This issue is an important one for me. These pages mark my final September as editor-in-chief of British Vogue. This certainly isn’t the end: I’ve six more issues to go at the helm of the magazine (my finale, so to speak, will be the March 2024 issue) before I step into my new role for our publishers Condé Nast, as Vogue’s global creative and cultural advisor. It’s a role in which I hope to continue my work in remoulding the scope and breadth of Vogue’s unique worldview, to hone its definitive power to shape fashion, to chronicle our many cultures and to maintain a devotion to excellence. I hope it’s an outlook that now reflects so many more of you than it did when I arrived in these offices six years ago.
And so, for my last September issue, what better way to celebrate than with four women who have, over the course of more than three decades, come to define the very idea of fashion itself: the original supermodels. Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington appeared on the January 1990 edition of British Vogue – accompanied by the late, great and much missed Tatjana Patitz – in an editorial photographed by another much mourned legend, Peter Lindbergh. That cover image – black and white, jeans and tanks, combining natural energy with supernatural beauty – heralded not only the start of a new mood in fashion that would permeate the years to follow, but establish the women as both super famous and super powerful: supermodels.
For the first time since that moment nearly 34 years ago, Cindy, Christy, Linda and Naomi have reunited for a Vogue cover, fashion editorial, interviews and video in-conversations to mark the release of their hotly anticipated documentary for Apple TV+ charting their stratospheric rise and releasing this month. For such a hallowed moment, my esteemed co-conspirator Anna Wintour – editor-in-chief of American Vogue and Condé Nast’s global chief content officer – and I decided there was only one thing for it: we had to put the legendary quartet simultaneously on the covers of both British and American Vogues.
For the shoot, I had the honour of travelling to New York with one of my favourite young collaborators, photographer Rafael Pavarotti. Over the course of two days in May, to say nothing of many weeks of preparation in styling our four icons, it was a joy for me to be reunited and work again with these women who I am lucky enough to call friends as well as colleagues. The mood on set was magical. Anna stopped by, the models were on top form and you can find the fruits of our labour inside the issue. To me, these extraordinary forces are the ultimate experts. Every pose, every fashion choice, every adjustment in eye contact is considered with them. To work with the supers is the fashion equivalent of watching Shakespeare performed the way it is meant to be done.
Elsewhere, our pages are packed with the essential news, trends and moods for the autumn/winter 2023 season. From photographer David Sims’s take on transgressive romance, to stylists Amanda and Tallulah Harlech’s quintessentially British outlook, the feel for the coming months is grown-up and wearable, with just a hint of derring-do.
As autumn arrives, culture takes centre stage too, as the long days of summer draw in. Zadie Smith speaks exclusively to Zing Tsjeng about The Fraud, her dazzling, and first historically set, new novel that examines a case of uncertain identity and a real-life court battle that gripped Victorian England. As ever with Smith, she also has plenty to say about the way we live now as well. Harry Styles and David Hockney discuss the former sitting for the latter in a new artwork to be unveiled at the recently renovated National Portrait Gallery later this autumn. Meanwhile, in a personal viewpoint, Alighieri designer Rosh Mahtani writes with grace and heartfelt honestly about her experience of having an abortion last year. I’m so grateful to Mahtani for sharing this story with us and hope it resonates with many other pro-choice readers about the deep and complex feelings that surround terminations that too often go unsaid.
So, yes, this September issue is a special one for me. I really hope you enjoy it.
