browns and made her buy a suit.
"I remember it was a Lolita Lempicka with shoulder pads and zips all over it. I suppose I thought this is what an editor of Vogue wears!"
I said I wanted to interview her. She said no - but I could come and hang around at Vogue and watch them preparing the March issue, and no doubt someone would be able to elucidate the mystery of handbags.
It is a surprisingly cramped office on the sixth floor of Vogue House, filled with beautiful white orchids and beautiful white girls. They all wear "interesting" shoes or boots but nothing I could identify as a Vogue uniform. I expected it to be like The Devil Wears Prada or Ugly Betty with everyone bitching about everyone else, but there was not even a hint of that. Insiders say she's fair but firm.
The first couple of editorial meetings I went to were baffling because I couldn't understand who or what anyone was talking about - it took a while to click that Mario was Testino and Kate was Moss and Uma was Thurman and Karl was Lagerfeld. There was discussion of a make-up feature in which someone asked anxiously, "Are we using real people?"
"Yes, but real beautiful people," soothed Emily Sheffield, the deputy editor, an outstandingly beautiful person herself.
Alex suggested I should go on a shoot. I volunteered to go to Peru with Mario Testino or to New York with photographer Craig McDean and Kate Moss, but Alex dispatched me instead to Kentish Town where photographer Jane McLeish Kelsey was shooting Three Ways with a Swirly Skirt.
"Alex," Pippa tells me, "has a big focus on real women."
The shoot itself was unexpectedly real and domestic, with a toddler playing on the floor (he was the son of one of the stylists, Bay Garnett) and a pale silent girl reading Hemingway's Fiesta in Russian - she turned out to be the model.
There was also a big burly man who just sat on the sofa doing nothing, so eventually I asked what his role was.
"I'm with the jewels." What? He showed me a Chanel box containing a star that looked to my untutored eye like a Christmas-tree decoration but turned out to be a platinum-and-diamond brooch costing 171,750 (NZ$435,860) - he was its bodyguard.
Kate Phelan, the fashion director, told me she was off to the States next week to shoot the Kate Moss cover and then on to the California desert to shoot another feature near Palm Springs.
She suggested I come to the "rail meeting" when she shows Alex all the clothes she has assembled for New York. The rail is in a dark corner of the office and looks like something from an Oxfam shop - what is more exciting is the sea of shoes spreading out from the rail and all round the office, weird and wonderful shoes with heels carved like ships' figureheads or skyscrapers.
Alex confides later that she hates these tortured heels but they are the new look. On the whole, she says, she leaves the choice of clothes to her fashion editors but she does demand to see "the rail" before every shoot, and she is upset this time because the Chloe outfits she thinks might make the cover are already in New York.
The theme of this particular "story" is clothes inspired by paintings - a theme Alex spotted in the shows in Paris, Milan, New York and wanted to focus on, "mainly because it's very beautiful".
She shows me a Gucci dress that she says is "almost like a Jackson Pollock" and a Prada skirt and top printed with "something like Edward Dulac or Rackham in this techy fabric". Tacky fabric? I ask, bewildered. "No, techy - it's a new sort of organza."
The clothes are all size 10 but Kate Moss "can fit anything". But Alex is a bit worried about her hair. "Does she still have the fringe? I don't mind the fringe but I don't want her hair scraped back." She also tells Phelan not to let Kate look "too boudoir. Keep that coolness about her, not too overtly sexy".
I ask Alex if Kate Moss is always a safe bet for a cover? "Nobody's a safe bet, but a famous model helps."
One of her problems, she says, is that there are so few superstar models now - the current crop may be well-respected in the fashion industry, but their names mean nothing to the public.
The other problem, Alex explains, is that top models and photographers earn so much more from advertising that they only do the editorial shoots they want to do - they are not the obedient puppets they used to be. In one issue, for instance, she wanted to do a "hippie nomad" story that could easily have been shot in Morocco, but Mario Testino wanted to go to Peru (because he is Peruvian) so Peru it was.
Going to Peru cost a packet - but then Vogue can afford a packet. Alex said I would have to ask Stephen Quinn about the money side because he is the publishing director. He said of course he couldn't give exact figures because Conde Nast is a private company, owned by the Newhouse family, but "profitability has never been higher.
British Vogue is the most profitable magazine in the company, outside the US, by far." It ran 2020 pages of advertising last year and advertising rates can be as high as 22,000 pounds a page, though the average is more like 16,000. Which, if my calculator is correct, means they made over 32 million from advertising last year. The cover price probably pays for the production costs.
There's much juggling of editorial and advertising sensitivities and priorities and I do wonder whether Alex finds it fulfilling?
"Oh it's certainly fulfilling, there's no question about that. Sometimes I walk down the road and I think, how lucky can you be?"
But other days she thinks maybe she should be at home with her son, maybe she should be writing a book. She is still not quite of the fashion world and admits that, even after 16 years, she has few or no designer friends.
"They're not soulmates. But then we're not there to be friends," she says bracingly. "I suppose in a way I compartmentalise my life. I do the job and I edit Vogue and I feel I'm very professional, but I'm not that emotional about it. The rest of my life I'm extremely emotional about, but I don't bring that into the office. And I suppose some people find that quite difficult, they don't understand how I can do that, but it's the only way I could do this job, because I do have very much another life and that's what I define myself by - I don't define myself as editor of Vogue. Which is lucky because a lot of my life I wasn't editor of Vogue and hopefully I will have another life after being editor of Vogue."
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