21 December 1959: Nearly thirty years ago, the future editor set out for an interview at the Vogue offices in borrowed clothes, her own...
21 December 1959: Nearly thirty years ago, the future editor set out for an interview at the Vogue offices in borrowed clothes, her own being inadequate to the occasion
Audrey Withers retires from the editorship of “Vogue” at the end of this month, but continues to be editorial director of the Conde Nast publications. Perhaps we should begin her story with a contemporary scene in a Paris couture house, the editor surrounded by voluble vendeuses, conducted to her chair by Pierre Balmain... but let us go back to a sturdy 6-year-old in holland pinafore and brown stockings, tailing up Cat Bells from her home on Derwentwater, taking the path that Mrs Tiggy-Winkle took.
Mrs Tiggy-Winkle’s kitchen, it will be remembered, had a nice hot singey smell. She ironed and goffered, and was an excellent clear-starcher; and the Tiggy-Winkle standard of uncompromising perfection is something Audrey has emulated in her own work and appearance. She has retained also, in spite of much travel - and travail - in high-fashion places, a love of well-ordered domesticity she may well have first learned from the Beatrix Potter characters. Mrs Tabitha Twitchet herself would approve the farm which Audrey Withers and her husband have in Essex; although Mrs Tittlemouse, that “most terribly tidy particular person,” might consider there were too many papers on the desk at Vogue House, too many books strewn about the London flat.
Borrowed clothes
But perhaps the most telling point in the tale is the day, nearly thirty years ago, when the future editor set out for an interview at the “Vogue” offices in borrowed clothes, her own being inadequate to the occasion since she had been out of work for some time. It was at the time of the disastrous slump in the early thirties, and this interview was the result of her reply to an anonymous “Situations Vacant” advertisement. The eye which was to select models from the great dress houses of Europe for illustration in “Vogue” was unerring in its selection from her friends’ wardrobes; she got the job, sub-editing at £3 a week.
But perhaps the most telling point in the tale is the day, nearly thirty years ago, when the future editor set out for an interview at the “Vogue” offices in borrowed clothes, her own being inadequate to the occasion since she had been out of work for some time. It was at the time of the disastrous slump in the early thirties, and this interview was the result of her reply to an anonymous “Situations Vacant” advertisement. The eye which was to select models from the great dress houses of Europe for illustration in “Vogue” was unerring in its selection from her friends’ wardrobes; she got the job, sub-editing at £3 a week.
To-day’s young aspirants to fashion journalism, who offer something vaguely called “dress-sense” as their one qualification, should know that Audrey Withers was equipped with much else besides. The daughter of a Manchester doctor who retired early, wrote many books, and was an early executive member of the National Trust, she grew up in country houses to which A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, and other writers were constant visitors. She went to St Leonard’s School and Somerville College, Oxford, where her mother had been before her, and her ambition was to get into publishing. Jonathan Cape advised her to gain experience first in a retail book-shop, and Bumpus gave her 25s a week; a most satisfactory start, she felt, when she found a friend from Balliol earning £1 in the basement. Later she promoted herself to the Times Book Club; but the slump came and the job went. So she learned shorthand and typing at Pitman’s, and then the long weeks of answering advertisements culminated in that letter from “Vogue.”