Review of In Vogue: The 90s (Disney+)

Fashion is hard. The world of clothes and beauty is saturated with pain, exploitation and cruelty. The paradox is that this is precisely part of its appeal. It is why fashion repeatedly returns to its own horrors while absorbing and aestheticising the horror of the world itself. It is also why people are willing to butcher and abuse themselves in order to meet the challenge of the image. 

This is not the story that the Disney+ series In Vogue: The 90s tells us, although if you look carefully enough you can see its traces. On the whole, the 6-part documentary does an effective job of hiding the pain: you have to read between the lines, or piece the story together from different sources, in order to decode it. In the first episode we return to Linda Evangelista’s infamous bon mot about supermodels (“we don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day”) which caused them so much trouble at the time. Years later, she is contrite and aggrieved at still being held to account for it, but there is really no need: she had, after all, coined one of the great cultural catchphrases of the era. Its notoriety was a consequence of its brilliance but also its truth content: not its literal truth (Grace Coddington notes that Evangelista did get out of bed for less than $10,000) but its symbolic truth.

With wit and economy, Evangelista had distilled the logic of fashion’s elitism. Part of the outrage was due to the fact that this had been said during an economic recession, but it was not simply about wealth: it was about power. The power of the supermodels at this moment was equivalent to the power conferred by access and taste in the world that Vogue represented. As well as being an industry, an artform, and a social scene, fashion is a knowledge structure. It claims standards of objective value that, to outsiders, appear highly subjective, mysterious, and arbitrary. But this is precisely how it protects its cultural capital: by exclusion. This exclusion, structurally defined by its cruelty and its right to inflict pain, is also crucial to its appeal, its desirability. As a result, while Evangelista’s quip inspired outrage, people also delighted in its lack of shame. 

The 90s offers promising material for In Vogue but the full potential is squandered by the decision — or, more accurately, the necessity — to provide cover for its lead character. In its treatment of Anna Wintour, In Vogue is the anti-Devil Wears Prada. The extent to which the American Vogue editor is critiqued is the extent to which Wintour herself is willing to play the Cruella de Vil caricature she has already appropriated (see my essay The Queen of the Condé Nast). Here, her own particular blend of cruelty and cunning — to caress or crush, as Machiavelli put it in The Prince — is uncritically portrayed as a professional byproduct of her visionary abilities or evaded altogether.

Wintour’s replacement of Grace Mirabella at American Vogue in 1988 is recounted as a feel-good tale of inevitable progress rather than the savage coup d’état and aesthetic revolution that it actually was. The Wintour transition later became known as the “July Fourth Massacre”; Mirabella found out she had been sacked when she watched the evening news, while the veteran Society Editor Margaret Case was so distraught by her own treatment that she jumped to her death from her apartment window. Describing her first American Vogue cover, Wintour dismissed the Mirabella era with sharp dispatch: “I wanted the covers to show gorgeous real girls looking the way they looked out on the street rather than the plastic kind of retouched look that had been the Vogue face for such a long time.” Clearly, In Vogue, a Condé Nast co-production, was never going to dwell on the ruthless reality of the company’s favoured style of personnel management. 

In his 1989 autobiography Chic Savages, former Women’s Wear Daily editor John B. Fairchild wrote: “in the fashion business, it’s almost against the law to tell the truth, and anyone who steps behind the silk curtain to show how raw the business is can expect a rough time.” Despite its claim to document the story of fashion’s most important magazine during a transformational decade, In Vogue is, in fact, another silk curtain. The paradox is that the raw truth is there on the screen. What it shows is that Wintour’s role, at the helm of a magazine, was to save fashion from its own extinction. She did this by fusing fashion and celebrity, encouraging traditional couture houses to embrace radical new talents, and legitimizing the transformation of boutique labels into high-street brands. But this change was a brutal process that would have interesting and disturbing cultural consequences. 

In Episode 4 (‘The Rise of the Met Gala’) we see the mutation of Sex and the City from a sitcom with a modest wardrobe budget to a pop cultural avatar of global fashion consumption. Far from heralding “the end of fashion,” as Teri Agins titled her 1999 expose, Sex and the City was a testament to the triumphant reinvention of the fashion industry during the 90s. The explosion of mass manufacturing, commercial branding and image production had not undermined the exclusive world of Vogue: on the contrary, its influence and its presence metastasized. The democratisation of fashion increased the pressure it could apply to the collective imagination. The cruel power of exclusion was amplified by the possibility of access. In the new era of the overlapping “creative industries,” when couture could be revived by the Oscars, fashion had achieved ubiquity, not just among the elite but on the high street.

This overspill found sharp expression in Carrie Bradshaw’s almost fetishistic desire for designer shoes. Her passion not only reflected but also influenced wider behaviours. Sex and the City played an important role in creating the cult of Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. While sales and visibility increased, aesthetic trends grew more extreme. In the summer of 2003, Blahnik was boasting that his autumn range would be “20% narrower and pointier than ever.” At the same time, the London Times was reporting on the growing trend of “fashion victims” paying for cosmetic surgery on their feet — toes straightened and shortened, requests for amputation and “toe liposuction,” bunions sliced off — in order to fit into their new Jimmy Choos and Michael Kors. This macabre development echoed the original Grimm’s tale of Cinderella, in which the wicked step sisters cut off toes and heels in order to fit their feet into the golden slipper, their doomed attempt at validation finally undone by the discovery of blood pouring out of the wounds.

There is no doubt that Sex and the City and the image-production of Vogue was implicated in such behavourial aberrations. The link between images of beauty and self-abuse was not exactly new, but what was notable was the role technology now played in the scale and progress of global mass production, image consumption and innovative cosmetic procedures. The link between beauty and mutilation, between the ideal of the image and the violent attempt to create perfection, was always implicit, if obscure, in the pages of Vogue. Until a change in advertising regulations in 2022, it was still possible to turn to the back pages of the magazine and find adverts for corrective surgery, body contouring, liposculpture, eyebag surgery, collagen injections, exoderm peel, microdermabrasion, anti-ageing serum, mesotherapy, anti-cellulite treatments: depending on your perspective, this was either a menu for self-improvement or a collage of body-horror. Flesh as a consumer product. In a 2005 National Review essay on the cosmetic surgery drama Nip/Tuck, Thomas Hibbs wrote that “in its soap opera plot lines is the suggestion of a hidden link between sexual licence and the technological project of remaking the human body in light of individual wishes; indeed the show depicts a deep connection between both of these and raw violence.” While Nip/Tuck was on the air, you could look at Vogue magazine and see something similar unfolding across its glossy pages: an unconscious reflection of the hidden link between desire, consumption and violence that is the primary dynamic force of fashion.  

Not always unconscious, because the industry and its image-makers have been capable, at certain times and in certain conditions, of making these hidden links visible, even explicit. The most obvious example that In Vogue gives us is Alexander McQueen, who is shown vowing to “destroy fashion” on camera but whose ambivalence about the industry he served is essentially dismissed as a temperamental eccentricity. In some ways, McQueen was the truth-teller who disproved Fairchild’s law, a role made possible by the abstraction and sheer beauty of the work he created. More than clothes, McQueen was the King of the Show and it was the presentation of his collections that directly channeled the cruelty and violence that lay nestled at the heart of fashion. These shows provided an existential challenge to the illusions and evasions of the industry, although they were not received as such and would eventually be absorbed and retailed. Set-pieces like the finale of ‘No 13’ (two enormous robotic arms spray-painting a belted dress worn by Shalom Harlow) or his masterpiece of voyeurism, alienation and auto-destruction ‘Voss’ had more affinity with the work of Damien Hirst in their stark drama and existential fixations than with, say, the collections of Miuccia Prada. (Hirst was, in fact, the only image-producer on the contemporary art scene who could compete with what was happening in the fashion world.) McQueen’s “vision” — partially fuelled by his own experiences of sexual abuse and his love of films like Salo and The Shining — was diametrically opposed and even destructive to the careful and glacial corporate vision embodied by Wintour. But it was also helpless to resist it, there to be absorbed and exploited at any moment.

The ultimate power of Vogue as an image-machine is that it can contain this kind of radicalism in its own pages: it just gives beauty new definitions, new limits, new looks. Following the example of Guy Bourdin and Francine Crescent in Paris Vogue of the 1970s, France Sozzani would push Steven Meisel to test the boundaries of “taste” in Vogue Italia. Like McQueen, Meisel was unafraid to take on contemporary art and to turn fashion imagery back on itself: to both absorb and aestheticise horror simultaneously. It was easy to miss the point. His 2014 ‘Horror Story’ shoot caused controversy for “glamorising domestic abuse” when, in fact, the imagery explicitly echoed the same kind of horror movies that McQueen adored. This was specifically about the violence of the gaze and the unconscious link between violence and desire (there was a good reason that so many of the Italian gialli were set in fashion houses, including the blueprint of the genre, Mario Bava’s Sei donna per l’assissino). Mark Fisher, responding to Meisel’s 2006 War on Terror-themed Vogue Italia shoot ‘State of Emergency,’ understood this perfectly when he wrote, “the issue is not how “healthy” sexuality can be purged of violence, but how the violence inherent to sexuality can be sublimated.” Meisel’s photographs, Fisher writes, “are uncomfortable and arousing in equal measure because they reflect back to us our conflicted attitudes and unacknowledged libidinal complicities.” This was fashion photography at its most complex and transparent: laying bare the tension between attraction and repulsion that is such a powerful component of individual desire and the consumption of images. 

In the hands of Meisel and McQueen fashion was not simply auto-critique or misplaced social commentary, then. Their imagery contained and gave expressive form to the violence that operates as an unconscious driving force within fashion. It exposed and exploited, only to be exposed and exploited in turn. This structural contradiction was central to the fascination and power of their work, only amplified by its presence on the pages of ‘trivial’ fashion magazines or sponsored runways. It revealed, in extreme form, the behavioral patterns and psychic traces that permeated fashion at every level. Beauty is power; clothes exclude; the image is cruel. This is the “raw” truth of fashion that In Vogue tries to repress. But the repressed is prone to return. Jean Baudrillard once observed that “the fashion model…is an abstraction”: no longer a subject, but a “functional object” in a “forum of signs in which fashion and the erotic are mingled.” While In Vogue does an entertaining job of recounting the stories of extraordinary individuals who have achieved great things, it ultimately fails to disguise the fact that fashion is not merely a creative industry or a means of self-expression: it is also a system of power and control.