Says Alexandra Shulman “As a magazine editor you’re like an orchestra’s conductor, and your role is to bring everything together It may be that you can play the cello but you can’t play the flute, [but] that doesn’t mean to say you can’t work with the flautist.”
Alexandra Shulman.
In this "How I Made It in Fashion" series, BuzzFeed Fashion asks the industry's most successful members how they got to where they are. Ahead, longtime editor of British "Vogue," Alexandra Shulman, discusses her journey from the secretarial pool to the editor's office, her advice for today's fashion interns, and that future Duchess of Cambridge cover: "In my dreams," she says. Ours too.
After graduating from university, I first worked [as an assistant at a record label] in the music business for about a year. But I had learned shorthand and typing skills during my gap year, so I then got a job as a temp in the office of Over21 magazine — they were looking for a secretary for their editor. When I went for the job the editor said to me "I don't think you're going to be the right person for this job, but I like you. Why don't you come in and help out until I find the person that I actually want to give the job to?" In the end, she just stuck with me.
It wasn't disheartening to me because I knew what she was thinking. She thought I just wouldn't be interested in doing the dogsbody work — but I knew that I could and would do that. I never minded photocopying or making coffee; I had to keep track of the magazine's payments — this was a long time ago, mind you — so I had a big ledger book and I had to write in every single invoice. It wasn't my favorite thing to do but I never minded because it was part of the job. Admittedly, though, I was being paid to do it. That did help.
Maybe now people think that they don't have to do that entry-level grunt work. I think everybody does, and certainly everyone at Vogue who is at the top of the editorial tree now has had to do several years of that kind of stuff. That's how you get to know how everybody at a magazine works; how you get to know the structure.
While working as a secretary I wrote little pieces for the magazine — 50-word pieces here and there, or even just the captions for stories. At the same time I was pitching ideas for other publications. One of the key things I learned as an editor's secretary — because I opened all of her mail and got to read all her letters — was how people pitched ideas and what pitches got accepted. So actually I had a pretty good strike rate for someone without much of a track record as a writer. I got pieces in The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times, and one of the big pieces I pitched was to Tina Brown at Tatler magazine. It was about the evolution of Notting Hill. Tatler commissioned me to write it and accepted the piece, although when I had finished they didn't actually publish it. But they did offer me a job instead.
Nowadays, in pitches I look for somebody writing something interesting. It's that simple. Of course, they need to make it very clear they've thought about why it would interest Vogue and not some other magazine. They need to have a clear view, and it needs to be something original. What I don't need, ever, is people suggesting they do an interview I could have thought of myself. At Vogue we're never going to ask a fledgling journalist to interview with Christopher Kane, for instance. We're never going to ask someone to do a trend piece on, I don't know, monochrome this season — we've got staff here who can do that. I want someone to add something to the conversation. And I'm always interested in people who can make smart social observations, or put ideas together. I want someone to tell me, "This is happening in London now. I can give you seven illustrations of it and work them together into a piece."
I still like pitches in letters — but then I've got an assistant, so that helps. I think you can argue email either way. In lots of ways it's a fantastic facility to have but realistically what happens is people send me email and I literally don't have the time to read them all. So either they fall off my screen and I forget all about them or I'm forwarding them to my assistant and saying, "You look at this and decide whether it's something I should engage with."
I should say that, really, I don't want people emailing me cold. That's almost never going to make an impression. Most of the ideas that come to Vogue are pitched to one of my department heads and that's what I encourage – pitch my features director or my fashion features director.
