Sally Singer on the Relevance of Vogue
FBNY’s Diane Clehane interviewed Vogue‘s Sally Singer for a ‘So What Do You Do?’ feature currently running on mediabistro.com’s homepage. In it Singer responds to Cathy Horyn’s NYT recent piece bemoaning the lack of relevance at Vogue:
I was in India when Cathy’s piece came out, so I didn’t read it at the time; I can’t comment directly on what she said, but I obviously disagree wholly with that. When I started at American Vogue, Style.com hadn’t even started. There’s now far more information in the world about fashion. You couldn’t know the name of the 14-year-old Eastern bloc model the day after she appeared in the Prada show, unless you were at the show. When I was at New York and you had to shoot a look from Ann Demeulemeester, you had to go to the showroom, put the pieces together, and Polaroid them. There wasn’t even a look book, let alone a Web site to show you how it was worn. It’s changed completely. Anyone who is interested in clothes right now knows the clothes almost as soon as I do. That changes the way you report on clothes and changes the way you show clothes. It makes what we do more relevant than ever, because you actually need someone to edit it down for you. You need people now not to tell you what was at Prada, but to tell you why it was at Prada and how you’re going to wear it. American Vogue is very good at explaining to American women — and by extension, women around the world who want to dress like American women — why they should wear what they wear, and how they should wear it.
You can read the whole interview — as well as, find out what it’s like to have Anna Wintour as a boss — here.
