Alexandra Shulman: the British Vogue editor on fashion, her candid memoir and standing by Philip Green

As she publishes her brilliantly candid memoir, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman gives Charlotte Edwardes the lowdown on what it’s like to work with everyone you’ve ever heard of, and why she’s standing by Philip Green…
Chris Tubbs
Charlotte Edwardes18 November 2016

One of my absolute favourite excerpts from Alexandra Shulman’s diary of Vogue’s 100th year (and there are many) is when she can’t find anything to wear in the racks of designer clothes at Selfridges. ‘I’m the editor of Vogue,’ she declares, ‘surely this should not be happening.’ So she goes to Jigsaw instead and finds lots of ‘really good, well-priced, easy clothes’. She says she’d love to wear Preen, but would look like a ‘bag lady’, and later buys her mother, the writer and former magazine editor, Drusilla Beyfus, a nice, safe Liberty print wallet for her 90th birthday.

So when I sit down in her light, bright kitchen in Queen’s Park, I’m surprised to find she’s in Erdem and Dolce & Gabbana. ‘This is just for the pictures,’ she corrects. ‘This is not me.’

What is her is the chicken carcass in a Le Creuset pan — roast chicken is her ‘favourite’ — and the endless cups of coffee she provides from a moka pot. There’s a ribbing exchange with her son, Sam Spike, 21, who lives with her and her boyfriend, the writer David Jenkins. Sam accuses her of being dismissive of his view of ‘contemporary feminism’ and says Jenkins agrees with him. She replies — somewhat dismissively — that they are just ‘ganging up’.

The first thing to say about Inside Vogue the book is that it is everything the BBC2 documentary Absolutely Fashion: Inside British Vogue was not. Shulman, 58, says writing was ‘therapy, really’: ‘I thought, “I’ll put it all down. I’ve got to be careful not to edit”. So in the end there’s more than I thought.’

Even without the piquant observations — Karl Lagerfeld is a ‘benevolent Bond villain’; Mick Jagger is ‘soft shoes and Mount Rushmore face’; the late Zaha Hadid ‘just like Big Bird’ in an enormous ostrich cape — it’s eye-popping. She faithfully reports Sophie Hunter telling her how she met Benedict Cumberbatch in a loo, Ben Goldsmith calling Sadiq Khan a ‘smug little f***er’, David Bailey comparing himself to Picasso and then asking Vogue’s fashion director, Lucinda Chambers, why she hasn’t had Botox.

Tracey Emin cancels expensive shoots at a moment’s notice, as does Naomi Campbell. Shulman relates how Campbell calls in a cold fury that she won’t be included in the centenary issue because she didn’t turn up to a shoot, adding, ‘threateningly, “It’s not going to look good in the press if I’m not there”’. The shoot is rearranged and Campbell sends ‘a sweet text with lots of emojis I can’t interpret’.

Charles Saatchi is ‘weird, undoubtedly’ for stopping Shulman in the hall as she leaves a dinner party to check her ears for plastic-surgery scars. And I cringed reading that Kate Moss put her arm around Shulman’s son, Sam, ‘like a cat with a baby mouse. (The next day Sam says he has her hair extensions in his jacket pocket.)’

My God, is she worried about causing offence? ‘It’s not in my nature to offend,’ she says. ‘But I decided to do this so I have to be prepared that some people might be upset. My main thing was it had to be honest.’

What shatters ego in her world is, anyway, hard to judge. ‘You can say someone is a serial killer and they won’t be offended. But say they wore a red tie and they never wear a red tie, and they really mind.’ The main thing is that it’s an antidote to the dull thud of the documentary. ‘That wasn’t me,’ she says. ‘The book is.’

Certainly I was nervous to meet her after reading it — not just because of her waspishness but the number of times she is ‘cross’, ‘grumpy’, ‘irritated’, ‘mildly annoyed’ or ‘snaps’ at an assistant, hair colourist or driver. In person, though, she is warm and droll. The only time she gets exercised in our hour together is over pubic hair, and the notion that women are waxing themselves bald for men.

‘It’s absolutely appalling for women to have to feel that they have to be different from the way that they’re created,’ she says. ‘Women have pubic hair, they should have pubic hair. The idea that they feel they can’t have pubic hair because their generation of men will think they’re less attractive, I find absolutely repellent. It really makes me quite distressed.’

She waxes her legs, she concedes, ‘so on one level there’s something I’m changing’. But not her arms. ‘Lots of people would wax their arms if they had as much hair as I’ve always had.’ She gives it a stroke.

Rather than be drawn into condemning the march of skeletal models down the catwalk (‘I’d like to say, “And I’ve changed the world!” But I haven’t’), Shulman believes the way to confront the issue of Size Zero is by providing heroines who are not in fashion or fashion thin.

One ‘bug bear’ is designers who won’t lend clothes for them to shoot, say, the head of pathology in a hospital. ‘If you want teenage girls to be something other than Kim Kardashian or Holly Willoughby or Keira Knightley, well I suppose Keira is an actress, if you want them to aspire to be in the professions — lawyers, doctors, economists, engineers — you’ve got to also encourage them to think they can have all the fun of glamour, too.’

Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that one person she’d love to shoot for Vogue is Theresa May: ‘Absolutely love to. I love the way that she clearly enjoys her clothes, and that she’s this very hard- hitting, tough-seeming person. She holds her own in a man’s world and she doesn’t want to be granted any favours because she’s a woman. But at the same time she had really great red nail polish on when she opened the Tory party conference, and lipstick. And she likes her jewellery. Obviously she likes her shoes, and she has great legs — it’s a huge help when you are going to wear trousers.’

Of course, Shulman’s big coup was getting the Duchess of Cambridge to pose for the centenary cover of Vogue this year. How does she differ from the late Diana, Princess of Wales? ‘Diana was more interested in that high-voltage celebrity, that was something she really embraced. One of the things I’ve learned in this job is how much celebrity is a decision.

Credit: Chris Tubbs
Jonny Cochrane

‘The Duchess of Cambridge is prepared to do her bit, but it’s not one of the things that she most cares about. She loves her kids and the countryside. Dressing up, that’s a professional side to her. It’s a sort of uniform, all those lovely couture costumes.’

Shulman describes the Duchess as very amenable. ‘She’s incredibly likeable, she really is. She wants to do what she’s doing well, and she’s very professional. That’s the point with the royal family. It’s when they stop being professional that things go wrong.

‘We want them to be pros, to get everything right, to be on message and look great. We don’t want them to have off days.’

Shulman is dark and pretty, yet her lack of vanity is striking. She can’t be bothered with the fiddle-faddle of a blow-dry — ‘one of my least favourite activities’ — and the idea of having hair and make up done daily is ‘unbearable’. Actually, she’s happy to change into eveningwear in the office loo and will slug a glass of wine at 9am if it helps her overcome her fear of flying. She cheerfully admits to scarfing two croissants in a binge of disappointment after Alber Elbaz fails to turn up to breakfast with her in Paris, and trying on a dress one day, she remarks she looks like a ‘sequin sausage’. ‘My diary has appointments on the half-hour every hour,’ she reflects. ‘That sounds as if it would make one thinner, but not in my case.’

While ‘The Saintly Audrey’, as she calls her yoga teacher, comes regularly and she runs in nearby ‘Dog Poo Park’, she also smokes ‘between two and four roll-ups’ every night with a glass of wine (‘I always drink on my own’). A childhood habit of waiting for her father, Milton Shulman, the former Evening Standard theatre critic, to get home before having supper means that she can’t eat before 8.30pm at the very earliest. ‘I’m terribly unhealthy. I do everything the wrong way round: eat, drink, smoke and sleep.’ It’s more Bridget Jones than Anna Wintour.

Kim Kardashian West (L) and British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman attend British Vogue's Centenary gala dinner at Kensington Gardens on May 23, 2016
Dave Benett/Getty Images

Like Wintour’s father (Charles), Shulman’s father worked on the Standard. Both women attended high-achieving, competitive London girls’ schools — Shulman St Paul’s, Wintour North London Collegiate. There the similarity ends. She ‘hugely’ admires American Vogue. Are they friends? ‘We don’t “hang out”,’ she says, ‘but we have had supper together and we have mutual friends.’

Her good friends are people she’s known forever, such as her neighbour Jane Bonham Carter, the Lib Dem peer. She’s also ‘loyal to Philip Green’, whose appearance in front of the Select Committee over the BHS sale and subsequent fall-out over pensions is chronicled in her diary. As the press mounts against him, Shulman is firm that he is a friend of British fashion. When I ask what she thinks of his tax avoidance, she says: ‘There are all kinds of other people who pay no taxes at all, companies or whatever. How great do we feel about that?’ She concedes, ‘[Green] hasn’t handled it brilliantly. I’ve spoken to him about it. I know his arguments. But clearly it was a bad decision to sell.’ Should he pay back the money? ‘It’s difficult for me to say what somebody like him should do, but he should do something that makes people feel better about him, yup.’

Shulman is, understandably, patriotic about British fashion. It annoys her that Stella McCartney shows in Paris instead of London, for example. ‘I really wish all the British designers would show in London: Stella McCartney, Sarah Burton and McQueen, Victoria Beckham. It would be so fantastic and I don’t really understand why they don’t.’ She’s had this conversation with Victoria Beckham, she says. And? ‘People normally say it’s about the market.’ Is she firm? ‘Listen, I can’t tell people what to do with their businesses.’ I don’t doubt she tries. Actually she’s funny about ‘Brand Beckham’, as she calls it. ‘That’s a strong-worked image and as I say in the book they all contribute. It’s unbelievable. It’s like the royal family: it’s a machine isn’t it? They’re all in there. Even Harper is now adding to the lustre of the Beckhams. She’s only four.’

Alexa Chung, Pixie Geldof, Kendall Jenner and Alexandra Shulman attend the Topshop Unique show during London Fashion Week Fall/Winter 2015/16
Getty Images for Topshop

After 24 years at Vogue (before that she was editor of GQ), she’s fairly cynical about fame. She was thrilled when Kim Kardashian and Kanye West came to the Vogue Festival, although she was openly clueless about Keeping Up With The Kardashians. When they asked for security she observed: ‘No such thing as a free celeb.’

Despite the pragmatism and the dry wit, Shulman is brilliant at writing female anxiety, especially her own. When she meets the ‘still’, ‘rooted’ Duchess of Cambridge, she says: ‘I compared myself, looking beyond hideous with swivelling eyes and hands waving all over the place.’

Anxiety has hovered on the fringes since she was 21, and after several ‘episodes of very bad anxiety’ she took medication. Today she always carries an emergency Xanax, although ‘I haven’t used it for quite a long time’. She says: ‘Lots of people feel bad about admitting [to anxiety]. Drugs to treat anxiety and depression are absolutely invaluable. Anybody who thinks it is wrong is not giving themselves a chance.’

She doesn’t know what will come next in her life. ‘I never thought I would do anything I did, so I’m open to seeing what happens. I certainly don’t want to stop working,’ she says. ‘My mum is still working and she’s 90. My dad worked until he was 87. I’m not genetically predisposed to stop working.’

She doesn’t rule out moving to New York but would need a good job because ‘to not be successful in New York would be terrible’. Meanwhile, she’s rented a flat on the seafront in Aldeburgh. ‘I’m looking forward to having somewhere different to be, to doing things that aren’t anything to do with Vogue, like spending a lot of time in pubs. Yes pub lunches.’ How fabulously un-Vogue.

‘Inside Vogue: A Diary of My 100th Year’ by Alexandra Shulman, out on 27 October (Fig Tree)

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