Clodagh Finn: Carmel Snow, the Irish Anna Wintour who reshaped US fashion

Irish Examiner

a day ago

Carmel Snow, the influential Irish woman who transformed US fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, was born Carmel White in Dalkey in 1887. Had she been a fan of the double-barrel name, she would have become Carmel Snow-White.
I love that quirky if little-quoted fact, not least because it shows our insistence on shoehorning trailblazing women, such as Carmel and the in-the-news phenomenon that is Anna Wintour, into fairytale stereotypes. Women with power, influence and fearsome reputations are no Snow Whites, of course; they are cast as cartoonish wicked women.
Or devil women. For proof, look no further than the box-office sensation, The Devil Wears Prada, the film supposedly based on Wintour. Mind you, as steely editor of Runway magazine, the wondrous Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly), offered us a poised and immensely entertaining version of female wickedness, one which we will happily see again soon.
News that a sequel has just gone into production lands hot on the heels of confirmation that Anna Wintour is stepping down from her role as editor-in-chief of Vogue.
Anna Wintour who is to step aside from her role as the day-to-day editor of American Vogue, with the magazine hiring a new head of editorial content.
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She is not stepping back, though. Make no mistake about that. Anna Wintour, the woman lauded for revitalising the celebrated magazine and chairing the annual Met Gala, will continue to work as Condé Nast's global chief content officer.
There has been much coverage of the woman herself — her razor-sharp bob, her trademark sunglasses, her achievement in fashion-empire building and her icy demeanour. At least there is also some recognition that she is a real person behind the curated image.
I like this description of the personal Wintour from fashion editor Jess Cartner Morley: 'In private, [she] is devoted to her family, is a tennis superfan, a passionate supporter of the arts and a witty and phenomenally well-read conversationalist.'
Maybe she is glued to Wimbledon right now.
One of the many things I admire about her is her sense of humour. Here's a fine example: She turned up to the London premiere of The Devil Wears Prada musical wearing Prada. And she told reporters that it was up to the public to decide if she and Miranda Priestly were 'twinsies'.
Though we might not like to think so, we — the observing public — will never be able to make an informed choice about that because it is impossible to get behind the caricatural Anna of the headlines.
There is, however, one undeniable fact in all of it: Anna Wintour is 75 years old and she is still at the top of her game. In all the coverage, that single figure is the one that remains after the clichés and wooden generalisations drain away.
Having this elegant, high-powered executive back in the news also gives us a joyous occasion to recall the Irishwoman who was the Anna Wintour of her day. Or maybe that should be the other way around — Wintour is the Carmel Snow of her day.
Happily, this Irish 'icon of impeccable style', editor of Vogue and transformer of Harper's Bazaar is now quite well-known, but that is recent.
When, in the 1990s, writer and TV producer/director Anne Roper first came across a reference to her, she had been all but forgotten.
American fashion journalist Carmel Snow (1887 - 1961) attends a function in London in 1956. Picture: Getty Images
After reading this tantalising footnote in Truman Capote's biography — 'The remarkable Mrs Snow, Dublin-born, had transformed Harper's Bazaar from a simple fashion magazine into a haven for the new and daring, in photography and design as well as fiction' — Roper rang the magazine's New York offices to find out more. They had only vague memories.
Then she came across her out-of-print memoir, The World of Carmel Snow, and began the process of writing this tenacious and supremely talented woman back into the public consciousness.
Let's start with a bit of name-dropping to put her importance into context.
To quote none other than Capote again: 'Diane Vreeland was her fashion editor. Alexey Brodovitch, who designed for the Ballets Russes, was her art director. There was no question, Bazaar was the magazine to work for.'
Capote was a contributor along with Katherine Anne Porter, Evelyn Waugh, Frank O'Connor, Louis MacNiece and Maeve Brennan. As she put it herself, Carmel Snow was creating a magazine for 'well-dressed women with well-dressed minds'.
She discovered Balenciaga, Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy. She gave Cartier-Bresson his first magazine assignment, and counted Coco Chanel, Colette, Salvador Dali, Liam O'Flaherty and Noel Coward as friends.
Her vision was an immediate success. She took over Harper's Bazaar in 1935, tripling the circulation in jig time.
It happened by accident, in a sense. Or rather due to the tragic death of her businessman father Peter White who died suddenly in Chicago in 1893 while setting up the Irish village, a showcase of Irish history, culture and industry, at the World Fair. Carmel's mother, Anne White, took over from him and did an exceptional job.
A commemorative stamp of Carmel Snow. Picture: An Post
The 'very capable and charming Mrs Peter White', as one newspaper described her, decided to stay in the US and open a craft shop. She later took over a dressmaking firm with a workroom of over 250 fitters and seamstresses who produced Parisian haute couture for the US market.
Carmel later recalled her mother's 'momentous decision' to stay on and take over with admiration. 'Her determination had taken her a long way in that period when women, particularly Irish women, seldom ventured,' she wrote.
Her mother's career brought Carmel to America and introduced her to the fashion world. She accompanied her mother on buying trips to Paris where she met Coco Chanel and witnessed the 'birth of the revolution in fashion'.
She moved to the city — after a failed love affair, apparently — and worked for the Red Cross during WWI. Her big break into the fashion world came in the early 1920s when she filled in for a New York Times fashion correspondent who couldn't make one of the Paris fashion shows. Her copy was so good it led to a column in that paper and later a job as assistant fashion editor in Vogue.
'For the first day, I got myself up to kill. I wore a smart, but dead black crepe-de-chine dress and jacket from Vionnet, the exciting new Paris designer whose bias cut was so subtle I was proud of myself for recognising that here was an artist in fashion,' she wrote.
Her subsequent career at Harper's has been well-covered; here was an early high-flier who did not let the birth of her children slow her down: 'I was never without a baby under the desk.' Much attention has been paid to her drinking in later life, too, and the dignity-stripping reality of that, but let us hope that serves as a reminder that people, even talented and successful ones, have feet of clay.
I did not discover until this week, however, that she wrote a six-part series published by the Evening Echo in 1953. Here's a flavour of it: 'To wear the new Dior line, you cannot have a spare tire [sic]. What you need is a spare rib. You must have a concave stomach and pretty well nothing to sit on. You must be slender as a willow and as few of us are this, we must be prepared to be stern with ourselves.'
Plus ça change.
Although I do, naively perhaps, hold out hope for change. The collective noun for those at a publication's helm is, I read somewhere, 'a revision of editors'. How nicely put. Maybe we can now revise the caricatures we sketch for the women who sit in that hot seat.