If you look at Vogue’s March cover, you’ll see tennis superstar Coco Gauff beaming, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, absolutely stunning in a gold Michael Kors Collection dress. It’s a classic, if not especially memorable, Vogue cover. Her cover story is equally nothing to write home about – the expected gleaming profile on a sports star well on the rise through both championships and endorsements.
This month, there is no Vogue New Zealand. In fact, there hasn’t been for 58 years. Vogue New Zealand, edited from the UK, ran for just over a decade from 1957 to 1968. In an interview with Vogue Australia – founded in 1959, and existing to this day – Claire Regnault, curator and author of Dressed, says that the editors were provided with “up-to-the-minute” information on fashion trends. “This was a service that they’d never had before … It imbued the local industry, which was burgeoning at the time, with confidence and pride.”
Auckland Library has just one copy of Vogue New Zealand from Spring 1966. I spent an afternoon with the magazine, combing over the spreads, advertisements, and scant writing with a fine-toothed comb to figure out: What was Vogue New Zealand? Or at the very least, what was Vogue New Zealand, in Spring 1966.
You probably shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but you can absolutely judge a magazine by that metric. A bobbed brunette – unnamed and uncredited – stares directly at the camera, framed by gorgeous earrings, chalk-white from Block. To her left are the headlines: “New Looks for Spring”, “How to be Feminine For Life” and “Vogue in Southland!”. It’s chic, it’s simple, it is arguably more striking than this month’s Vogue cover (sorry Annie!).
The first piece of non-advertorial writing isn’t until page 65, a two-pager on the impact of cutouts on beauty care, with gems like “Strips and straps between you and a summer sun can leave their mark to spoil another dress come the evening” and “All over the fashion world, the cry is for paler suntans: pot-of-gold, biscuit, honey – but this summer please, no tough, deep-fried browns.”
Until that point, there are advertisements for Chanel No. 5, Velva Moisture Film, Satura by Dorothy Gray, Milne and Choyce, Wild Silk by Goya, Moygashel Fabrics, Glamis Crochet Knits, Naked Wool, Burberry Traveller, Helena Rubinstein’s Eye Makeup, Gossard Girdles, The Breakaways, and the concept of swimsweaters (exactly what they sound like).
What’s most startling about the magazine is how little actual writing there is. The magazine consists of three proper articles: a smattering of short profiles of Southland families, a slightly academic piece, and a republished essay from the flagship Vogue from Dr. Robert A. Wilson on the benefits of hormone replacement therapy to avoid menopause.
If you’re thinking “yikes!” about that last one, you think correctly. Subsequent trials from the Women’s Health Initiative contradicted his claims, proving that the therapy could have significant medical risks, and later his research was revealed to have been completely funded by a drug company.
Otherwise, the actual writing consists entirely of beauty tips, including an entire page on different eye makeup looks – a far cry from a YouTube tutorial – and notes on what’s happening in the scene, including recommendations for an upcoming radio serial called The Life of Fred, a brand-new version of The Gondoliers performed by the Auckland Light Opera society and two pages devoted to “who people are talking about”. Actor Rita Tushingham, owner of perhaps the poshest name I’ve ever heard, is who they were talking about.
Less startling is how regressive it is. There are the obvious indicators that this is a magazine from the 60s, such as advertisements for Matinee Kings cigarettes – for “smoothing smoking”, the aforementioned swimsweaters and how to plan a trip to South East Asia, and let me tell you Vogue New Zealand in the 60s does not refer to it as South East Asia. This charming ad takes up the entire back of the magazine:
The back cover is also a handy metric to judge Vogue New Zealand by. The blank look on the model’s face with “He forgets I’m fifty” above it haunts my nightmares. The taglines for so many ads are poking fun at the reader rather than poking fun with the reader. It’s standard advertisement fare: “If you think water is a moisturizer, you’re sunk!”, “Is it really you or Secret Fulfillment?”, “Why are cool calm and confident women always more exciting?”
And this free-verse poem:
“Hair that lives …
hair that breathes …
hair that looks
Like hair
With sex appeal”
That’s an ad for Peter Stening, Wellington’s Fashion Stylist, by the way. (His salon is still run as one, FAB Hair Company in Khandallah.)
Even a typewriter, an arguably utilitarian device, is advertised with “It’s beautiful…..” – yes, that’s five periods.
The magazine is also, unsurprisingly, really British and therefore, unsurprisingly, really white. Not a single person of colour can be found within these pages.
It goes even further, and perhaps even more unsurprisingly, that the overwhelming message of this Vogue is that the reader should look like the women inside the pages, and it does not really consider anybody who doesn’t already look like that, even while advertising them countless ways they could possibly look like them.
These are not revolutionary observations, but it’s a bit sad that New Zealand didn’t buck this bleak trend, even while this edition was edited from within the beating heart of the British Empire (even though a New Zealander, the recently departed Michal McKay, was its fashion editor around this time).
By the time I closed Vogue New Zealand, circa Spring 1966, I didn’t feel especially illuminated about New Zealand fashion, and if you want that experience, you needn’t check out the magazine, but the room you have to physically walk through to get to the magazine, where you can see That’s So Last Century, an exhibition about what Auckland wore from the 1950s-90s (this runs until July 13).
Vogue New Zealand shows you what Vogue New Zealand wanted to be important to New Zealand: moneyed, white, skinny, and weirdly keen to purchase a lot of wool. It’s not so much a shame that the magazine isn’t around anymore, but a shame it didn’t get the chance to grow to be more than just that.
