Back in 2020, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour issued a rare public mea culpa in which she apologised for the magazine not finding ‘enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators’. The magazine, Wintour added, had ‘made mistakes…publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes’.
More than four years on, the question must now be asked – will Wintour expressly apologise for the mistakes she made against the people of Syria, as well? In 2011, Vogue breathlessly celebrated the country’s former First Lady Asma al-Assad in a glossy profile. After all, while Black staffers were distinctly disadvantaged at the magazine under Wintour’s editorship, the suffering endured by the people of Syria has been on a scale of several magnitudes larger.
‘A Rose in the Desert’ was how Vogue described Assad, a former investment banker who now appears to have played an equal – if not more craven – role than her husband in quashing dissent during Syria’s brutal 13-year-long civil war, which claimed more than an estimated 500,000 lives. ‘The very freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,’ the magazine continued in its celebration of Assad, now exiled to Moscow following the overthrow of her husband’s regime by Islamic militants last weekend.
As is often the case, it’s not the crime that haunts bad guys most – it’s the cover-up. And Vogue’s cover-up of the Assad profile is a master class in message manipulation almost gone right. Well aware of the messy optics around the article, Vogue scrubbed the Assad profile from their website just weeks after its release. Despite having framed the Assads as ‘wildly democratic’, the Syrian leaders had killed more than 5,000 civilians by the time the magazine hit newsstands – part of a brutal crackdown amid the Arab Spring protests convulsing across the Middle East that year.
To further distance themselves from their editorial blunder, the magazine then severed ties with writer Joan Juliet Buck, a former French Vogue editor-in-chief who’d penned the Assad profile. Wintour – despite initially defending the piece – finally condemned the Assads’ actions and ‘values’ as ‘completely at odds with those of Vogue’.
But championing the rich and thin and powerful is what Vogue has always done best. And glamorous Mrs. Assad – despite her family’s decades of totalitarianism – simply made sense. ‘Vogue had been trying to get [Assad] for quite a long time,’ said Buck in an interview with NPR in 2012. ‘Here was this woman who had never given an interview, who was extremely thin and very well-dressed and therefore, qualified to be in Vogue.’
The orgy of elitism that surrounds profiles like Assad’s exists as much to insulate Vogue as those who appear in its pages. But removing a piece from the internet is as rare as it is extreme. Back in 2008, for instance, gay cultural critic Dan Savage tried to scrub racially-offensive comments he’d made against African Americans following Barack Obama’s election that November. A quick search on Google reveals that Savage’s efforts – like most attempts to manipulate the internet – clearly failed.
Vogue-parent Conde Nast has far more to lose than Savage when its editorial output spectacularly – and unexpectedly – conflicts with cultural and political sensitivities. And Conde will clearly do whatever it takes – including manipulating published content as it did with the Assad piece – to retain its gilded reputation. A few years back when I worked at Architectural Digest, for instance, a digital piece during black history month highlighting the homes of Black celebrities that had appeared in the magazine’s pages, was altered after it went live.
The editor-in-chief was incensed that the piece – written by a black writer about black subjects for black history month – noted that no African-Americans had appeared on the cover of the magazine until Tina Turner back in 2000, some 80 years after the magazine was founded. She felt this historical fact portrayed the magazine poorly and had the writer remove it. Not only does the updated version omit this original damning detail, the magazine also took the almost unprecedented step of deleting an accompanying social media post after followers – mostly Black – complained that it felt tokenising and racist. Forget facts – or even the limits of the internet – in the end it’s all about optics.
Such wilful indifference to the truth continues to this day at both Conde Nast and most of America’s glossy magazine publishers – most notably in their coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza. Despite Wintour’s virtue-signally concession toward the ‘right’ side of history during the #blacklivesmatter protests in 2020, Conde Nast has displayed an outrageous level of anti-Israel bias since Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
Teen Vogue, in particular, has published some of the most odious anti-Israel content, starting from the top, editor-in-chief Versha Sharma. Last month, for example, Sharma published an op-ed endorsing Kamala Harris for president in which she decried ‘the Israeli government[‘s]…all-out assault on Gaza… including the horrific killing of civilians in Gaza, the targeting of journalists and aid workers, and the reports of children being shot in the head’. No mention of Hamas’s despotic use of civilians as human shields.
Teen Vogue’s casual, consistent references to ‘Israeli genocide’ and unchecked reliance on Hamas for Gaza death toll numbers continues the wanton disregard for facts or even professional journalism that Vogue displayed over a decade ago with its Assad piece. A similar tone oozes out of Vanity Fair, whose pro-Palestine sentiments even extended to its gleeful coverage of the anti-Israel outburst at an awards ceremony for the LGBT-focused advocacy group GLAAD Media – with no mention of Hamas’ well-documented paper trail of anti-LGBT atrocities.
Such pick-as-you-wish editorial policies reflect a corporation that clearly has no business mixing fashion with politics. As evidenced by the June departure of Conde Nast’s first chief diversity officer over alleged anti-Semitic sympathies, such efforts have failed in regards to race – and they’re failing when it comes to Israel and the Middle East. Just as Vogue failed the Syrian people with that now-infamous Asma al-Assad profile.
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