What does Vogue mean today?

The magazine has a new editor in Chloe Malle. It may also need a new identity.

There’s more change in fashion, and this time it’s not a designer: American Vogue has a new editor. Or rather, head of editorial content.

Chloe Malle, the former head of Vogue.com and the favourite to take over the front row seat, has indeed been handed the reins of the magazine – or rather, content-creating platform. The one that Anna Wintour, the former editor and still editorial director of all Vogues (still Malle’s boss), likes to call “the bible” of the industry.

But is it? What does Vogue really represent today?

Once upon a time, back when Arthur Baldwin Turnure created Vogue in 1892, it was supposed to chronicle what was described as the ceremonial side of life. Condé Montrose Nast, who bought it in 1909, built it into the ultimate fashion magazine, arbiter of taste and elegance. Editors like Edna Chase and Diana Vreeland reinvented themselves as veritable style dictators, issuing decrees from on high for all to follow – or at least aspire to follow, even if doing so involved a certain essential elitism that was by definition part of the deal.

When Wintour took over in 1988, she built Vogue into an empire, amassing more and more territory and acting as a chess master with designers behind the scenes until she herself became a pop culture caricature. The September Issue, the documentary by R.J. Cutler released in 2009, captured the moment of peak influence for posterity, but it also turned out to have caught what increasingly seems like the end of an era.

Now everyone can access the work of designers, and designers can speak directly to their communities without depending on the good graces of Vogue (or any other glossy magazine). It’s not the most fashion-forward book – that niche reserved for indie magazines that have the freedom to push the boundaries of image-making – or the most newsmaking.

In extending Vogue’s reach, making it more palatable for more people, Wintour diluted its promise. That was around the time social media rendered a key source of its power, its position as conduit between what was happening next (in fashion, in culture) and those who would consume it, null and void.

It has been, said Bryan Yambao, the editor of Perfect magazine (and the former blogger known as Bryanboy), “reduced to a glorified yearbook, a glamorous commemorative photo album of who is hot, wealthy and connected. I don’t think it shapes culture so much as rubber-stamps it.”

It’s still in many ways “a reflection of its times,” said Kim Jones, the former men’s artistic director of Dior menswear and Fendi womenswear. But just as, under Wintour, Vogue marked the shift from models to celebrities, and the rise of the celebrity influencer, it now marks the shift of power between those who once fought to be in its pages – the fashion houses and celebrities – and the magazine itself. Where once the publication had the upper hand, the reverse is now so.

This is true of almost every fashion magazine, but because Vogue was the most dominant for the longest – because it was effectively the synonym for “fashion magazine” – it has also become the symbol of their slide into the swamp of mass culture.

There’s no better example, really, than the covers that pretty much bookended Wintour’s regime.

Her first one, famously, featured model Michaela Bercu laughing on the street in a Christian Lacroix couture jacket with an enormous bejewelled cross on the front – and a pair of Guess jeans. It was the first time jeans had appeared on the cover of Vogue, and it sent seismic waves through the industry as a high-low statement asserting a modern point of view that was beholden to no brand.

The most recent cover featured Emma Stone, a Louis Vuitton brand ambassador, in a Louis Vuitton jacket (and jeans), and was part of a multipage feature of Stone wearing only Louis Vuitton, photographed by Jamie Hawkesworth, who has photographed a number of Louis Vuitton ad campaigns.

Even at a time when it is the norm for many brands to demand their products be photographed as a “total look,” and even though the Vuitton looks had been designed specifically for the shoot (as opposed to for sale), it seemed less about a Vogue point of view than a Vuitton point of view.

That the point of the story was to demonstrate that Stone and Vuitton designer Nicolas Ghesquière were close friends – that the relationship wasn’t just business – only made the piece seem more like brand propaganda.

And it suggested to many that Vogue’s pages were now for sale. That concern had come up in June when Lauren Sánchez Bezos appeared on the magazine’s digital cover in an exclusive story about her wedding (which Malle engineered and authored). While elite weddings are a hallmark of Vogue, they almost never made its cover, and Sánchez Bezos seemingly had neither the celebrity nor modelling credentials that usually merited cover treatment. On the other hand, what she did have was the sort of profile that defined the ideal co-chair of Vogue’s ultimate brand extension, the Met Gala.

Authority, it implied, had been traded for access.

Therein lies Malle’s opportunity.

After all, now that Vogue is no longer, as Julie Gilhart, a consultant and the former fashion director of Barneys, pointed out, “the only church in town,” Malle can decide what she wants to preach.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Vanessa Friedman

Photographs by: Amir Hamja

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