ideas: on media

For true Grace, mags still rule

Grace Coddington would be one of those women her own magazine would patronisingly list in their ‘World’s Most Beautiful’ pictorial for ‘inner beauty’. And unlike everyone else on the list, it would be true.

Almost 70, her wrinkled face peeking through an unkempt fuzz of red hair, her dowdy outfits a stark contrast to the couture on the racks, the creative heart of American fashion bible Vogue sits as a sore thumb catwalk-side, and as some romantic relic in a new-media age.

Yet watching Grace – and what a prophetic choice of name by her British parents – upstage ice-queen editor Anna Wintour (pictured) in the brilliant documentary The September Issue, it’s clear Vogue is nothing without this woman. And that media, broadly, would lose something quite special without her kind.

Grace is not star-struck by celebrity; she silently protests against the fame-hungry starlets who adorn the Vogue covers since Wintour began her reign. She’s not even particularly fussed over just what colour really is the new black. She’s merely obsessed with creating the most beautiful magazine pages. She is an artist, in the visionary yet accessible and unpretentious way all artists should be.

An exhausting number of words have been written on the future of journalism in a digital age, but little has been made of what sort of future art and design has in this seemingly inevitable online convergence. For me, The September Issue brought that into sharp focus.

As expected, the documentary captures the sheer vapidity of the fashion industry. But it also beautifully highlights the gorgeous high-art that goes into a publication like Vogue. Grace fusses over fashion spreads that would fit perfectly into any photographic gallery collection. They are stunning pictorials, lush make-believe worlds that transport readers, like the story-telling proverb goes, more powerfully than a thousand words.

Is there a home for her inspired photographic spreads in the digital age? Is there a place for Grace at all? Are we losing some of our best commercial artists as print readers decline and magazines close?

Some of the most talented people in magazine production are design artists. I’m in awe of the three I work with on a daily basis. With a restrictive creative licence on fairly dry business-based products, ours turn blank pages into engaging designs that draw readers into the text.

Like newspapers, there’s a romanticism about magazines, too. Particularly the high-gloss, high-design products that can be proudly displayed on the coffee table. That shiny paper still feels good between the fingers. It smells fresh. And it’s home to some of the best commercial art around.

We’ve experimented with digital magazines; many have. I just don’t think they work. They seem clunky, no matter the platform. It is low-resolution design, 72 dots per inch (designers will understand) that seem less vivid, less moving, than the real thing. (A plug, though, to a PDF-based e-zine one of those three admired designers helps put together, the wonderfully arty Blanket Magazine.)

So what future for printed magazines? The September issue of The September Issue booked more revenue than any in Vogue history, a seemingly impressive result last year as the financial crisis gripped. But readerships and certainly revenue in most magazines are in terminal decline. High-gloss fashion magazines are perhaps more buoyant than others, but as publishers are forced to slash costs and drive redundancies who will invest in Vogue-style media art?

It’s true, I’m a tiny bit in love with Grace. I desperately hope she has an answer…

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