4 MARCH 2006, Page 41

Putting bezazz into

Bazaar

Vicki Woods

A DASH OF DARING by Penelope Rowlands Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 548, ISBN 0743480457 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Carmel Snow, routinely called ‘the legendary Mrs Snow’ by newspapers in her lifetime, edited the most perfect fashion magazine in the history of glossies, American Harper’s Bazaar, for 25 years from 1933 to 1957. It’s probably a fashion statement in itself (‘Sooooo yesterday’) that her legend has almost entirely faded from public memory. Having spent long years toiling as a professional mag-hag myself, I knew the mythopoeic bits already. It was Snow, at Christian Dior’s first Paris show in 1947, who told son cher Tian that ‘your dresses have such a new look’, thereby ensuring a) his name and thunderous fortune, and b) the triumphant return of postwar Paris as the centre of the world’s fashion industry. (For which she was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 1949.) It was Snow who famously created a magazine for ‘the well-dressed woman with a well-dressed mind’. It was Snow, the talent-spotter, who found a bold, brilliant, modernist art director in the Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch (he gave the graphic design world its ‘bleed pages’, should you care). And it was Snow who appointed the unknown Diana Vreeland as fashion editor and indulged her barking obsessions (e.g. ‘The whole issue must be about fuchsia’). Vreeland’s infamous column ‘Why Don’t You?’ (e.g. ‘Why don’t you rinse your blond child’s hair in flat champagne, as the French do?’) ran in Bazaar for only a few years, but its engaging lunacy was still being parodied decades later. Sometimes the lunacy was more disturbing than engaging: e.g. ‘Why don’t you wear bare knees and long white knitted socks, as Unity Mitford does when she takes tea with Hitler at the Carlton in Munich?’ So, who was the legendary Mrs Snow?

Penelope Rowlands has attempted a great big meaty Life and Works, but while the works are detailed with clarity, the life eludes us somewhat. Once past the numbing title (from her own somewhat ho-hum soundbite: ‘Elegance is good taste, plus a dash of daring’), the first 50 pages are dull Irish genealogy. In brief: born Carmel White, devout Catholic, one of nine children, comfortable suburb of 19th-century Dublin. Her formidable mother, widowed early, relocated family to New York, remarried, set up a frockshop for society ladies, in which pretty Miss White toiled gloomily until she was 33.

Whereupon a huge great piece of Irish luck dropped on her. Condé Montrose Nast (who ran a stable of ‘distinctly class publications’), offered her a job at Vogue in 1920. She found her métier. She also found a perfectly OK husband in wealthy Wasp businessman George Palen Snow when she was 39. She overrode the American convention for married women’s surnames (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Hillary Rodham Clinton) for obvious reasons and became Mrs Snow tout court.

Early 20th-century fashion mags were terribly twee and Snow was not. For 12 years she developed her taste in fashion and her brilliance as a moderniser. She loved the Paris collections, the new, the nonpareil, the next hot thing. She would have liked to become editor of Vogue, which was then (as now) the premier fashion magazine of the world. Unfortunately the editor’s seat was already taken by a chilly woman called Edna Woolman Chase who had already been there since 1895 and (unbelievably) remained in place until 1957.

The great self-propelled flying leap of Snow’s life was to move to Harper’s Bazaar, owned by that big beast of a newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. (Snow’s brother Tom White worked for Hearst.) It was Vogue’s only rival, and easily ignored as a duller, smaller magazine with no great talents to boast of. When the talented Mrs Snow took up Hearst’s offer (while lying-in with her third daughter), both Condé and Edna saw the threat and went quite mad with rage: ‘Vogue trained you, Vogue made you, now you propose to make out of Vogue’s rival a copy of the magazine that trusted you!’ What she made out of Bazaar was the best and most original fashion magazine ever. Everything after Bazaar was informed by it in style and tone. Snow recognised that high fashion captures the zeitgeist as much as high art, and the performing arts of film and theatre, and the applied arts of design and interior decoration. Her magazine brimmed not only with illustrations and photographs by Man Ray, Cocteau, CartierBresson, Bill Brandt, the young Richard Avedon, the (very) young Andy Warhol, but also with room-sets by Franck, cuttingedge fiction by Truman Capote, John Dos Passos, John Cheever, Carson McCullers (Snow boasted that she picked her up ‘almost straight from Georgia’). The teenage Lauren Bacall was seized on by Hollywood after her 1939 Bazaar cover.

Hearst was not a bit like the gentlemanly Nast. He was a wild rager (like Robert Maxwell) and a hands-on, late-night interferer (like Rupert Murdoch), but the pintsized, impeccably dressed, blue-rinsed Irishwoman managed both his rages and his meddling. She published a picture of the American contralto Marian Anderson in the teeth of his fury (‘I won’t have that nigger in my living-room’). In 1936, Hearst’s lover Marion Davies told Snow the (then unprintable) gossip about an American divorcée in London, Wallis Warfield Simpson. She immediately arranged to have her picture taken in London. Alas, it was despatched straight back to Hearst himself, who seized on it with delight for his newspapers. Snow roared round to battle him for her scoop, mano a mano, and won. It appeared in her May issue, as planned, captioned: ‘Mrs Ernest Simpson, the most famous woman in London, wears a Chinese dinner dress’.

Snow died in 1960, having clung on to her editor’s chair for much too long. She was a heroic Irish drinker, and her last few years at the helm were sad (she famously went, on Richard Avedon’s arm, to a Rothschild ball in Paris, where she was seen to have peed on the stairs). It is not her legend that endures, but her employee Diana Vreeland’s, who became editor of Vogue in 1962 and wrenched the Condé Nast magazine back into its premier place (where it remains to this day). It is the latterday Vreeland, her cheeks painted bright red like MarieAntoinette’s, who became the caricature prototype for every fashion generalissima today — from the real (Anna Wintour) to the fictional (AbFab’s Patsy). Why? Perhaps because she always gave better soundbite (e.g. ‘Pink is the navy-blue of India’). Also, Snow worked in the golden age of handmade couture fashion, when clothes of rare beauty and perfection were made for women who were not young (and accepted the French belief that a woman didn’t ‘grow into her style’ before the age of 40). Vreeland was luckier in her era — the Sixties youthquake/ Twiggy/ Bailey/ mini-skirts/ Beatles/ Quant/ Courrèges/ Warhol and everybody being famous for 15 minutes. The women who wore the fashions were not groomed sophisticates in their middle years, but huge-eyed and blonde-haired like toddlers. Autres temps, autres modes.