Oh darling

Vogue 1950's

While researching a story today I came across this hilarious article which was published in Peterson's Magazine way back in 1861. I assume this was (like Vogue in it's early days), a sort of social gazette for young aristocratic women who wanted advice and assistance on how to be 'in style' at the time.

Here are some of my favourite excerpts...can you just imagine what these women would have to say about the Lady Gaga's and Paris Hilton's of the world today?

"Young ladies, when they get married, should not relax their habits of personal neatness and graceful deportment, always so charming and becoming in their girlish days, and which were thought indispensable then in aiding them to create an agreeable impression, and setting off, in the most engaging light, their natural advantages."

Vogue 1920's

"Nature for each has a different style, and each should choose what best becomes her, whether in her character of maid or matron. She should cultivate her taste by experiment and observation. She should educate the eye to the chase and beautiful, and thus she would become more competent to judge what is most judicious and tasteful for herself, without copying, as we are too prone to do, the dress of others, whose different style, manners, and appearance, render them wrong arbiters of the dress we wear."

Vogue cover, 1914

"Then, again, a great many women excuse their own carelessness by saying, 'Oh! It don't matter whether we make ourselves fine or not, our husbands never perceive the difference. They don't care a fig.' But the woman who acts on this shallow principle treats neither herself nor her husband with respect; she underrates her own importance."

Balmain in Vogue, 1940's

The September Issue

Last night the much anticipated (well by us, anyway) documentary The September Issue screened at the Sydney Film Festival, and while the 45 minute line (chock-full of Sydney's fashion elite and mega movie buffs) wound around three blocks, it was definitely worth the wait.

The film is an amazingly candid portrayal of the very weird, sometimes strained and extremely amusing relationship between Anna Wintour and Vogue's creative director Grace Coddington - and Grace totally kicks arse.

US Vogue September 07'. Styled by Grace Coddington.
The documentary's camerman plays model with Caroline Trentini - while Anna wanted to photoshop his 'tummy', Grace wouldn't allow it.

She is amazing. Totally cool, she trots around the Vogue offices in what look like a pair of Kumfs (she is 68-years-old after all), she's refreshingly honest about how much Anna pisses her off on an hourly basis and she is a major old school romantic who's not afraid to show how much it still hurts (after 40 years at Vogue) seeing her beloved shots get 'cut' by Her Highness. She is easily the worlds most influential fashion editor, and as Anna refers to her in the film "a genius", but I just love how genuinely lovely she is throughout the entire film.

US Vogue September 07'. Styled by Grace Coddington.

Grace modeling in her early 20's

Karen Elson plays Grace in Vogue's August 08 issue

Click here to see the photos I took of Grace Coddington and Anna Wintour at New York Fashion Week a few months ago.

Goodbye to all that

Something that comes with closing down an office, is throwing things out.

It can actually be quite therapeutic, throwing out the tonnes of paper that has accumulated over the years, the mounds of cds of paparazzi images, the old floppy disks - of which the contents will be forever unknown.

But it was distressing when I had to face the magazines. The 15 years of Vogue (American and British), the 12 years of Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Nylon, Elle. You name it, we had it. Decades of it. And it all had go. It was heartbreaking, but I tried to make it as quick and painless as possible...until I got to Vogue.

I piled them on my desk, grabbed a coffee and started with July 1993. I flicked through each issue, ripping out anything I thought was too good to have disappear forever before I put them, year by year, into the recycle bin.

Here are a just a few (if I had my way there would be hundreds) of my favourite images from Vogue's 1999-2003 fashion pages.

Mode à la New York

There's nothing better than looking at pretty pictures over Sunday morning coffee and pancakes, so here are some of my favourite fashion images from New York with love. Enjoy.

Vogue cover, 1928

New York Times Sunday magazine

Irving Penn, 1948

Annie Leibovitz for Vogue

Helmut Newton, 1992

Grace Kelly

Fairy under Brooklyn Bridge, photographer unknown

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, 1965