ALEXANDRA SHULMAN celebrates the end of a bold and beautiful era

It’s so last century darling. As London’s Vogue House prepares to wave farewell to its most illustrious residents, former editor ALEXANDRA SHULMAN celebrates the end of a bold and beautiful era

Alexandra Shulman, a former Vogue editor, pens her farewell to Vogue House
The Mayfair building has housed several fashion powerhouses over the years
READ MORE: Can Vogue’s glamorous ‘Conde Nasty’ crowd ever have so much fun again?

If places can ever spawn nepo babies then I am the offspring of Vogue House, a building as familiar to me as anywhere I’ve lived. And what a building.

Home since 1958 to some of the best magazines of the 20th and 21st centuries – not only Vogue, but House & Garden, Tatler, Vanity Fair, World of Interiors, GQ – it stands, magnificent, on the southern side of Mayfair’s Hanover Square, hosting and hatching generations of style.

The nepotism I benefited from came via my mother, who edited Brides, then housed there, in the 70s, turning it from a staid bridal journal into a magazine featuring the best photographers of the age, such as Snowdon and Barry Lategan.

But it wasn’t that which impressed the 15-year-old me when I visited her at the end of the day. It was that her team looked like they were having so much fun.

They would crack open several celebratory bottles of white wine, sitting at desks laden with products from PRs hoping for features in the magazine: piles of desirable make-up, which I would be given to take home, hampers of food, books and travel brochures. It was my introduction to magazine life.

When I first wangled a job in Vogue House during my gap year (certainly an act of nepotism) I was a ‘rover’ (a stand-in secretary for holidays and sick leave). At that time only the fourth and fifth floors, a basement library and a studio on the sixth floor were used by its publisher Condé Nast.

To access these you had to get through Bunny, the immaculate receptionist, seated at a huge desk accompanied by a rather put-upon assistant.

She made it her business to vet, with a suspicious glance, any unfamiliar visitors: Cerberus at the gate of the kingdom of glossies.

I was then lodged in the small personnel office behind reception, kept occupied by typing out the list of extension numbers. In those days – working with typewriters rather than computers, and since the staff were always changing – keeping the list up to date was a Sisyphean enterprise, destined never to be completed.

One day I escaped humdrum personnel to stand in for the second assistant to the managing director, Bernie Leser, in his cigar-scented wood-panelled office. My job was to field his calls but such was my complete inability to master transferring them from my line to his that after two days he begged for me to be replaced. It is to his endless credit that he was a massive supporter in my being given the editorships, years later, of GQ and Vogue.

Alexandra Shulman pictured during her time as Vogue editor. ‘When I first wangled a job in Vogue House during my gap year (certainly an act of nepotism) I was a ‘rover’ (a stand-in secretary for holidays and sick leave),’ she writes

Each magazine in the building is the editor’s fiefdom, created in the image of the boss. When Vogue was edited by the formidable Beatrix Miller [between the 60s and the 80s], David Bailey, Tony Snowdon, Sir Roy Strong and Eduardo Paolozzi would visit her in her small office at the end of the fifth floor (an office I would inherit years later). It was always dim – with a lightbox in the corner and a wall where slides could be projected – and could only be accessed through a door in the corner.

When Anna Wintour succeeded her eventually in the 80s she installed glass doors to the rest of the office, along with her own Biedermeier-style desk and pretty collection of colourful Clarice Cliff pottery. Out went the somewhat quirky style of Bea’s Vogue and staff and in came an army of young women in Anna’s image – high heels, leggings, pearl chokers, bouclé jackets – along with a more modern open-plan office.

I was then two floors down on Tatler, at the time regarded as the wild child of the company. The editor was Mark Boxer, who seemed to care nothing about how his office looked. It was a Spartan glass box where he would spend every afternoon on the phone to George Melly, who helped him come up with jokes for his daily Times cartoon. At five o’clock, having sent it off, he would emerge to perch on our desks and ask eagerly for information. What was happening? What were people talking about? Who was sleeping with who? I managed to position my desk to look over the square – much of the time I was trying to have private conversations with one boyfriend or another, which inevitably led to tears, so I preferred to keep my back to the room.

Alexandra’s leaving card in 2017. The former editor writes: ‘By the time I arrived to edit Vogue in 1992 nearly the whole building was colonised by Condé Nast’

Alexandra at home aged 17. She says the nepotism she benefited from came via her mother, who edited Brides

One afternoon, 50 red heart balloons arrived from a hopeful contributor I had just met. We stuffed them out of the window and watched them float over the square. In summer lunch breaks we would sneak up the back stairs to the roof, where we could sunbathe in our underwear, drenched in Hawaiian Tropic, smoking and eating sandwiches bought with our weekly allocation of Luncheon Vouchers.

Tatler was a renegade crew of great talent and often clashing personalities. Two of the staff who did not enjoy each other’s company were the maverick writer Jonathan Meades and well-connected features editor Sarah Giles. To say they despised each other was putting it politely. One day, in a fury, Jonathan grabbed Albert, Sarah’s treasured dachshund – the only dog allowed in the building – and threatened to dangle him by the back legs from the third-floor window. The shrieks could be heard by the whole office.

By the time I arrived to edit Vogue in 1992 nearly the whole building was colonised by Condé Nast. I was able to bring my bespoke curved desk into that famous Vogue editor’s office. I painted the walls turquoise and installed a Matthew Hilton leather sofa. Like all editors, and some senior staff, I had a prized slot, with its metal name plate, in the car park – it could be the subject of its own documentary considering the incidents that took place there, including a member of staff caught in flagrante delicto with another on the bonnet of one of the directors’ cars.

In the 90s, GQ, which I had edited before Vogue, graduated from crummy offices a few doors along to the first floor of Vogue House, bringing increased numbers of men. So few previously worked in the building that there was only one male loo for all of them, on the executive floor (the bosses were all male). At one point, regular sweeps of the new GQ bathrooms were made by the personnel director, checking for cocaine.

Fashion maven in the making: Shulman (second from right) and family, pictured together in 1965

Meanwhile we on Vogue had our own issues: a staff member was discovered hoarding the booty he had been stealing from the fashion-room rails in the ceiling above his desk. Unfortunately for him, one day the ceiling tile gave way and it all came tumbling down.

Once a year the president of Condé Nast, Si Newhouse, would visit from New York. We were given a day’s notice with a stern warning to spruce up the offices and make sure everyone was in situ early since Si’s idea of a late start was 8am. I remember once seeing him, a Colombo-like figure in his trench coat, shuffling his way along the corridors totally lost – ignored by the many leggy blonde girls who had no idea who he was.

There had been rumours about the company leaving Vogue House for years but, given its prime location, no one was ever that keen. There seemed to be some rather flimsy argument that taxi and courier bills would be bigger if we moved out of W1, where most of our immediate network was based. At one stage the company considered moving to the Westfield site, in Shepherd’s Bush, and a space now occupied by Net-a-Porter. But again, few of the senior team wanted to leave the plush environs of Hanover Square for a new-build next to the A40. Imagine how much it would cost to get to Bond Street – or to the Wolseley or Claridge’s for lunch.

Now, though, in a less sentimental and indulged climate, the magazines are on the march to pastures new and with them go the golden years of the glossies. I am so lucky to be left with the memories.

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