“I remember you well at the Chelsea Hotel”: American Vogue’s Sally Singer
By Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

EMMELYN BUTTERFIELD-ROSEN: How did you end up leaving your American Studies Ph.D program at Yale to eventually work at American Vogue?
SALLY SINGER: When I was in academia, in the late eighties, there was an idea that the terms of production of a historical text were more interesting than the actual historical record – which, I mean, may be true; it may be true.

Allegory and hegemony theory were very popular – and I could ascribe my own allegory on anything, I could do all that, but it wasn’t why I got into history. I really believed that you could construct a historical narrative that would motivate people to think and act differently. But I didn’t have that narrative. I couldn’t sustain it as a women’s historian, or as a straight labor historian … At Yale I realized I was becoming more and more theoretically oriented, more theoretically charged. And at a certain point you’re just wanking, that is, speaking to a very small community about the terms of an argument you’re not actually having.

Book publishing was a very good transition for me, given the intellectual crisis I was having about the purpose of my academic work. I went to work for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, specifically when the ex-head of Harvard University Press went there to run Hill & Wang, which was their academic imprint.

I was there for five years.

While a book editor, I knew that I eventually wanted to get into magazines. But until I was hired by the London Review of Books, I was always told I was far too academic when I tried to get a job in magazines.

Even at Harpers. Harpers, not Harpers Bazaar, told me I was too academic.

Your first job in fashion was when you moved from the London Review of Books to British Vogue in 1996. How was that?
I did the culture stuff and mainstream features, but then I began to edit and write for the style pages. It was interesting. British Vogue at the time was all about how a woman who lives in W10, but used to live in W11, thinks about the life of the woman who is still lucky enough to live in W11. What’s on that coffee table? How is that private garden? How did they end up with that? How do they justify what they ended up with?

It was a “three-children-in-the-garden-jumping-up-and-down-on-Indian-pillows” kind of time. The question was: how can one appear not to care about power and work? It was not necessarily born from an ethical premise, but an idea of the seasonless, the ageless.

Do you think that that aesthetic of not caring about power comes from a kind of fear?
Well, no, I think at that time in England, it was the idea that English eclecticism was finally going to have its moment in fashion. You dressed as if you had gone to the dressing-up box in your large Norfolk estate and pulled out granny and grandpa’s ball gowns and pajamas and wellies. Then you wore it to work.

And you felt this at the time?
One’s sense of trend doesn’t come from an articulated position, or rationalizations. It comes from an idea that aesthetics are shifting. You get these currents, and you just feel it. Anyone working at the top of their game in my field always has these receptors out.

Well, it seems like you are very good at being sensitive to those moments. You’ve been described to me as having a seismograph-like quality.
Oh … well, that’s flattering. You know, fashion is aesthetics wedded to the zeitgeist. So if it doesn’t work in your time, it doesn’t work. I don’t want to see fashion in museums and stand there ruing the day that no one realized this person was a genius. It is a moment, and it is going to be gone.

Did you read the recent article in the New Yorker about Karl Lagerfeld? What was stressed above all else was the voraciousness with which he consumed media and information. Is that what is necessary in fashion?
I think that’s a particular way of working that trades on a kind of acute cultural sensitivity and cultivation. I mean, Karl Lagerfeld is the perfection of that, the nth degree of that sort of intellectual voracity. I think other designers work in different ways entirely.

At Vogue, we can only cover the top 1% of anything. But at the same time, we have to know everything that was excluded. To be a subject in Vogue, you’ve got to sustain a big profile, and sustain a big picture. There’s a very slim amount of material that actually works for Vogue, because the criteria are rather extreme – I am speaking here for features and profiles. We don’t do ugly pictures. That’s not to say we don’t do pictures of things that are ugly in the world. We can do pictures of unpleasant realities, but they will be beautiful pictures.

For readers, once you are in Vogue world, you are in a world where things have a heightened reality – things, by definition, look better, more beautiful, and smarter than you are. It’s like getting a letter from your most fabulous friend – not fabulous for monstrous reasons, or for narcissistic reasons, but your most culturally savvy, most elegantly attired, most impressively articulate, grad-school roommate. The magazine has got to speak in that way to people. And it has to be seamless: once you are in it, you are in it.

So where are you when you are in that seamless place?
It is an optimistic act to read Vogue. It is not a cynical act to read Vogue. That’s what I think. I mean, people read tabloids out of cynicism: they want to see celebrities fall down; they want to hear trashy gossip; they want to learn that famous people are not what you thought they were. In Vogue, you learn that these people are more interesting than you thought they were. Not always better, but more interesting. Do you know what I mean?

I do know what you mean. I’ve never thought about Vogue in quite that way. Because you live in the Chelsea Hotel it reminds me of a lyric from the Leonard Cohen song about getting head on an unmade bed from Janis Joplin.
“I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,” yup.

Yeah, and he talks about being “oppressed by the figures of beauty.” I do wonder whether Vogue probably also leaves that aftertaste.
Well, I think, yes, if you are an insecure person. If you are that person, you are going to look at an actress playing a doctor on “Grey’s Anatomy,” and think oops, I’m not going to be a doctor. And if you read a fashion magazine, you might think, oops, I don’t look like Sienna Miller.

Vogue is a continuum, it’s an idea of a life. It is not an indictment of a reader’s life, of the choices they’ve made, that she doesn’t have everything contained in it. It’s just a range of suggestions. If it was simply a replication of one’s actual world, then looking at it would be boring. There would be nothing to aspire to or learn from.

Part of the editorial side that is most interesting to me is the question of how do we take things that aren’t Vogue, and make them Vogue. How do you get someone who writes in a voice that isn’t Vogue to write for Vogue? It’s not a trick. It’s a series of tricks.

I love trying to figure out how to make things Vogue. And that could be anything … I mean, Dita von Teese and Marilyn Manson’s wedding. That was, you know, that was a military campaign, to get that to sit in the pages of Vogue.

And you wanted it?
I totally wanted it. I thought that it was fantastic.

What was fantastic?
I thought it was fantastic that a woman whose profession involved taking her clothes off had motivated designers to do very dressed-up clothes. Dita was inspiring everyone to get all dressed up and done. It was very clever, very ironic, very shrewd of her. Here was someone from Orange County, from the world of retro, rockabilly, psycho-billy that had taken those references and really perfected them in a very incredible way. And she had this credibility to a niche market, and a very crossover appeal.

Dita is willing to look perfect, and most of us are afraid to be perfect. Fashion now is all about being undone. Because undone is young.

You keep using that phrase: to make something Vogue. What makes something Vogue, then?
It’s an approach to the world that’s inherently optimistic. It’s inherently kind of pro-active. It’s about creating and sustaining an approach to the world that is more interesting, more vibrant, and probably more beautiful in conventional and unconventional ways, and more captivating, more fundamentally captivating, than what we started with at the beginning of the day.

You mentioned Sienna Miller earlier. Did you see Factory Girl? Did you like it?
I thought she was absolutely incredible in it. But I think it is always something of a pantomime, in the English sense of the word, to do Warhol and the Factory now, because there is such compelling footage of him, and of them, and we’ve all seen it. And if you haven’t seen it, you can watch the Rick Burns documentary, or Jonas Mekas’ footage – so when someone else tries to do it, it’s just a matter of matching their shtick.

I guess it was an attempt to fill out a cipher. And Edie is still a cipher, because, in the end, she was a narcissistic drug addict who took a long time to get ready to go out of the house, and had a lot of little things in little boxes, and didn’t wear clothes under her fur coat. What was going onside her warped little mind? In the end, who knows? Probably not much … there was no depth there.

For people who were there, like Brigid Berlin, I think Edie is mystifying for them even now, as is the endless fixation on the Factory. They were in a time and in a place where something kind of interesting was going on, which a lot of people, now, feel is very interesting.

I guess it’s just that there is no equivalent. Currently, I mean.
Well, nothing that has been documented in the same way. It was happening in New York, recording itself, fully aware of its marketability. And it was cast properly, with just the right mix of really beautiful rich people.
But there have been other cultural things that have happened. It’s staggering how quickly things have changed because of hip hop – I mean, ideas of lyrics, ideas of graphics, graffiti, sampling. Hip hop took post-modernism to a whole other kind of zone.

And then gay culture, drag culture, the way it has changed things culturally, politically, socially, is major, staggering. I mean, just think that the Factory was going on before Stonewall. So I think other things have happened that are far, far more enormous than the Warhol crew.

I think the fascination is related to some kind of romance of the sixties, as experienced by a very charmed elite. Because, anyway, what tabloid stars get up to now is far more lurid and grotesque and interesting, maybe more fascinating, than what the Warhol stars were doing.

It seems clear that the pace of nostalgia in fashion has accelerated. Do you think fashion without nostalgia is even possible?
Well, we do have a column called “Nostalgia” at Vogue.
Do I think designers will stop referring to the past in their collections? Fashion doesn’t change that much. What changes are proportions, where you put the armhole, how deep a neckline plunges. These proportional shifts inevitably emerge first on the streets, not runways. They work their way up into “fashion.”

Great designers always refer to the past, but they do so in a way that can only happen right now, often because of technological innovations in textiles or garment production. Good design probably references the best of something we’ve seen before, matched with up-to-date engineering.

For example, we’ve got a lot of Paul Poiret coming into fall 2007 – that dropped back, that Orientalist impulse. It is his proportions, and the ease with which he articulated them, that designers are responding to, although now, if you’re, say, Rick Owens, you can cut a Poiret-like jacket with a ballooning back in washed leather and skinny ribbed knit.

And there’s a Poiret show that’s about to open at the Costume Institute at the Met, right? Do you like Poiret?
I do, and Poiret would be someone that I like, because I admire the kind of people that have an aesthetic vision of the world that is totalizing: it’s in their clothes, it’s in their home, it’s everywhere. I love those people where clothing is part of everything.

So you love the total work of art. But do you also see editing as one of the primal pleasures of life?
Yes, editing, the ability to make choices, absolutely – or when you don’t have the luxury of choice, the ability to make due, and in making due you are realizing, or stamping yourself, onto everything you are doing. Making something seem like a choice, even if it wasn’t a choice, is terrific and healthy.

I don’t think of life, and I don’t think of my life, as one of limitless opportunities. I think of limits, and class rage, on most days. That said, within each set of opportunities I have had, at any given moment in my life, I have tried to make the wisest choices. When I was a waitress in nightclubs in New York in my 20s, I worked at the place with the best tipping customers.

In that sense, I am very Vogue, because I am very optimistic, and yet I don’t think I’m entitled to anything. I don’t come to the world with expectations. I come to the world thinking: there is a set of options, what is the most interesting way to manipulate them?