Vogue’s Coup de Grâce
Great institutions rarely collapse from lack of resources. Throughout the course of time, we’ve seen them collapse from lack of nerve instead. Vogue was invented to be authoritative. For most of its history, it understood this perfectly. It did not ask us what we liked but taught us what to like. It created hierarchy systems, fantasies, and aspirations. You could resent their judgment. You could disagree with them. That was rather the point, actually. There was a judgment to disagree with. Today, it behaves less like a tastemaker and more like a beautifully produced newsletter summarizing the internet. The result is a publication that reads underwhelming.
When Anna took over in 1988, her first cover was Michaela Bercu, photographed by Peter Lindbergh in a Christian Lacroix couture jacket and a pair of faded Guess jeans. The image was so unlike the polished close-up covers of the period that the printers reportedly called to ask whether a mistake had been made. Ironically, the mistake was the message. Vogue was announcing a new idea of glamour before anyone had been given time to understand it.
That is editing.
Not opening fifteen tabs, observing what is trending and producing an art-directed synthesis of the consensus. Editing is making a decision early enough, and with enough conviction, that everyone else has to respond to you.
In December 2003, Grace Coddington and Annie Leibovitz turned Alice in Wonderland into a mad fashion story with Natalia Vodianova as Alice and designers playing Lewis Carroll’s characters: Tom Ford as the White Rabbit, Marc Jacobs as the Caterpillar, John Galliano as the Red Queen, Viktor & Rolf as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You were basically forced to enter their vision.
Which makes me question the meaning between coverage and authorship…
Coverage tells me what happened.
Authorship gives what happened a point of view.
And somewhere between the feed, the affiliate link, the celebrity press cycle, the demand for constant content and fashion journalism’s fear of being caught on the wrong side of the discourse, the institution began behaving less like an author and more like the world’s most opulent dressed witness. I should clarify something because that is important. The problem is not becoming more inclusive. Nor is the problem that Vogue began paying attention to politics, race, gender, or changes in culture. Some of its strongest moments came precisely because it did.
When Beyoncé was photographed by Tyler Mitchell for the September 2018 issue, Mitchell became the first Black photographer to shoot an American Vogue cover in the magazine’s then 125-year history. He was twenty-three. The images were beautiful, the decision was culturally significant, and Vogue gave a young image-maker a platform powerful enough that one of those portraits would later enter the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Even the infamous Kim Kardashian and Kanye West cover of 2014, which produced enough conversation to make one wonder whether Anna had placed a dog on the cover wearing Givenchy, was an editorial decision. Funny enough, nowadays we got Dogue… The fashion establishment had spent years treating the Kardashian discourse as something one was expected to look down upon while the woman quietly became one of the defining visual figures of the decade. Wintour defended the decision on precisely those grounds: Vogue should feature the people shaping culture at a particular moment. And she was right.
The problem is what happens when reflecting culture becomes the entire job. Because there is a difference between identifying somebody before the room understands their impact and putting somebody on a cover because the room has already made them inevitable.
And that, to me, is where Vogue’s crisis sits.
Vogue’s decision to make itself irrelevant exemplifies the pitfalls of politicizing everything. And Vogue is certainly not suffering from a lack of audience. Quite the opposite. Condé Nast currently describes the brand as operating across 28 markets, reaching tens of millions of global unique users and hundreds of millions of social followers, with billions of monthly video views. So no, Vogue is not irrelevant in the literal sense. It might be more visible than it has ever been. That is what makes the problem interesting. Exposure does not equal authority.
The fantasy behind Vogue was not that millions of people saw the covers. It was that appearing there meant something had happened to you. That doors had opened, and you had been allowed into a very particular room. The internet destroyed much of that scarcity, obviously. Everyone publishes. Everyone photographs. Everyone comments. There is no going backwards, nor should there be.
But that should have made Vogue’s judgment much more valuable. Because when information becomes infinite, selection becomes the law.
Vogue Shopping now quite literally describes itself as a one-stop destination for editor-approved purchases, populated by products, trend edits and retail links. There is nothing inherently vulgar about this. Vogue has always sold desire, and pretending otherwise would be historically illiterate.
Watching an institution built on exclusivity align itself with the logic of online shopping feels a bit like the Four Seasons announcing that its new culinary inspiration is the supermarket freezer aisle. Possible, of course, but spiritually incoherent. Because what you are selling is so indistinguishable from the thing you are.
This is how institutions end—not with scandal, but with exaggerated openness. By trying to represent everything, Vogue has slowly relieved itself of the burden of meaning anything in particular. The pages remain glossy, the events remain “lavish”, and yet nothing truly lingers. I do not want Vogue to imitate Grace Coddington. I want it to find the person Grace would have been inspired by. I don’t want another Steven Meisel simply because Steven Meisel is Steven fucking Meisel. I want Vogue to look for the photographer who will make us question photography ten years from now. Nor do I want a magazine pretending TikTok does not exist. On the contrary, I want a magazine so certain of itself that TikTok has to catch up to what they are doing.
There is also a word fashion publishing seems terrified to death of: No.
“No, this person is not interesting merely because they have followers. No, this collection is not successful just because the designer has a moving personal story. No, this product is not culturally important because forty creators received it on the same Tuesday. No, not every famous person needs a cover. No, not everything needs to be represented.”
Selection means exclusion. Editing means killing things. Taste is discriminatory by definition—not discriminatory in the moral sense, but in the most necessary one:to distinguish one thing from another. If fashion media loses its determination to make those distinctions, what exactly are editors doing?
Perhaps this is why so much fashion content now feels so weightless even when it is perfectly competent. Nothing is technically wrong per se. Clothes are credited. Some celebrity has something to promote. Clips have been cut vertically and are ready to be posted.
Yet, three weeks later, I cannot remember a damn thing.
That forgetfulness is the death of it all.
Fashion has always been frivolous, but the best imagery has never been forgettable. It becomes part of the memory of a period, giving us no choice but to remember what was going on back in the day. I’m just wondering what will we remember 30 years from now… Inevitably, makes me question if the world’s most influential magazine has embarked on a remarkable form of self-erasure. No explosions, no discourse, no dramatic finales—just a gradual retreat from the very idea of authority.
WRITTEN BY FREDDY ESPINAL