Always in Vogue: The autobiography of Edna Woolman Chase, editor of Vogue from 1914-1952

ONE

On a crisp autumn morning, more than half a century ago, I was sitting in the living-room of my mother’s small New York apartment reading the newspaper. I was thrilled by the palpitating account of the Patriarchs’ Ball for débutantes, which had taken place the night before at Delmonico’s. The ball, it seemed, had been late in starting because of the opera and the several large dinners beforehand.

In my youth the rich fared lustily, and, considering the tightly drawn stays of the ladies, the way in which, after a formal dinner, they were able to down the elaborate supper served at one o’clock was noteworthy. I assumed they danced it off at the cotillion afterwards.

I could picture them so well – the pretty débutantes in their ball gowns, and later, when it was time to go home, in their flowing cloaks with great fur and feather boas. They would have been helped into their parents’ carriages by admiring escorts; proud girls, gracious yet aloof. With their beautiful clothes and their wealth there was a shine about them.

I envied the débutantes – I was their age – but I knew that I would never be one and that if I ever expected to have any money I must set about earning it. But how? I had no training in anything, and at that moment I was particularly concerned with finance, for though Christmas was still a couple of months away it was in the air and in the ads and I had no money for presents. I folded the paper with a sigh.

I would have been even lower in my mind but for the fact that I had a luncheon engagement with my best friend, Alice. Alice was the sister of my current and first beau, Charles Penny, and she had a job on Vogue, the smart weekly magazine that had been started three years before. She was for ever talking about her work and to me it sounded wonderful. A little after twelve I picked her up at the office on Fourth Avenue, and over the lunch table confided to her my dilemma – lack of funds in general and for Christmas in particular.

Alice looked sympathetic, speculative, and then decided. ‘See here,’ she said, ‘the magazine is taking on temporary help in my department – circulation – why don’t you come back with me after lunch? I think maybe I can get them to give you a job addressing envelopes or something for a few weeks and you’ll make a little pocket money.’

I stared at her reverently. I had been in the habit of wandering into the office to see her whenever I could and I was always impressed. To think of working there gave me an almost painful delight. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you think it’s all right I’d love to come.’

‘Come on,’ she said.

Young Miss Penny’s offer was quite literally the gift of a lifetime. Shortly afterwards she resigned her own position to marry Gustav Oberlander, one of the founders of the Berkshire Knitting Mills, but I stayed on. I stayed for nearly sixty years and my job has been the true love and focus of my life.

It was a curious alliance, for Vogue, from its first issue, had been published by and for sophisticates and I might have been cast as the typical ‘little girl from the country’ arrived in the big city to make good.

Born in Asbury Park, I was raised by my Quaker grandparents in a small New Jersey village, but my mother, Laura Woolman Martin, who was living in New York with her second husband, frequently came to visit us.

My family name was Alloway, but before I was old enough to remember my father my parents were divorced and he drifted out of our lives. When my mother married again I took my stepfather’s name. Long before divorce was the easy thing it is today there had been two in our family, but the subject was never mentioned in my presence.

There was a nebulous character in my childhood who occasionally sent me gifts and great boxes of juicy oranges. I never knew where they came from until much later, when I found out that the grandmother I knew and loved was my grandfather’s second wife. His first, my mother’s mother, had run off with a Southerner whom she married shortly before the Civil War, and it was from her groves that the mysterious boxes of oranges arrived every winter.

The running away would have been grievous enough, but that she should have chosen a Southerner was a bitter blow to a staunchly abolitionist Quaker family like ours.

Her name was never mentioned, yet a blessing was a blessing and the whole family relished her golden fruit as though it were manna from heaven, tacitly ignoring the source.

My father’s family I heard little about, but my maternal grandfather, Joseph Burr Woolman, was a descendant of the William Woolman who landed in 1678 with a shipload of settlers, most of them English Quakers, on the banks of the Rancocas, a broad stream in the Delaware Valley.

The one remaining photograph of my grandfather shows him with a severe God-is-displeased expression and fearsome white eyebrows, but to me he was always the kindest and gentlest of men, though he loved to tease me. I was a small, slender child with an enormous appetite, and one of his quaint sayings sticks in my mind. He would look at me, shake his head in wonder, and say, ‘My goodness, child, thee eats so much it makes thee poor to carry it.’

Another of William’s descendants was the celebrated John Woolman, born in 1720. Armed with the self-sufficiency needed to survive in those days, he was able to turn a hand to many trades. He was a merchant, an amateur lawyer – he could draw a deed and write a will so that they stood up in court – a tailor, a farmer, and the author of one of the most distinguished records of the spirit penned in America, The Journal of John Woolman.

I had a great deal in my childhood – affection and the security of a happy home – but certainly the world of fashion was alien to our ways: yet instinctively I must have been clothes-conscious. I can remember, as a very small girl, a snowy Sunday in the country when I was visiting my Great-aunt Abigail and Great-uncle Gilbert Swain. Because of the snow, we couldn’t drive to first-day meeting, so we sat in their parlour, I on a little stool by the fireplace, and held the silent prayer meeting at home. It was very quiet – the Quakers do not speak at service until the spirit moves – and I was very bored. I looked round the room and decided how I would rearrange the furniture if it were mine. I looked at my aunt and uncle sitting in their sober Quaker clothes and thought that that was a fashion I didn’t care for at all, and I began considering how I would re-dress them.

As I think back upon their appearance, Aunt Abigail in her soft, puce-coloured silk, with the snowy kerchief of fine muslin drawn in neat folds over her bosom, and Uncle Gilbert in his high stock, they seem, to my now-sophisticated eyes, to have possessed a true elegance that no amount of ornamentation can achieve. But in those days I was much more impressed by the fashionable, bustled silhouette of my young mother when she came from New York to visit us, and by my small cousins from Philadelphia in their embroidered white frocks and heavy silk sashes tied on their little behinds.

My mother had an untrained but beautiful voice and I was fascinated by the sentimental and popular songs of the day she sang to us and by the delicious odour that clung about her. In our neighbourhood sachet and perfume were unknown luxuries and our songs, if any, were hymns.

In the evenings Grandpa taught me to play whist, or he helped me with my lessons – before moving to New Jersey he had been principal of a school in Indiana. Sometimes he read to me from the large, illustrated Holy Bible that was a fixture on the sitting-room table, and sometimes I read to him from the New York Tribune, his favourite newspaper.

When I went to New York to live and to start my long career, I did not often find time to return to the old home, but I always felt a sense of security when my grandfather’s letters would arrive telling me not to work too hard: ‘If thee feels too tired, remember thee can always come home.’ The words were comforting when sometimes the spirit was low.

In New York, when I was a young girl, there was a charm to living that I think was real, not merely my own sentimental remembrance of the long-ago past.

The city at that time indulged in the pleasant custom of the pavement cafés and beer gardens that so delight us when touring Europe, and we too had our boarding-houses, those pensions which Americans who have lived abroad recall – at least in their memoirs – with nostalgia.

Our native pension life was a friendly kind of existence, where perhaps a dozen people lived in the house and others came in for meals. A family relationship inevitably developed among the boarders, who were mostly single young men and women, with a sprinkling of elderly couples who liked to assume the role of voluntary chaperons. It seems to me to have been a much more homelike and protective way of life for young strangers in a great city than the makeshift kitchenette-Hamburger Heaven kind of existence that is the lot of so many lonely working women today.

To be sure, the gemütlich note was not universal. Every year thousands of untrained girls were swarming into the city in search of employment, and competition was bitter. Many of them hung on, desperately gambling against slow starvation, and often the end in the boarding-house bedrooms was heartbreaking, a recurrent minor theme in the city’s rhythm.

But though I was curtailed financially I was spared the seamiest side. I was on good terms with my mother, although it required no extra-sensory perception to spot a lack of harmony in the relationship of Mr and Mrs Martin. Feeling that, in this instance, three was not only a crowd, but controversy, by mutual agreement I left their apartment and went to live in a congenial boarding-house by myself. I had a job and my life was sociable.

Bridge whist, as it was then called, was becoming very popular and I could always get a game, and sometimes, if one of the boarding-house young gentlemen was flush, he might invite me to dine at Lüchow’s, the German restaurant that was all the rage.

Besides Lüchow’s there were other fashionable restaurants where, with a moneyed beau, one might go after the theatre to linger romantically over a bird and a bottle.

I thought about marriage – what girl doesn’t? – and when I went out on a festive evening I tried to look my best. I had a skirt of beautiful black heavy satin and frilly blouses with enormous balloon sleeves.

With my new job I was becoming very clothes-conscious and wanted to be like all those other girls who, looking older than their years in the mature fashions but looking, too, somehow frail and appealing under the sheer weight of piece-goods, smiled shyly across the café tables, at the young men with the plastered-down hair and the high, stiff collars and the coats buttoned tight across their chests.

Personally I was careful with my smile. By nature it was spontaneous, but my mother had warned me about my mouth. I had curly brown hair and hazel eyes and my nose was straight, but my mouth! My mother found it ungenteel. ‘Mercy, Daughter,’ she would say, ‘thy mouth, it’s so large. Do put thy hand up when thee smiles,’ and she herself would smile complacently. Her mouth was pretty, her teeth were superb, and she never used anything on them but salt and lemon juice.

I bore her admonition in mind, but when one is young and eager smiling is difficult to resist.

Life in New York was a quickening experience, not so gay as the writers and artists of a later day – who found everything in the ’nineties frightfully amusing and quaint – would have us believe, but stimulating and challenging.

Art and business were on the march. Art, eventually, was to linger in Greenwich Village, but business moved north, in time all the way up to Twenty-third Street, and the Flatiron Building was built. New Yorkers considered it a fine tribute to commerce, but lady New Yorkers were chary of walking near it, for its odd shape caused the wind to blow in unexpected eddies that lifted our skirts and gave the knots of Johnnies standing about a chance to ogle our ankles.

The pavements of New York! The buildings, the theatres, the houses, they were the biggest, and the office of Vogue was the best!

TWO

The first issue of Vogue appeared on December 17, 1892. Its founder and publisher was Arthur Baldwin Turnure. Mr Turnure was a Princeton graduate of the class of ’76 and a founder by instinct. A great organizer of clubs, he also helped form the Grolier Club, which today is still the most distinguished organization in the American printing world.

Typography was his passion, and while the merit of much of the material in the early issues of Vogue is debatable, typographically the magazine was a model.

Its advent was graciously noted in the daily Press:

One of the principal débutantes of the week will be Vogue who will be introduced next Saturday under the chaperonage of Arthur Turnure.

Vogue is very pretty, and while she has as yet little to say she says that little very well, and her conversation is very instructive on all points of fashion and topics of the day.

The new child, apparently fostered by New York society en masse, included Peter Cooper Hewitt, Percy R. Pyne, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Mrs William D. Sloan, Mrs John G. Heckscher, and Charles Oelrichs among its fifty-six distinguished and interested godparents.

Mr Turnure’s statement, published above his signature, presented his débutante to the public:

… The definite object [of this enterprise] is the establishment of a dignified, authentic journal of society, fashion and the ceremonial side of life, that is to be, for the present, mainly pictorial. …

The magazine was published weekly and cost ten cents a copy or four dollars a year. Editorial contributions were both signed and anonymous. For the health of their authors it was perhaps well that the jokes, of which there were several pages, were in the latter category.

Under a half-tone drawing of two young ladies in animated conversation is the following caption:

PENELOPE: I’m in awful luck.

PERDITA: What’s the matter?

PENELOPE: Engaged, and I have still eight new dresses of which I will never have a chance to try the effect.

Or captioned: ‘At the End of the Ride’ under a drawing of a sporting young couple with bicycles:

VAN WITTER: If you will excuse me, Miss Lovely, I will go make myself more presentable for dinner.

MISS LOVELY: Impossible, Mr Van Witter.

(Van Witter is in doubt as to her meaning.)

The magazine carried a great deal of fiction and poetry and there were many more drawings than photographs, but the departments ‘Seen in the Shops,’ ‘Smart Fashions for Limited Incomes,’ ‘On Her Dressing-Table,’ ‘The Well-dressed Man’ had their inception in the earliest issues. ‘Playhouse Gossip,’ which later became ‘Seen on the Stage,’ was an original feature, and I well remember the thrill of my first backstage visit, when Mr Turnure sent me with a photograph of Mary Mannering to get her approval of it for publication. I went to her dressing-room after the matineé and thought it wonderfully original, the way she had telegrams stuck all round her dressing-table mirror.

Vogue also carried patterns, a department that developed into a great branch of the business from a truly humble start.

A woman named Rosa Payne one day strolled into the office and suggested they print a pattern she had made. The atmosphere was casual, the mood of the editors receptive, so they printed it.

The reader snipped a coupon, mailed it along with fifty cents to Vogue and in due course received the pattern, hand-cut by Mrs Payne on her dining-room table. At that time and for several years after I joined the staff the problem of pattern sizes was simple. There was one, and it was a thirty-six.

I think I was not an unattractive young woman, and I longed to be as fashionable as the drawings in Vogue, but the chic, the prevailing, the only permissible bust measurement, the perfect thirty-six, I did not possess. No matter how many ruffles I pinned to my corset cover, I still retained a childlike desperately unchic flatness.

For many years Vogue carried ‘As Seen by Him,’ a feature that has been revived intermittently. Published anonymously, it was written by Walter Robinson, an old friend of Arthur Turnure and Harry McVickar, the magazine’s art director. A snobbishness that today strikes one as both callous and preposterous pervades the tone of these early columns, but they were the most popular and controversial feature of the magazine. On one occasion ‘Him’ wrote:

A word about the treatment of servants. One should always be kind to them. I am never familiar, never allow them to bring tales to me, and I always keep them at a distance. I, however, occasionally encourage them with a bit of commendation. In fact, I always make it a point to be scrupulously civil to inferiors. I say make a point, but it really comes to me naturally. I frequently stop in the street to pat a vagrant dog upon the head or to say a kind word to a horse. Every man who feels assured of his position would do likewise.

‘Him’ also discussed etiquette, and we find him sharply taking to task an uncouth fellow citizen:

Whenever I see a New York man who should know better doing something that is radically rude it makes my blood boil. … I saw this only yesterday when a fellow who belongs to two of the smartest clubs in this city slammed a storm door in a woman’s face at Delmonico’s. The woman came from the West and I have no doubt she goes back to her prairie home with a poor opinion of New York men. We should remember that we have an example to maintain and the man who fails in this is not one of us and he is not worth picking up, even with a pair of tongs.

In the early days Vogue’s staff was small and the atmosphere around the office informal and non-professional. The regular contributors were recruited largely from the personal friends of the proprietor and were chosen more for their social standing and knowledge of good form than for their literary repute. The make-up, too, had a certain nonchalance about it. A page otherwise devoted to fiction might be broken up with a couple of photographs of the house of a socially prominent couple, and we once illustrated a love story of a girl on an army post with drawings of plump, belligerent trout on hooks. The idea that an illustration might plausibly implement the text had yet to gain a footing.

There were many drawings of dresses, but few descriptive captions, although we would sometimes say: ‘For descriptions see printed text on another page.’ Just what page that would be was as much a surprise to the staff as to the subscriber, for no number was ever given. The designers were not mentioned. Once Vogue showed two or three dresses for stout women, but we were so shaken by the experience we haven’t repeated it in fifty-seven years.

Today, in the Mrs Exeter fashions, we acknowledge that a lady may grow mature, but she never grows fat.

In the ’ nineties Vogue’s reporting included interior decoration, just as it does today. Miss Elizabeth Marbury, who became well known through her long association with Elsie de Wolfe and also for the fact that she owned the small Maine farmhouse that has since blossomed into Elizabeth Arden’s de luxe Maine Chance, started her activities as a dramatic agent and producer. It was exciting to learn how she brought the feminine touch to the establishment of herself as one of New York’s best-known career women:

Her office in the Empire Theatre Building is exquisitely fitted up. Costly rugs are laid upon the polished floor, palms bloom in jars of Oriental pottery, velvet hangings drape the doors and windows and there is a divan placed upon a dais, covered with rich rugs and overhung with festooned draperies upheld by javelins or spears. Miss Marbury’s desk is large, handsome, capacious and gives a business-like aspect to the artistic room.

Men and sports played a large part in Vogue’s early make-up and there were often full-page drawings of men’s fashions in clothes and head and face adornments. We once had an issue devoted entirely to the male sex and frequently ran photographs of stalwart Yale and Princeton football teams. The editorial thinking was that it was a magazine for ladies and gentlemen, not just a woman’s fashion magazine.

A notable feature of the early Vogues was the less supine acceptance of the mode in fashion and manners than is the case today. We might observe that ‘in her bisque-coloured dress and black hat with the pink roses the Duchess of Edinburgh looked far from smart,’ or, commenting on the wedding of H. H. Asquith and Miss Margot Tennant: ‘In an essentially government wedding, the entire cabinet, headed by Rosebery, as well as the retired Premier, Mr Gladstone, were conspicuous by their absence. The church looked like a division in the House of Commons.’

Today we treat the higher social orders with greater respect, but the irreverence of old had pith.

On its third anniversary Vogue announced with confidence that ‘the high-class weekly is the coming advertising field of the future.’ Despising smug complacency, they opined, just a bit smugly, that ‘during the year Vogue has indulged in little or none of the self-praise and smug complacency which seems to be a precious practice of nearly all papers. Nor does it mean to depart from its habit now, despite the gratifying exhibit made in this issue by its business friends, the advertisers.’ In the editorial Mr Turnure stated:

Vogue with this number completes its third year. … Two leading ideas control its career – one the constant recollection that improvement and development go hand in hand; the other that its readers are gentlemen and gentlewomen and that to the requirements of this class its energies and resources shall conform.

Into this atmosphere of high resolve I entered fervently, equipped only with the integrity inherited from my Quaker background, common sense, and, considering my lack of training, what must have been a flair for fashion.

For the kind of magazine Vogue has always been its name is a particularly happy one, and credit for the choice must be given to Mrs Josephine Redding, its first editor. Mrs Redding gazed upon the Century Dictionary and saw that its definition of the word ‘vogue’ fitted her fledgling to a T:

Mode or fashion prevalent at any particular time; popular reception, repute, generally used in the phrase ‘in vogue’: as, a particular style of dress was then ‘in vogue’; such opinions are now ‘in vogue.’

Her other qualifications for the editor of a fashion magazine were less evident. In a day when the chic feminine figure was corseted until breathing was a matter of hearsay rather than experience, Mrs Redding’s square little body was cosily unconfined, supported on common-sense shoes and topped, summer and winter, day and night, by a broad-brimmed hat. Under no circumstances was the hat ever removed. Were you to dine with Mrs Redding at her house, your house, or in a restaurant, she would appear in evening dress wearing one of her flat-crowned, broad-brimmed creations. Nobody in the office of Vogue had ever seen her without one and there was considerable speculation among the staff as to what she kept under her hat. General opinion inclined to a large bald spot, so one day, when word came that she was ill and wanted to see me at home, the office was agog. Mr Turnure himself was as curious as any. ‘Now,’ he said hopefully, ‘you’ll be able to tell us what she looks like without her hat.’ But when I arrived at her house and was shown into the editorial bedroom, there lay Mrs Redding, propped against her pillows, clad in her nightgown, her hat upon her head.

Vogue’s editor violently disapproved of the fashions of her day and was outspoken in her dislike of them. ‘Humps,’ she would write. ‘Women today are all covered with humps. Big, humpy sleeves, humps on their hips, humps on their behinds; it’s nonsense.’

There were moments when, tried beyond endurance and flying in the face of the advertisers, she would spill her outraged common sense into the editorial pages of the magazine. ‘No sooner are we properly godeted and set up for the season, and are sailing in the zenith of fashion’s glory, than this fiendish discoverer springs upon the feminine world, as he has, within a short time, with his nine-yard wonder. A skirt, twenty-seven feet in circumference, swinging from a twenty-inch belt, is a sight to make angels weep. The silk petticoat, in spite of corded rufflings and wired hemming, will collapse under a nine-yard pressure, and something more substantial must take its place. Hoops, no doubt!’

As much as she deplored the fashions of her day, Mrs Redding loved the animals. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which had been founded by Henry Bergh in 1866, counted her one of its ardent supporters and at frequent intervals she haled into court some ‘cruel monster’ who beat or failed to water his horse.

During her régime the pages of Vogue barked, meowed, cheeped, and roared with accounts of animal life. The roar would be from the lions. For years the magazine had a passion for lions; again and again the king of beasts appears, by himself or with mate and children, in mood ferocious or benign, in halftone double-page spreads.

A long-dead goose of my mother’s once formed the subject matter for one of our illustrations. When we were dining with Mrs Redding one evening my mother told her of a pet goose she had had as a child. His name was Ben and like Mary’s lamb he followed mother everywhere. When tired he would plunk himself down in the road looking at her reproachfully and honking disconsolately, whereupon she would pick him up and tote him home in her arms, his long neck dangling down her back.

This story so charmed Mrs Redding that she commissioned one of Vogue’s artists to make a drawing of the bucolic scene.

Something else Mrs Redding disapproved of, besides the fashions of the day and cruelty to animals, was men. Office gossip had it that one of the gentlemen contributors had done the dirty on her, and she began to take frequent editorial jibes at the male sex.

… Any romantic notions that a woman may entertain regarding the stern sex are apt to be very badly damaged if she meets men outside of domestic and social circles, say as fellow collegians, or fellow workers in professional or commercial life. Here drawing-room etiquette does not prevail and the aboriginal man, divested of conventional veneer, stands forth in his true colours as a very fallible, commonplace human being.

Mr Turnure, poor chap, was but a lowly worker in professional life, only he happened to be the boss, and somewhere along the line he and Mrs Redding parted company, but between them and from them I absorbed a good deal of magazine policy and learned a lot about what was and was not Vogue material.

The partitions of the early offices did not reach the ceiling and many of their altercations floated over the top and fell upon my not unwilling ears. There were other violent disagreements, too, between Mr Turnure and his art director, Harry McVickar, about what illustrations should be used. I had been brought up to believe that swearing was low and sinful, so that when Mr McVickar, who was prone to strong language, would let out a ‘God dammit, Arthur, can’t you see what I mean?’ and Mr Turnure, who scorned profanity, would reply with great restraint, ‘Yes, Harry. I know what you mean, but I still don’t like it,’ there was no question in my young mind but that the gentlemanly Turnure was right, no matter what the problem.

The first proprietor was a big man, rather floridly handsome, with charming manners. His wife, the former Elisabeth Harrison, was a beauty, and she and her sister Marie were among the first-ranking women golfers of those early days of the game in America. Elisabeth indeed was runner-up for the championship. On her way out to Baltusrol to play, Mrs Turnure would sometimes stop at the office to pick up her husband. She would hurry in, eager to be on her way, wearing a heavy circular ankle-length skirt, a high-collared shirt-blouse and a long, swinging, red-lined cape. This was considered the correct costume for the game and we all thought her very smart.

I remember the shock as well as the pleasure we experienced the day Mr Turnure informed us that his wife had given birth to a baby boy. They were calling him David. Enveloped as he had been in the voluminous folds of the golf cape, we none of us had had an inkling of his imminence. There was some speculation that perhaps the stork really had brought him. The fact that today that baby, his wife and their son and college-age daughter are cherished younger friends gives me great happiness.

When I had been with the magazine a few weeks I was enthralled one day by a phone conversation I heard taking place in Mr Turnure’s office, which came to me over the partition. He was addressing a somewhat deaf fashion artist, a Mrs Rose. ‘No, no, Mrs Rose,’ he shouted. ‘I said underclothes, Miss Vanderbilt’s underclothes. We have some of her trousseau here in the office. I want you to come in and draw it.’

My pulse quickened; I was a poetic eighteen – the same age as the bride – and the wedding of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the scion of the Marlboroughs in 1895 was the great romantic event, not only of the season, but of the entire fin de siècle era.

For weeks beforehand the papers carried the minutest details of the preparations and of the trousseau. ‘Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt is a very dainty little lady with very decided ideas about her wardrobe and the lingerie will be exquisitely simple and dainty in every detail.’ Did I not know! Vogue devoted the major portion of an entire issue to these entrancing garments, and some of them were right here in the office, fashioned of mull and lace, embroidery and ribbons. As we informed our readers, ‘The markings consist of the name Consuelo embroidered on the nightgowns, chemises and corset covers on the left side, while on the drawers it adorns the left knee. The writing of the duchess’s own signature was copied for these.’

The Vanderbilt-Marlborough wedding was the super-de-luxe unparalleled spectacle of its time. It is hard today to realize the furore the event created. People opened and closed houses, took long train trips, and travelled across the ocean to the tune of those particular wedding bells.

In her charming autobiography, The Glitter and the Gold, Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan tells how she spent the morning of her wedding day alone and in tears.

The tears were natural, for without love and under almost medieval coercion she was being forced into the most spectacular marriage New York had ever seen.

To say that the New York Press gave the wedding generous coverage is an understatement. However, the Times didn’t go so far as to close its eyes to business completely, and its account of the affair was interspersed with ads more or less appropriate to the occasion: ‘Come, haste to the wedding, but remember to fetch along a bottle of Riker’s Expectorant. St Thomas’s Church is a mighty draughty place, and it’s well to be on the lookout for a sudden cough or cold.’ ‘House furnishings from Lewis & Conger,’ ‘Cuticura works wonders,’ and ‘Tonight – Hood’s Pills.’

The following day, just to keep the welkin ringing, two other young people got married in Richmond, Virginia; Miss Irene Langhorne wed a Mr Charles Dana Gibson, artist.

Mr Gibson and Vogue burst upon the world in the same era, but he was never in our pages. I feel sure that Arthur Turnure, who knew him well, would have welcomed him, but his famous girl had already been launched in Life before Vogue came upon the scene. Life, a weekly at that time, mostly devoted to satire and humour and not owned by Mr Henry Luce, no more resembled today’s Life than our social mores today resemble those of the end of the nineteenth century, but it was immensely popular.

Mr Gibson’s girls were always the essence of ladyhood, but it was not until the dean of society, Mr Ward McAllister, once described as ‘the most omnipotent snob in America,’ invited Miss Irene Langhorne from Richmond to lead the grand march at the Patriarchs’ Ball that the Gibson girl jelled into a type.

Once he had won his bride, Mr Gibson needed no other model. Colonel Chiswell Langhorne’s daughter was the love of Gibson’s life and she became the ideal of every girl in America. The way she wore her hair, her sailor hats, her gowns, even her blouses and belts, were slavishly copied. Wherever the fashionable young women of that period assembled the Gibson influence was inescapable and a popular song of the day was ‘Why Do They Call Me a Gibson Girl.’ Even in Paris they were humming ‘Pourquoi m’appelle-t’on une Fille Gibson?’

The Gibson vogue recalled another famous artist who had enormous influence on the fashion of his time. George du Maurier, when he created his stately Duchess of Towers in Peter Ibbetson, set the model for every beauty-conscious girl of his day, but the duchess was a figment. Mrs Gibson was as lovely and had the advantage of being real.

THREE

Throughout its long life Vogue has moved nine times, taking possession of the current premises at 420 Lexington Avenue in May of 1927. Our set-up, I think, may be fairly described as luxurious, but in the early days one of the nine moves brought us to a location even less formalized than the office with the part-way-up partitions. In this one there were no partitions at all, desks were distributed throughout a large, open room, and mine, though I was only a young novitiate, was close to the boss.

My original job on Vogue was in the circulation department. We had long printed lists of subscribers and my task was to write new names in the margin as new subscriptions came in. I also addressed the envelopes in which we enclosed the subscription forms. Wishing to show the stuff I was made of, I