Anyone who knows me will know of my all-consuming love affair with Vogue magazine. A long-term subscriber, at the beginning of each month I can be found crouching by the letter box awaiting my next fix of fashion, the magazine which satisfies my cravings for glossy images of the perfection and luxury which is so absent in my everyday life. In a room covered in wall-to-wall mess, clothes strewn haphazardly on the floor, my extensive collection of Vogue magazines can be found in pristine condition, lovingly arranged, chronologically, on their own special shelf: a pocket of order in a world full of chaos.
It is the preoccupation with wealth and beauty which draws me month after month to Vogue’s shining pages. Here there is no sadness, no ugliness, no poverty or disease, only page after page of thin, shiny, beautiful people, people who can afford to spend thousands of pounds on a snakeskin clutch and still feel guilt-free enough to giggle photogenically into their glasses of Moët. These are the upper classes, the unobtainable ones, the ones we are all supposed to want to be.
Imagine my surprise, then, when the cover of October Vogue proudly declared a feature not on yet another society-skipping princess, but someone rather less high-class: Amy Childs, “the ultimate Essex girl”, star of the wonderfully tacky ITV show The Only Way is Essex. At last, I thought. Finally an acknowledgement that there are people in existence outside of London’s super-rich, rather than sweeping the working classes under the proverbial (100% new wool, daaahling) rug. I wondered what she might have to say for herself, away from the harsh glare of reality TV limelight.
However, my surprise soon turned to disbelief after skimming through the page-long feature on the most famous of Essex girls. Instead of the candid interview with Amy I was expecting, the feature was in fact a 1000-word treatise on why the writer, the notorious Giles Coren, would love the opportunity to have sex with Amy Childs. Or someone like her. The distinction was not important. “The girl wouldn’t necessarily have to be Amy,” he says. “Chloe Sims would do… or, in fact, any old beautician under 60 born within a white stretch-limo ride of Basildon.”
There are several reasons why I was mystified and disgusted by this article. Firstly, and most obviously, was the way in which working class women, usually ignored completely by Vogue, were represented merely in terms of their sexuality. The working class woman was essentially rendered as a physical commodity, a sexual object for consumption by the upper middle classes. “For every man who dreamed of Pippa Middleton,” Coren writes, “there was another who dreamed of waking up hot and sweaty in the orange glow of Amy Childs’s copper-coloured nakedness, in a bed crunchy with rhinestones and false eyelashes.”
This graphic physical description continues throughout the article. Constant references are made to breast enlargement (or“artificial jubblies”) and loose sexual morals. All the while Amy stares out sadly and silently from the opposite page, denied a voice of her own. The magazine is full of page after page of interviews with the high-class elites, the superstars, the designers, the social butterflies, but the working class girl is not allowed to speak. Her words have no value; only her body is important. The ultimate message of his article is that Coren, as a middle class male, longs for a sexual encounter with a working class woman. Or, as he most delicately phrases it, some “proletarian bump and grind”.
As a girl from the part of the south east of England which isn’t London (yes Vogue, there is such a place), I found this depiction of working class girls offensive. Yes, we do exist, but we are not in existence merely to satisfy the sexual cravings of the capital’s wealthy and private-schooled. Just because we cannot afford to buy your diamond-encrusted jewellery and hand-stitched leather handbags, it does not mean that we ourselves are up for sale. Vogue is packed from cover to cover with advertisements for beautiful things. It just offends me that the body of a working class girl has become yet another product being sold as part of the glossy and glamorous lifestyle which magazines such as Vogue encourage their readers to buy into.
It is true that fashion has loved and lauded many a girl from a less-than-privileged background. The humble Croydon origins of Kate Moss provide one such example. However, it seems that fashion only embraces these women after they escape from their non-glamorous birthplaces and ascend the social ladder to the heady heights of London, Milan, New York and Paris. Wealth makes people far more interesting. Perhaps, if you make enough money, you might even be allowed to – gasp - tell people what you think about things, rather than being judged purely on your appearance or sexual prowess.
So perhaps this article has changed the way I look at my beloved Vogue. Perhaps now I will be more aware of its snobbery and elitism, and its obsession with the young, the rich and the beautiful. Perhaps I will boycott it in protest of its unfair portrayal of the ‘lower’ classes. Perhaps you will not find me, in the next few days, hovering by the letterbox awaiting its arrival. But, I am ashamed to admit, even with an article as crass and offensive as Coren’s, there still seems to be no remedy for my insatiable addiction to Vogue. It is more than likely that in the next few days you will find me once again peering through the looking glass, searching for my self.
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