Meet the Vogue editor who's size 14 - and happy

ON Wednesday night, Alexandra Shulman, the editor of Vogue, will attend a party for 350 of her closest friends at The Ritz. Thrown in her honour by Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast International, the company which owns Vogue, it will celebrate the fact that she has been at the helm of the British fashion bible for 10 years. Everyone will be there: Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, Jay Jopling, Nigella Lawson, David Bailey. "It's going to be a fun party," she says, a little uncertainly.

"A great mix of people. But I do feel quite odd about it. It makes me seem like a bit of a dinosaur. Maybe I've become a veteran editor. That's a bit frightening."

Veteran or not, the anniversary could not be allowed to pass unnoticed.

Fashion is fickle and not a little bitchy, and when Shulman landed the job all those years ago (she was then editor of GQ) more than a few of its leading lights raised their delicately plucked eyebrows in horror at her appointment.

"What does she know about hemlines?" they cried. Shulman, however, simply remarked that she "loved shopping" and got on with the job. Five years later, circulation was up 20,000 and Vogue was selling more than 200,000 copies every month (the figure has been stable ever since). Ten years on and, well, here she is, still ensconced in her gleaming white office.

"Do I feel vindicated? Yes, I do. I feel triumphant!" She laughs. "The first few years weren't very enjoyable. It was such a different world for me. I didn't know many people, I was always in the company of strangers. I remember the first shows I went to; it was like being in an awful maze. But, at the end of the day, it's a journalistic job and I was a journalist. I always had enough self-confidence to think I would be able to do it if I got the chance.

I enjoy it much more now. Having an idea and then being able to put it into a magazine is such a huge luxury ... the power of it!

I certainly can't think of another magazine, either here or in America, that I'd rather edit."

Shulman is more groomed now than she was of old (today, she is wearing a cream-and-turquoise ensemble: top by Clements Ribeiro, skirt by Alberta Ferretti, shoes by Sergio Rossi) but her hair is determinedly unruly and she is is still - hooray! - a size 14. So far, she says, she has not been tempted to buy into this season's hippie-chic look. "I look a bit that way anyway, so I try and counterbalance it, otherwise I end up looking like an awful old fortune-teller."

Tasseled shawls apart, however, she made a decision early on not to worry about what people thought of her image.

"The expectations were low anyway, and I couldn't pretend to be something that I wasn't." She gets some freebies and can order in advance of the season if she sees something she likes in the shows but mostly she just trawls the stores like everyone else.

Shopping, however, must play second fiddle to the demands of the day job and those of her seven-year-old-son, Sam.

Shulman is separated from her husband, the writer Paul Spike, and shares her house in Queen's Park with Sam, a nanny and, during the holidays, her stepdaughter, Emma, who chose to stay with Alex when her father left, and is now at Sussex University. "When I wake Sam up in the morning, the first thing he says is: 'Mum, are you babysitting tonight?' He's a very clever, manipulative little boy and he knows it winds me up. But I do try to make sure that I always see him at some point in the day because I remember as a child that even though your parents irritate you there is a kind of bleakness when they're not there."

THE busier her home, she says, the more she likes it.

"When I split up with my husband, I was very worried about the house becoming a precious little thing with only me and my son in it. That's why I was so pleased when Emma stayed with me. I loved it that she wanted to. It made a huge difference to me, and I didn't want Sam to lose another person from the house, either. We miss her now. We miss her a lot. There's that whole other life she brings with her: the telephone ringing all the time, other people coming over." Emma, I say, won the lottery in the stepmother stakes: she got someone she liked enough to choose to live with, who also happened to edit Vogue. Shulman smiles. "I don't think she would put it that way."

At the moment, Shulman is single, and says she is content to be so. "Of course I would rather that it wasn't the case that Sam's father doesn't live here.

I'd rather that hadn't happened. But am I unhappy? No, not at all. I've had people in my life and I absolutely don't expect to remain on my own. But, in some ways, right now it's not the end of the world. There is so much going on, and it gives me more space with Sam than if I was living with somebody else.

I mean, it's nice to have a companion, and when you fall in love with someone you can always make time for them, but ... actually, I don't know why I don't mind more about it. I suppose it's because I've got a lot of friends, more than most people who have a career like mine, and I just love them."

Perhaps

this is why she has not cultivated any designers as friends.

"I wish that had happened," she says.

"But my relationships with them hasn't really moved on from being a professional one. There are lots of interesting designers, but you have to get on their wavelength. Tom Ford (who runs Gucci and Yves St Laurent, among other labels) is really impressive and good company and clever, and Hussein Chalayan, Paul Smith and Miuccia Prada are all very rounded characters."

The fashion world is not, she insists, as spiteful as people often say it is, but its denizens can be extremely rude if they put their minds to it.

"It's a very impolite world. I'm endlessly amazed at how bad- mannered people are. It makes me feel really antiquated.

"People don't reply to invitations, or don't make an effort to be polite to the person they're sitting next to.

There is this thing that, if you're creative, you don't have to behave well. In fact, the more creative and successful you are, the more badly you behave. I think there's a kind of celebration of bad behaviour, and I despise that. People are too cavalier. If someone invites you somewhere, you make an effort, you turn up on time, you look nice and you chat to everyone. That's what I think one has to do.

"But here in the office, it's not bitchy.

Occasionally, wars break out between various parties, but that's because there are a lot of strong personalities at play."

Shulman arrived at Vogue just as grunge was getting under way and, although it was later usurped by a new kind of glamour, she believes its influence on fashion has had a permanent effect.

"That celebration of the understated has remained," she says.

"People might take Concorde somewhere, but then they'll stay in a tent, or they'll mix their Marc Jacobs shoes with a thrift-shop top." She is pleased that Vogue was on hand to record these seismic sartorial shifts.

"It's a magazine of record, and I'm hugely proud of that. Look back, and it really does reflect the times."

So what does the future hold? In the short term, Shulman has her eye on a "wonderful" little black cocktail dress by Yves St Laurent. She would also, she admits, like to own a good pair of diamond earrings. As for the long term, for the time being at least, she is happy to carry on doing her truly "gorgeous" job. Does she ever think beyond Vogue, to a place where hemlines, heels and handbags no longer rule the world? "Well, I don't want to be fired tomorrow." She looks out over the rainy rooftops in Hanover Square. "But yes, I do think beyond it.

I don't define myself as the editor of Vogue.

There was a life before it, so there will be a life after it, too."

Copyright 2002
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