Come on, Vogue

I’ve been reading Vogue magazine on and off since I was thirteen. As a teenager I found it a colourful counterpoint to the grungy glamour of the music rags I also subscribed to. I loved the glitz, the expense, the ridiculousness of the outfits.

As a country girl still a long way from having an real sense of myself I found solace in reading about and gazing at pictures of the different potential role models within its pages. Did I want to be an all-American Calvin Klein girl with sunkissed hair and spotless white chinos? How about an edgy aristocrat permanently perched on a horse? A rock chic in acid green underwear and a string of aquamarine beads? I cut out whole fashion spreads, some of which I still have. The one that sticks in my mind is from about 1994; a fierce model with strawberry blonde hair somewhere in the American midwest wearing a dazzling array of dresses, cowboy boots and feather headdresses. For me she embodied the spirit I wanted to grow into: fearless, exciting, independent – happy. Unusually for a Vogue spread this model radiated a carefree joy. In one picture you see just her face. Her eyes are closed as the sun beats down on her. She is chewing the end of a corn stalk, just as I used to on my solitary walks. I see the irony of this now. What I saw as a distant unattainable attitude at the age of 16 was something I was in fact embodying right then and there. I was carefree and happy. I had hours to stalk the countryside, gathering armfuls of grasses, artfully tearing my charity shop clothes as I planned my ‘escape’ to the real world.

Not that long ago, in a fit of nostalgia perhaps, I took out a subscription to Vogue. At first I looked forward to it dropping through my letterbox, but now I find even just flicking through it something of a challenge.

What strikes me now, as a woman in my thirties, is the obsession with youth. It must have been the same back then, but of course I was too young to notice. Now I find myself alienated by the young girls and ‘men’ draped with clothes I can still no longer afford. Not that I want to see plump, aged models as I flip through its pages, but I want to know what these styles might look like on someone of my age – not a girl who’s barely started menstruating.

And there’s the concomitant obsession with the offspring of the rich and famous. The Le Bons, the Geldofs, the Lennons, Woods, and the rest. These children have their parents’ incredible genes, and damn do they look good in their cast offs, but I’ve yet to see one who exudes any of the charisma of their mother or father. And yet still Vogue ogles them, interviews them, photographs them. I find it nepotistic and vampiric. Where is the new? Where is the original?

Perhaps I have lost the joy of ‘dressing up’. Never have I worn less makeup, flatter shoes, more comfortable clothes. I like to be able to sleep in and then run in comfort to the tube station rather than rise early to draw on complicated eyeliner and then totter down the road on six-inch heels. Years of being a woman have taught me just how much effort goes into looking ‘effortless’. Now when I look at those eager women who open up their wardrobes and their houses to the Vogue photographer I see, not potential role models, but rather desperate control freaks who sublimate their sex drive through shopping.

I still like fashion. I like its ‘fuck you’ attitude and defiance in the face of dullness. I love the attention to detail and the genuine artistry that goes into couture. I even like the fact that I’ll never afford a designer dress, and that I wouldn’t buy one if I could. Vogue is a fantasy world, like a comic book or an illustrated children’s novel. The trouble, I suppose, is that I’m not a child anymore.