Vogue’s woke makeover has proven its downfall

A while back, clever commentators of working-class origin worked out that what we call ‘woke’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Being Kind’, or wishing to include people previously excluded from the pleasant parts of life. No, in an age when it is not done to openly look down one’s patrician nose at the great unwashed, being woke is a way to disdain the demos – now the ‘gammons’ – in the name of radiant righteousness rather than simple snobbishness. We saw this in Emily ‘Lady Muck’ Thornberry’s condescending tweet in 2014 (during another World Cup) of an England-flag-festooned Kent council house with a white van in the driveway, which lost her her job in Ed Miliband’s shadow cabinet.

Even more (and in a wonderfully comic and surreal manner), we see it in the ‘progress’ of Vogue from a proudly elitist publication into the house journal of woke. Rob Henderson’s wonderful term ‘luxury beliefs’ could not find a better illustration than in this magazine’s journey. Once concerned with hemlines and hairstyles, it has been committed wholeheartedly to the quasi-political lunacy of our times for some time now, even before it threw its minuscule BMI behind BLM back in 2020.

Vogue has fawned over most of the preposterous females of our era, from Greta Thunberg (an unlikely cover girl) to Mrs Mamdani, paying lip service to the strength of such ‘powerful’ women. Somewhat paradoxically, in 2017, Teen Vogue, which has attempted an even more extreme pivot from frivolous fun to po-faced protesting, instructed teenage girls on how to have anal sex with the help of an anatomical diagram that left out the clitoris, while the article referred to females as ‘non-prostate owners’ and ‘vagina owners’. When the backlash came, the ‘queer’ community predictably branded such outrageous criticism ‘homophobic’, while editor-in-chief Elaine Welteroth doubled down by telling the Guardian: ‘We say “woke” here. We’re a woke brand, and our readers are woke, too.’

Go woke, go broke? In a piece this year called ‘Vogue is dying and taking down the magazine industry, too’, Aleeza Gani wrote, ‘There was a time when Vogue defined fashion, shaping trends, telling stories, and spreading messages through art. But now, its influence is gone; its articles are bland and subpar, and its covers and editorials are one-dimensional and meaningless.’ A monthly magazine since 1973, Vogue went down to 10 issues a year in 2023, and now this year to only eight. I hadn’t read it in years (and was surprised to see the August issue on sale for £3.99 – Grazia is £4.50), but I had kept up to date on risible tidbits over the years, such as nepo-baby supreme Bella Hadid (a whopping 27 covers) becoming the catwalk’s foremost advocate of ‘Palestine’ and whining to Vogue that she regretted having a nose job at 14 because ‘I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors’. The mag recently featured the ‘mood board’ of a practising Muslim fashion designer called Kazna Asker, which showed photographs of women wearing burkas so extreme that even their eyes were covered by a mesh.

Vogue’s editors – like so many thick, rich Westerners whose decadent ways would find them first up against the wall – really have gone gaga for Islam in all its forms. Take the recent drooling over Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for Palestine, who claimed that America is ‘subjugated by the Jewish lobby’ and, the day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, shared an Iranian state-media item claiming that the CIA and Mossad carried it out. They also made total tits of themselves way back in 2011 with a profile of Asma al-Assad, entitled ‘A rose in the desert’ – a lyrical tribute to the wife of the Syrian dictator. There may be a method in this apparent madness, however. After all, these days, the vast majority of those women who buy couture are from the filthy rich Arab world.

But back to the current issue. The cover girl is actress Daisy Edgar-Jones, a lovely waif of the kind beloved by Vogue since the 1960s, when it (first) pretended not to be posh and tried to climb on board Swinging London with the likes of Jean Shrimpton. It seems a long time since the 2023 cover that featured three gorgeous plus-size models – Precious Lee, Jill Kortleve and Paloma Elsesser – on the cover and called them ‘the new Supers’. The trio could be seen on catwalks and in campaigns for a while, but then fashion moved on, as it must by its fickle nature. Inside the latest issue, there’s a piece by a fat – sorry, ‘body-positive’ – girl which bemoans how the fashion industry is ‘largely white and thin-centric’. Looking at the models, suffice to say there’s an elephant in the room – but certainly not in Vogue.

The BS doesn’t quit. ‘Awareness is the beginning of agency’, a ‘Vogue Values’ infomercial for the new Samsung smartphone lectures us. A piece tells us that there is ‘something subversive’ about sports clothes that cost a week’s average wage. A gospel choir is featured as an afterthought in a clothes shoot. And then, here is Lila Moss, daughter of Kate; here are Elizabeth and Georgia Jagger, daughters of Mick; here is Savannah Miller, sister of Sienna; Daisy Edgar-Jones is the daughter of Philip, an entertainment television bigwig. If you were an alien coming to Earth today, you’d suppose that you had to be born into showbiz to succeed in it, like being royal. Woke notoriously finds the concept of meritocracy suspect, and perhaps this is why none of its adherents can acknowledge the very obvious fact that social class – not colour or queerness – is the greatest predictor of social mobility.

I remember an old Vogue interview with the bright and beautiful Big Brother presenter AJ Odudu, daughter of a cleaner and a bus conductor, in which she practically had to spell it out: ‘Someone asked me once what it was like being a black female coming up in the industry; I was like “Oh my gosh, being black was not even the hardest thing”. We just didn’t have the means.’

Vogue wouldn’t have been any help to her, despite its concern for how her colour might hold her back. Notorious for unpaid internships (even under the editorship of the gay, black Edward Enninful, who came out with the usual blather about bringing ‘diversity’ to the youngsters recruited), Vogue was reported to HMRC in 2018 by the estimable Tanya de Grunwald, who said that the magazine’s month-long ‘workplace shadowing roles’ ought to qualify its interns as actual workers. Only the children of the rich can afford to work for free – and so journalism, once a trade open to bright working-class upstarts, is now firmly in the glamour-job camp. When Anna Wintour stepped down as editor-in-chief of Vogue last year, she was replaced by Chloe Malle (daughter of actress Candice Bergen and director Louis Malle). Her first issue featured Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid on the cover – a nepo-baby hat-trick!

But despite – or perhaps because of – this level of in-breeding, the future does not look bright for Vogue. At this year’s Met Gala, Vogue was very publicly snubbed by its pin-up Zohran Mamdani, who presumably saw the dodgy optics of swanking along the red carpet at a $350,000 per table party sponsored by Jeff Bezos. Instead, the NYC mayor took to Instagram where he wrote: ‘While the world’s eyes are on fashion’s biggest night, we’re turning ours to the garment, retail and warehouse workers who keep the industry running.’ One can only imagine the amping up of Anna Wintour’s resting-bitch-face on reading this.

It’s pleasing to think that old-fashioned class politics (and the rise of the social-media influencer, a position that’s much easier for a kid with no connections to achieve) might bring down Vogue, after its pathetic and extended attempts to sashay along the radical-chic side of the street. You can understand why it tried to ignore the spectre of social class. It’s fine to patronise every minority from the ‘queer’ to the ‘neurodiverse’ as they are relatively few and can be easily absorbed. But there will always be far more Have-Nots than Haves – and the stringing up of the leisure classes that occurred in 20th-century Europe can never truly be said to be out of fashion. No hack really relishes the demise of a publication in this online age, but the market does as it will, and one would have to have a heart of stone not to smirk at the continued unwinding of woke Vogue.

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, ‘Notes from the Naughty Step’, here.