Audrey Withers became the editor of British Vogue in September 1940, the same month that the Blitz started in earnest. For 57 consecutive nights, as the 35 year old settled into her new office on Bond Street, German forces aggressively bombed London, with her staffers retreating to a “wine-cellar basement” to continue production whenever the alarm was sounded. Before the year was out, the buildings that housed her editorial team had been decimated. Withers, however, never missed a beat. “There is Vogue in spite of it all!” read a page in her first issue after the bombing, accompanied by photographs of the destruction that left a “new crater” in the pavement below her office windows. “Each issue is a new hurdle in a steeplechase,” she wrote shortly after the incident for American Vogue. “We gather all our forces as we approach it; the difficulties pile up threateningly; one last spurt – and (so far) over she goes! And no owner leading in his steaming horse feels prouder than we on the day when all the book-stalls are hung with the new Vogue.” Right from the beginning of her 20-year editorship, Withers was determined: Vogue would go on, and Vogue would shape both the outcome of the war and of women’s lives.
She started with the miracle of keeping Vogue in print at all. With paper rationed and transportation options limited from 1940 onwards, Harry Yoxall – British Vogue’s then managing director – petitioned the Ministry of Information to allow them to continue distributing the magazine. The British government recognised the opportunity that Vogue presented to encourage the so-called “gentler” sex to participate in the war effort, and his request was granted, with the caveat that it became a monthly rather than a fortnightly publication and significantly fewer copies were produced. “Please pass around your Vogue,” read one of many notices in the magazine that encouraged sharing. “Copies of Vogue (since paper rationing) are restricted, so there are not enough to go round. Please pass yours on when you have finished with it. Let friends who can’t get on the subscription list see it first; then take it into the Post Office… They will then be distributed to all the [Women’s] Services where most required, to dozens of stations abroad or lonely stations at home.”
Meanwhile, as the Nazi forces marched across Europe, Withers set about transforming Vogue’s pages – turning them into a guide for female readers, referred to as “soldiers without guns”, on how to support the Allied cause. Everyone was encouraged to do her part. “Last year women were running households. This year they are running canteens, voluntary organisations, service units – and taking orders as well as giving them. Last year time was no object: this week, next week, sometime… This year time is of the essence of the contract.” With Vogue’s encouragement, the female public worked in munitions factories; operated radios and switchboards; volunteered as nurses with the Red Cross; drove London ambulances; and ran emergency field kitchens. “See the women… working by night, efficiently, stealthily, under battle conditions, cooking for hundreds, constructing ovens from baked mud, scooped clay, and old tins,” Vogue wrote in praise of the last. “They learn how to screen their ovens, how to build fires that send up no tell-tale smoke.”
Just as deserving of praise, of course, were those women who joined the military services. There were female members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), who manned gun sites through the night; Wrens in the Navy (including the Duchess of Kent); and Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) girls, who piloted Spitfires, bombers, and Hurricanes. Even the then Princess Elizabeth served as an honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, with Withers running a portrait of the future queen in a diamond brooch shaped like the regimental badge in 1943. Simultaneously, in the countryside, the thousands-strong Women’s Land Army took on full responsibility for all agricultural production in Britain. The vast majority of great houses were turned over for public use – with aristocrats digging vegetable gardens instead of planting roses and box hedges. In a standalone feature in 1941, Vogue shadowed Lady Diana Cooper, the great socialite of the day, as she milked her Jersey cow, Princess; collected eggs from her own hens; and cut hay from her three-acre plot.
At the same time, Withers put female journalists front and centre in the magazine’s pages. Most famously, she dispatched Lee Miller to the frontline as Vogue’s war correspondent, where the writer and photographer sent back reports on the siege of St Malo, the liberation of Paris, and – perhaps most famously – the death of Hitler. Along with giving prominence to Miller’s articles, which Withers personally edited, Vogue praised those doing similar jobs on the home front. One feature from the March 1944 issue, titled “News Makers and News Breakers”, celebrated female politicians and reporters: “These are women in the news. Two of them – the chief of a women’s army, and a Parliamentary Secretary – help to make it. The others record it: but with so sensational a success that in breaking the news, they have become News themselves.” Among those included in the piece? Colonel Hobby, director of America’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps; radio broadcaster Miss Barbara Ward; Miss Florence Horsburgh MP, the parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Health; and the then Mrs Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn. “Married since 1940 to the novelist, [she] has been a journalist since she was 19,” Vogue captioned a portrait of her at her writing desk.
Naturally, Vogue also continued to advise on fashion – teaching women how to make the most of what was available in spite of the clothes rationing that began in June 1941. While at the beginning of the war, the magazine had claimed that it “deplore[d] the crop of young women who take war as an excuse for letting their hair down and parading about in slacks”, it quickly changed its tune – espousing a make-do-and-mend philosophy. Knee-length suits paired with wooden-soled shoes became a uniform for many. Taking a pointedly chipper tone, Vogue declared: “Dress restrictions simply pare away superfluities. The progress of the war has made it necessary to prohibit all superfluous material and superfluous labour… Fashion is undergoing a compulsory course of slimming and simplification.” This, the editors reasoned, was all for the best. “Subtraction, not addition, is the first of fashion rules.” Withers even advised the Board of Trade on a range of Utility clothes – connecting them with renowned fashion designers such as Hardy Amies and showcasing the results in the pages of Vogue. “They, by sheer skill of cut, sheer interest of fabric, can turn negative restrictions to positive triumphs,” the magazine wrote in an attempt to get readers on board with the austerity pieces.
Withers simply refused to concede that fashion was no longer important. In a famous shoot, Cecil Beaton captured model Elizabeth Cowell standing among the debris after a night of particularly devastating bombing in 1941. Written alongside the photographs? “It is now said that fashion’s goose is properly done in, for want of the best butter. But fashion is indestructible and will survive even margarine coupons… You cannot ration a sense of style.” Indeed, even at the height of the war, the industry struggled on as best it could in London – harbouring a number of designers who had fled from Paris. “When the siren sounded in Mayfair, it often as not found the couturiers in the middle of complicated fittings,” Vogue wrote after the Blitz concluded. “Captain Molyneux, his mouth full of pins, would ask his model, ‘Do you want to go to the shelter?’ and Sheila Wetton, today Vogue’s senior fashion editor, would obediently shake her head. At John Lewis the fittings were carried on in their shelters…”
Vogue dispensed practical advice on every conceivable fashion and beauty-related topic. The magazine suggested alternative hairstyles now that girls were forced to go “hatless” and were in danger of catching long tresses in factory equipment; provided step-by-step instructions for tailoring last year’s clothes to match this year’s fashions; proposed cream make-up and socks as an alternative to nylon stockings; and gave tips on how to combat the effects of war on skin. “Miss Lily Ehrenfeld works from eight till eight, five days a week, in a munitions factory,” began a noteworthy editorial, before listing cosmetic solutions for the problems of hands “coated day-long in grease and grime” (“At night she paints her nails with white iodine to harden them…”) and recommending good postures to adopt while on your feet all day. The rationing of cosmetics was likewise taken in stride. “Today, you want to look as if you thought less about your face than about what you have to face, less about your figure than about how much you can do,” Vogue announced in the August 1942 issue.
By the time of the armistice on 2 September 1945, Withers had helped to foster a generation of independent women. She opted for a blue sky cover for the October 1945 issue, which was devoted to “peace and reconstruction” – an oddly bittersweet moment for those women who had grown used to a life free from normal patriarchal restrictions. Withers may have been thrilled to celebrate the return of peacetime – but she would never lay down her arms when it came to the feminist cause, least of all in her remaining 15 years as editor. “Where do they go from here – the Servicewomen and all the others, who without the glamour of uniform, have queued and contrived and queued, and kept factories, homes, and offices going?” Vogue wrote shortly after the armistice. “Their value is more than proven: their toughness where endurance was needed, their taciturnity where silence was demanded, their tact, good humour, and public conscience; their continuity of purpose, their submission to discipline, their power over machines… all the things men liked to think women couldn’t be or do… How long before a grateful nation (or anyhow, the men of the nation) forget what women accomplished when the country needed them? It is up to all women to see to it that there is no regression – that they go right on from here.”
Lee is in cinemas in the UK from 13 September 2024
