It was late spring, and Anna Wintour, the notoriously decisive editor of Vogue, was stymied. That is not a common state for her. But the presidential election had her in a bind, at least when it came to her December issue. She had to make a magazine in one reality and publish it in another. What to do?
“I thought, It’s going to be a very emotional time,” she said. “I think we should all take a step back.”
Other Vogues, including French Vogue and British Vogue, had been “guest-edited” in the past. Ms. Wintour had always, she said, been awed by the French Vogue created by David Hockney in 1985. (It included a portrait he did of the British designer Celia Birtwell for the cover.) So she decided to do something she had never done before: She handed her Vogue over to someone else. The designer Marc Jacobs would step into her metaphoric Manolos for one issue.
The result is online this week and will be on newsstands Nov. 26. Spikier than the usual Vogue, it includes contributions from names that have never before worked for the magazine (the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, who wrote about the pain of wearing a corset) or, in the case of the artist Gregory Crewdson, who photographed Mr. Jacobs in his Frank Lloyd Wright house in Hitchockian gloom, for any magazine.
Here’s how it happened — arguments, lessons and laughs included. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
ANNA WINTOUR I asked Marc to do it over lunch. We always have lunch at Balthazar, and our lunches are very speedy.
MARC JACOBS We had two chicken breasts. I had mashed potatoes, Anna didn’t. We hadn’t seen each other in a while. There was nothing about our day that indicated what was to come, but we were in the middle of a very lovely conversation, and then out comes an envelope. Anna says: “I put this together for you. It is a mood board of sorts of what your issue might look like if you want to do this.” I was kind of shocked.
WINTOUR There was never anyone else in my mind. If he had said no, I would have gone a different route, not to another person.
JACOBS I was very scared. I really was. There’s no other way to say it. I have this terrible habit of listening to these voices in my head, which are like: “You can’t do this. You don’t know how to do this.” But I thought the worst thing would be to regret not doing it.
Did you immediately have an idea of what you wanted to include?
JACOBS My first instinct was that we have to do something that celebrates fashion, celebrates creativity. We ended up with a big portfolio about dance as freedom and discipline and expression. I did think about the timing of the issue and the election and that it could look like fiddling while Rome burns.
WINTOUR When we had our lunch, we were talking about art, cinema, theater, music. And nails, obviously. All the things that Marc cares about.
JACOBS Anna kept saying, “Push it, push it.” I thought, Does she really mean push it, or does she mean push it in her direction?
Did you have any, let’s call them spirited, disagreements about content?
MJ We had two, one very minor and one major.
WINTOUR I realized at the beginning that Marc was seeing the magazine the way he sees a fashion show.
JACOBS When you’re presenting a collection, it’s a fantasy that exists within a small space of time in a specific way, for a very tiny group of people. So I had trouble thinking that the magazine was for anybody other than the 300 people who really love fashion the most. For example, I thought everything should be shot in a studio. That way you focus on the thing itself. I was like, fashion people are going to love this. But Anna doesn’t love the studio. She reminded me that maybe there’s a slightly bigger audience for Vogue than there is for the Marc Jacobs show.
WINTOUR I had to explain to him that I understand completely why a fashion show is best when it is one message clearly delivered, but with what we do, it’s better to have pacing and a rolling-hill approach.
JACOBS I still think you should have everything in the studio.
OK, that’s one. What was the other disagreement?
JACOBS When we talked about who should be on the cover, my first thought was Anna. And Anna just looked at me and she said, “Move on.”
There are actually two covers, both featuring Kaia Gerber: one by the artist Anna Weyant and one by the photographer Steven Meisel in which she wears a dress from Marc’s last collection. There’s also a whole portfolio of Kaia wearing pieces from the collection, as well as an article on Marc’s house and another on going to the Met with Marc. Was the intention always to make it so much about Marc?
JACOBS That was Anna’s idea completely. I was uneasy about it. I felt there shouldn’t be much of myself in there. And I felt we can’t just cover my six favorite designers. My job here is to be a little bit more open-minded. I also wasn’t very keen on the idea of my house.
WINTOUR It was Marc’s world that I wanted to see. It’s all-encompassing. There are wonderful designers that have a little more — how can I say? — tunnel vision in how they create. But I always feel that Marc does not exist, ever, in a silo, that everything is part of his creative process. I kept saying, “Let’s do the house, let’s do the house.”
JACOBS I had to come up with a way I would be OK with it. I didn’t really think until the last minute that Gregory would say yes. He has refused to do anything like this before. The image is probably the most not Vogue picture in the issue.
It is very spooky.
WINTOUR But it was amazing. It did make me think we could take more risks.
JACOBS There was another image that I was very fond of that Anna just couldn’t get her head around. It was in the dance portfolio. One model was creating all of these distorted, almost grotesque faces. It wasn’t attractive, but it was about that kind of avant-garde dance. But Anna just couldn’t. She just couldn’t.
Speaking of images, how did you get the last look, the dog wearing a Chanel bracelet as a collar? And was his name really Carl with a C, not a K?
JACOBS It really was.
WINTOUR Marc had to cast the dog.
JACOBS We looked at a bunch of dogs. The first batch, I wasn’t into at all. Then we got it down to a breed — the Brussels Griffon. The one I fell in love with was in Russia, so we couldn’t have that one. Then we found a local hero. But we had some ideas that just couldn’t happen, and that threw me.
Give me some examples.
JACOBS One performer we wanted wasn’t available, and then the photographer who was going to shoot it lost interest. All the cancellations and moving around? Honestly, I would lose my mind.
WINTOUR That happens all the time — you don’t get a model you want, the fabric doesn’t turn up, you can’t get the rights to the music. It actually presents an interesting challenge. Often you end up in a better place than what you were thinking about.
JACOBS That may be completely normal to people who work in a magazine every day, but it wasn’t normal to me. I’m the type of person who, after a show, finds all the mistakes, all the things I could have done better. My shrink always tells me that focusing on that skirt backward in the show two years ago isn’t going to fix that skirt backward two years ago. And that’s exactly what happened with this issue. I received the PDF and I was like, I wish we would have done it this way, and we should have shot that with so and so.
WINTOUR We all do that. We all think, Why did I say yes to that?
Marc, did you ever think, Why did I say yes to this? Or did it make you want to start your own magazine?
JACOBS This was a really nice little guest appearance, but it’s not something I want to do twice. I really love my job. I’m not a frustrated actor or architect. And this way I have two firsts. There’ll never be another first designer at Louis Vuitton, and there’ll never be another first guest editor who’s a designer at American Vogue.
Anna, does this mean you are considering handing over the magazine on a more permanent basis?
WINTOUR No. Absolutely not. I’m like Marc. I love my job. I love all aspects of it and hope to be able to do it for a long time to come.
JACOBS She’s just survived me.
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