Fasion

Vogue is to our era what the idea of God was, in Voltaire’s famous parlance, to his: if it didn’t exist, we would have to invent it. Revered for its editorial excellence and its visual panache, the magazine has long functioned as a bible for anyone worshiping at the altar of luxury, celebrity and style. And while we perhaps take for granted the extent to which this trinity dominates consumer culture today, Vogue’s role in catalyzing its rise to pre-eminence cannot be underestimated. To both celebrants and critics of the cult of modern fashion, Norberto Angeletti and Alberto Oliva’s IN VOGUE: The Illustrated History of the World’s Most Famous Fashion Magazine (Rizzoli, $75) is indispensable reading. As substantive as it is sumptuous, the incisively written, meticulously researched and gorgeously illustrated “In Vogue” chronicles how Vogue became the world’s most influential fashion magazine.

Founded in 1892 to chronicle the doings of New York’s social elite, Vogue soon developed into an “active participant in the culture of fashion.” Under the successive leadership of seven formidable editors in chief — all women — Vogue has pioneered a host of aesthetic, technological and commercial advances, virtually all of which inform the fashion media and industry as they exist today.

Appropriately enough, for a publication that insistently juxtaposes surface with substance, many of these advances have been evident on its cover. In July 1932, Vogue became one of the first magazines to publish a cover with a color photograph. Besides innovating the look of Vogue (and, eventually, of magazines everywhere), this move had far-reaching financial implications, as it allowed for a more detailed presentation of a model’s clothing. Now receiving fuller credit for their work, designers returned the favor by placing more advertisements in Vogue, whose revenues increased accordingly. The powerful symbiosis between journalism and advertising was born.

In the latter decades of the 20th century, still more revolutions played themselves out on Vogue’s covers. During the “youthquake” of the 1960s, Diana Vreeland replaced the curvaceous models of the previous decade with lanky, androgynous teenagers whose “undernourished” looks quickly “became the new standard.” In 1974, Vreeland’s successor, Grace Mirabella, published the first cover featuring an African-American model. And when Anna Wintour succeeded Mirabella in 1988, she too reshaped the era’s stylistic ideals. Her inaugural cover, a three-quarter-length photograph of a model wearing a bejeweled Lacroix jacket and a pair of jeans, abandoned Vogue’s by-then tired convention of representing a woman’s face alone and assigned greater importance to both her clothing and her body. This image also promoted a new form of chic by combining jeans with haute couture. Wintour’s debut cover brokered a class-mass rapprochement that informs modern fashion to this day.

Yet the Vogue editors’ ingenuity has always “extended to the inside of the magazine” as well — notably to its first-rate photography. Edward Steichen, Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritts are just a few of the heavyweights whose work has appeared in Vogue. From Avedon’s 1967 portrait of Twiggy (an adolescent waif in flower-child face paint) to Leibovitz’s 2006 depiction of a pregnant Melania Trump (posed on the steps of a private jet in a skimpy gold bikini), Vogue’s pictures — love them or loathe them — express the values of the culture from which they emerge. And they offer an exhaustive visual record of America’s past, with its seismic shifts, its improbable whims, its insatiable aspirations.

Indeed, like the religion of Voltaire’s day, the Vogue of our era thrives on aspiration — on the hope that a better life lies just around the corner, in the arch of an eyebrow or the rustle of a new silk dress. Cynics might note that, with its inexorable cycles of planned obsolescence, fashion journalism exists purely to exploit this hope. There remains, however, something undeniably and viscerally appealing about a publication that honors our craving for fantasy, glamour and change. For more than a century, Vogue has met that need.