In this episode I go on a style journey with the longest standing former editor of British Vogue …  Alexandra Shulman CBE. 

As a young designer at the time I will never forget being invited by Alex to a one on one lunch at San Lorenzo not long after she became Editor in Chief.  I didn’t quite know what to expect, but I came away thinking how kind and approachable she was…in fact the polar opposite to the intimidating image of most editors at the time…There was never anything Devil Wears Prada about Alex.

In this episode she talks openly about her relationship with fashion …proclaiming she knew nothing about fashion when she took the job and maybe “ignorance was bliss”. But when she took the helm of Vogue it was a unique moment in fashion…there was an incredible pool of British design talent and at the same time the High Street was breaking through and democratising fashion. Of course I ask her what she wore on her first day in the ever-imposing Vogue House…

We talk about the pressure of dressing to attend all the shows around the world and she is wonderfully pragmatic about how she knew she was never going to be a “Carine or an Anna”… How the editors grand hotel rooms would always be laden with flowers on arrival from all the big houses, often with handwritten notes from the designers…and a time that Karl (as in Lagerfeld) wrote several pages to her as to how he was feeling about a particular situation…

During her editorship she was asked by the then Kate Middleton to recommend British designers for her wedding dress…Alex submitted her ideas, bearing in mind the possible dynamic between the designer and Kate, the obvious need for incredible security not to mention, could the designer/house create a dress worthy of making history for all the right reasons. She had no idea until the wedding day who had actually got the job.

She talks lovingly of spending time in her mother’s dressing room as a child (the only time she and her siblings got to see her during the week), watching her get dressed for work as the editor of Conde Nast Brides magazine. How glamourous and stylish she was and indeed still is in her 90’s…  

Alex’s book Clothes and Other Things that Matter… is not only about clothes but about the way we live our lives. “From childhood onwards, the way we dress is a result of our personal history”.  Not dissimilar to this podcast, our clothes have stories …

I hope you enjoy this episode…it was a rich conversation peppered with stories of the crazy world of fashion.

Thank you @alexandrashulman for being so wonderfully open and brilliantly eloquent x