BWW Reviews: Kirstie Clements' THE VOGUE FACTOR

VOGUE is without doubt one of the most widely read publications in the world, and as fashion is as regional as it is ephemeral, there are multiple editions of it for multiple countries. Some of its editors, such as current VOGUE US editor Anna Wintour, become celebrities in their own right, internationally. Others, less known internationally, are still important at home. That would describe Kirstie Clements, who literally rose from the reception desk to the editor's office at VOGUE AUSTRALIA, and did so without a trail of dead bodies and stolen Manolos following behind her.

THE VOGUE FACTOR chronicles Clements' twenty-five years at VOGUE and her final departure after the commercialization of its pages when Rupert Murdoch separated it from Conde Nast ownership. But the book is far more than a pot-shot at NewsCorp and its infamous regime.

If it is a "tell-all," then one of the things it tells is that in some cases, you can rise in the ranks at a job by displaying hard work and initiative, and that if you do it in a big enough way, you can sometimes create your own job in the process. Clements' offer to organize the stockroom - full of fashion and beauty items, not stationery - when there was nothing happening at the front desk helped propel her away from the front desk and into assisting with photo shoots. And from there, there was no looking back.

Aside from some detailed notes on how to succeed in life and at VOGUE without crushing people in your path - and that seems to be possible if her recounting of her career is accurate - the book is a breezy romp through anecdotes about designers, photographers, the staging of a VOGUE spread, and how to form a fashion identity for oneself.

But there's more, and a darker side as well, outside of the tales of jaunts to Paris and sitting through couture shows. Part of the book's controversy, outside of the Murdoch issue, is Clements' revelations of exactly how badly models are dying to be thin. It's not uncommon for them to not eat for the duration of photo shoots, it turns out, and they are often so starved at the end of the shoot that they can barely move. Then there are the ones who try filling up on paper tissues rather than food, and the one "fit model" (a fitting model for a couture studio) who thought nothing of not eating until she had to be hospitalized and put on a drip. If Clements is to be believed, and she should know, this starvation is endemic among models, for whom the idea of a lettuce leaf and a sip of water is actively frightening, since the lettuce might have too many calories. Although VOGUE has been in the forefront, publicly, of seeking healthier body images of women, Clements recounts (as VOGUE readers certainly know) that for most of the international franchise, the concern is given only lip service.

But Clements' own life hasn't been one of starvation; as a VOGUE staffer and editor, she's been invited to some of the most fabulous fashion-and-celebrity-studded parties on multiple continents, and to lunches and dinners with designers and celebrities determined to see that their guests were properly fed. She's been permitted to indulge, though lucky enough to keep a figure despite it (multiple photographs in the book attest to that), and she comes across as likeable enough that there's no begrudging her the luxury she's experienced. It clearly wasn't always that way for her, and it's easy to rejoice with her at her first Armani jacket, or at meeting the women at VOGUE who had already developed dramatic style sense and weren't afraid to display it. She's interviewed royalty, but she worked to get the interviews, and she has no sense of entitlement either to those interviews or because of them.

THE VOGUE FACTOR is short and breezy, an easy beach read for those who want to display their good taste on their lounger while being highly entertained, for this book is indeed lighthearted, gossipy entertainment along with its serious moments. It is never badly written - it is, after all, written by an editor - but it is also never pedantic or full of itself.

But there is also a certain nostalgia here - nostalgia for the days when writing and producing a quality luxury magazine carried pride with it, rather than corporate bottom lines, for the days when fashion journalists were treated well rather than as the stepchildren of larger corporate publishers, for the idea that the bottom line is not the be-all and end-all of life. It is a nostalgia for the idea of gracious living that upscale fashion magazines have always espoused to their readers, but that the producers of those magazines are no longer able to encounter themselves thanks to modern number-crunching in publishing.

Clements is still working, though no longer with VOGUE, and we may hope to see more writing of this level from her. There's no reason that a book can't be informative and fun at the same time, and this is very much both, just as the magazine that gave wing to Clements' talents was under her editorial era.

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