Vogue Australia celebrates 60 years: Leo Schofield remembers early days
As Australia’s trailblazing style magazine celebrates 60 years at the forefront of fashion, Leo Schofield sits down for lunch with fashion icon Maggie Tabberer and current Vogue editor Edwina McCann.
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In 1959 I was working as a copywriter in the advertising department of Farmer’s, the famous Sydney department store at the corner of George and Market Streets.
I had just spent four years as a cadet journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald but in all that time I only ever had Sundays and Mondays off. For an outgoing twenty-something lad this was hardly a satisfying lifestyle. Besides, the pay was lousy.
The more glamorous and better-paid world of advertising beckoned.
The one sunnyday, into the advertising department walked a newly-arrived Kiwi, one Bernard Leser.
A refugee from Nazi Germany, he and his family had fetched up in the schmatte business (shoes and knitwear) in Auckland, whence he was dispatched to Sydney to launch the Australian edition of Vogue.
Bernie, as he was universally known, was a born salesman. He had chutzpah to burn and he managed to persuade the advertising manager, Zelda Steadman, who was unswervingly committed to newspapers as a medium for retail marketing, to take a pricey full page in the first edition of Aussie Vogue.
Now at Farmer’s, one multi-tasked. We copywriters were set to sell everything from furs to fridges. I was asked to devise our first ad in Vogue. The fashion model du jour was a gorgeous young lady from Double Bay, Margo McKendry.
The photographer, Laurie Le Guay and I agreed to shoot her down in Argyle Place, posed against the facade of one of the lovely old colonial houses in the Rocks. I seem to recall that, in an attempt to stand out from the other advertisers, we ran the shot horizontally rather than vertically.
Ah, dear dead days!
And here I am today, sitting at Nour restaurant in Surry Hills with two of the legends of Vogue, the eternally glamorous Maggie Tabberer and the current editor of the magazine, Edwina McCann.
We are afloat on a sea of nostalgia. McCann of course is much, much younger than either Maggie or me and seems interested in our memories of some of the Voguettes past, the ghosts of Bernie who went on to fame and fortune in New York and London as the grand panjandrum of the Conde Nast empire, of the first editor Rosemary Cooper and her successor, the challenging, somewhat spiky Sheila Scotter.
The occasion is a kind of celebration of sixty years of a fashion magazine that has, in those six decades, left many a rival in the dust. “Vogue didn’t suffer when other magazines folded. We just got stronger,”says McCann.
The centrepiece of the anniversary celebrations has been a knockout exhibition Women in Vogue: Celebrating 60 years in Australia at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.
At first only models were featured on the covers, Aussie beauties such as McKendry and tall, striking blonde Anne Fulton, both of whom had international careers. Gradually these impossibly lovely sirens made space for real people, Kylie Minogue. Crown Princess Mary, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Margot Robbie, Miranda Tapsell, women who do things rather than merely look beautiful.
McCann plundered the Vogue archives for images of these and other stars for the Canberra exhibition.
“For the very first cover they sent out an English photographer and an English model. But the second edition featured Maggie,” she says.
“I remember. I was wearing a purple hat and purple eye shadow and pink gloves and my hand were arranged like this,” recalls Tabberer, who then replicates the pose.
It’s something of a miracle that the Vogue staff and the Portrait Gallery director Karen Quinlan were able to pull the show together.
“All of our records burned in a fire in our offices in Clarence Street,” says
McCann, speaking of the challenges faced in sourcing items the exhibition. ”We actually had very little to work with.”
But Quinlan was an old hand at fashion shows. In her eighteen years as Director, Bendigo Art Gallery has come to be recognised internationally for the quality of its exhibitions, many undertaken with overseas partners, and focusing on fashion.
The name Patrick Russell comes up, eliciting sighs from my two lunch companions who are big fans. Russell was the Rene Gruau of Australia. Gruau was the professional name of Count Renato Zavagli Ricciardelli della Caminate, an Italian artist whose groundbreaking illustrations, particularly those for Dior, dominated the haute couture in the middle years of the 20th century.
Influenced by Gruau’s bold fluid line and dramatic use of black, Russell was, as McCann puts it, “an essential figure in the history of Vogue, “spanning the transition of fashion illustration into fashion photography. We printed up some of his work especially for the show.”
The food begins arriving and it looks like a parade of exotic millinery, each plate a work of art. And the flavours are fantastic. There are a number of Middle Eastern restaurants now dotted throughout Sydney, mostly temples to tabouli, headquarters of humus, with little in the way of distinction. Here at Nour, on the site of the late lamented MG Garage, senses stir not only to delicate tastes but to fragrant smells.
Replete, we resume our conversation.
We talk about the immutable and persistent appeal of the Vogue brand, the way it pops up as a noun in odd places like a Madonna video – “You couldn’t buy that kind of exposure.” says McCann- or is recruited, without the capital V to describe a camp, posey dance style. It’s flexible too, and can sit easily on the cover of a lifestyle magazine like Vogue Living. But underlying the brand is the universal notion of fashionability.
Conversation is not confined to female fashion. Both ladies remark on the new and growing interest in male fashion.
“It’s a tougher market,” observes McCann,” but quite lucrative at the moment. The Australian male is changing.”
I recall that once if you wore Old Spice after-shave you were branded a poofter.
“We’re a long way from that nowadays,” chimes in Tabberer, emitting her seductive gurgling chuckle like dry gin cracking on ice cubes. ” Now a lot of blokes have personal cologne.
McCann expands on the global influence of her magazine. “Just at the moment there are twenty-seven Vogues around the world. We inhabit a world without borders, a digital world.
Suddenly we are talking to young women and connected on values on a global scale. And we can discuss subjects that were once unthinkable among women’s magazine, encourage young women to acquaint themselves with contemporary subjects such as stem cell technology.“
I ask McCann to what she attributes Vogue’s ongoing ascendancy, not only in Australia. Her answer is modest and succinct. And understated: “We are very lucky being a superbrand.”
■ Vogue Australia: Sixty Years Through the Lens, a one-hour documentary special examining the evolution of Vogue in Australia, will premiere on FOXTEL on Wednesday, November 27 at 8.30pm AEDT on Fox Showcase, and the special 60th anniversary December issue of Vogue Australia starring Nicole Kidman is on sale now.