One isn’t introduced to Suzy Menkes, exactly. One is ushered into her presence. And what a presence it is.
Swathed in Issey Miyake (the crinkly label, she says, “works as hard as I do”), her famous quiff shooting upwards like some weird, inky ice-cream cone, she is a series of circles topped off with a broad but somewhat remote smile.
A caricaturist’s dream. For those who care about these things, her tights are teal, her bag turquoise and her sandals open-toed though I don’t dare ask for the names of their designers. I wouldn’t want to appear vulgar.
Unlike virtually everyone else in fashion, Menkes doesn’t accept freebies, for which reason she has been known — whisper it — to carry the same Prada bag for seven seasons in a row. “I’m sure it’s deeply shocking to Miuccia Prada to see me with the same purple ostrich bag year after year,” she will tell me later, “but I love that bag, and I look after it, and that’s a compliment to her when you think about it.”
We meet at the West End offices of International Vogue, hushed and pristine. Menkes has been working here since June, when Jonathan Newhouse, Conde Nast’s chairman, appointed her the online voice of all the Vogues across the world (the exception being the US edition). Was it a wrench to leave the International Herald Tribune, her home for 25 years? “Well, I didn’t leave the Tribune,” she says. “The Tribune left me. It morphed [in 2013] into the International New York Times. New people came in; nothing felt the same. It was the ideal time to move, and my new job is a terrific idea because is there anything more international than fashion?”
But how on earth does she choose what to write about? There are a daunting 23 editions of Vogue. “You begin at the beginning. There’s the framework of the year, the things you absolutely cover. Then you go off that list — though I’ve always done that, of course. I’ve never felt I have to comment on Gwyneth Paltrow’s hairstyle. Fashion isn’t just cloth. I like to review exhibitions too.”
A recent post featured a display at the Salvatore Ferragamo museum in Florence: “I’m fascinated why killer heels continue. So I’ve written about this exhibition, which explains what the foot is all about.” What is the foot about? She flashes me a slightly exasperated look. “Well, the foot is the basis of the shoe because if the shoe doesn’t fit the foot, life’s very miserable.”
Menkes’s enthusiasm for fashion is seemingly undimmed, for all that by now she must have watched it pass through its various cycles — minimalism, maximalism, boho, retro, military and the rest — several times over (she is 70).
“It’s hard to explain,” she says when I ask her to account for this.
“I just am interested. But I’m not interested in miniskirts, or whatever. I’m interested in the why rather than the what. I’ll give you an example. I was intrigued when I saw all these girls wearing dresses over trousers, particularly in England. But then it suddenly clicked. I saw a couple of Indian women who’d adapted the salwar kameez, wearing leggings underneath.”
Does she think the two trends are connected? Surely the dresses-over-trousers-and-leggings thing has more to do with women’s increasing weight than with multiculturalism. “Yes, I do. After all, England is probably the best example of integrated cultures there is.”
To those who accuse fashion of being trivial, she has this response: it’s a bellwether. In the 80s, for instance, the shoulder pads of Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana reflected the fact that, out in the world, women were beginning to assert themselves.
(Apparently, no one else had noticed this.) So, as she scuttles down Oxford Street, does she scan passers-by furiously, trying to read beneath the surface of their clothes? “No. I usually rush down there like everyone else.”
Menkes has not missed a London Fashion Week since they began in 1984, and will duly take up her seat when the new collections are unveiled next week. London, she thinks, is all set for a change following the death of Louise Wilson, who directed the fashion MA at Central St Martins.
“Almost everyone who now generates excitement on the catwalk came through Louise. She’ll be a tough act to follow — though it must be said that it’s increasingly tough to be a fashion student at all.
“The cost is huge, which is why there are so many Asian students taking up places. It’s inevitable, I think, that we’re going to lose the Britishness we had with McQueen and his contemporaries.”
Who excites Menkes now? She’s not saying. “I get slightly alarmed at the speed with which people shoot off into stardom. Look at Jonathan Anderson [the 30-year-old Northern Irish designer appointed creative director of Loewe last year].
“When I used to visit his studio in Dalston I would tease him about how he’d never managed to stump up the money to replace a broken window. Now he’s in chic new premises. You see the first show, you blink, then they’re catapulted into a new realm. I worry they’ll burn themselves out. It’s a tremendous pressure.”
Is fashion going through a heady patch, or is she secretly longing for something shocking to happen? The current outbreak of good taste must be rather a curse, copy-wise. “I think you never know when the great moment of change is going to come. In the past there’s been seven years between one movement and another.”
Are we due another, then? “Maybe. Who knows. One thing we can say is that while fashion used to be the style of a few cheerleaders, thanks to digital cameras it’s now available to everybody. You can be in the mountains of Hungary — if there are mountains in Hungary — and you can see the latest offering from Balenciaga.”
Is this a good thing? “It is, and it isn’t. I’m never quite sure if fashion is for everybody. It’s complicated.”
The link between celebrity and fashion an association that has perhaps reached its apotheosis in Victoria Beckham has pushed out quirkiness to a degree. But this is also just a mirror on society so far as Menkes is concerned.
“It’s to do with money. When I was growing up, credit cards didn’t exist. So no one was going to buy designer clothes. And then, of course, on the other side you’ve got Primark syndrome, and the incredible cheapening of clothes.”
Menkes is unwilling wholly to condemn too-cheap clothes of the kind that are often produced in sweatshops (which is pretty striking: it’s not as if the companies involved are Vogue advertisers).
“It’s very complicated,” she says. “I don’t like the idea of throwaway clothes, but who am I to say? I don’t think you can go, like King Canute, against the tide of what is happening. I don’t think you can single out one company in particular, and I find it depressing anyway because most of the things are so ghastly. I don’t think one should be in judgement of it. I think if people want to do it, it’s their money and it’s their life.”
Similarly, she won’t go along with my horror at handbags that can cost as much as a second-hand car (though, of course, these most definitely are made by Vogue advertisers).
“It’s obvious that people are looking for something that proves who or what they are. People who are adrift in society, who have no position, give themselves a position by buying a Louis Vuitton bag. They’re a status symbol.”
I mutter amazedly about the bags I see dangling from the arms of women who must surely have had to forgo several months’ rent to pay for them. But she’s having none of it. “You’re a total innocent!” she admonishes. “They’re probably fake.”
Menkes’s earliest interest was in journalism rather than fashion. Her 99-year-old mother still owns the newspaper her daughter produced aged just five: “Yves St Laurent would have turned a bit of paper into a frockette at five, but I turned it into a newspaper. There’s a difference.”
She and her sister, Vivienne, grew up near Brighton, their Belgian cavalry officer father having been killed shortly before Suzy was born, and both were encouraged to go to university: “My sister went to Oxford, so naturally I wanted to go to Cambridge.”
Before that, though, she had a gap year in Paris, where she studied couture at the Chambre Syndicale fashion school, and attended courtesy of her White Russian landlady a Nina Ricci show (caught sketching a hat in her diary, she was almost thrown out).
Cambridge must have seemed dowdy compared to Paris but if her heart did sink at the sight of all those dreary twinsets, she isn’t saying: “I didn’t at any point feel it was a let-down.” She became the first woman editor of Varsity, the student newspaper, and the die was cast.
After Cambridge, she joined the Times (where she met her late husband and the father of her three sons, David Spanier). Did she feel like a pioneer? This was the early 60s, after all. “I don’t think I did,” she says. “I didn’t go around waving flags. The men at the Times were polite and intellectual. It wasn’t until I got to the Express that Oh, when I think about it now! There was this guy we used to call the Groper. Whenever you went to copy something he’d come up behind you, put his hands on your breasts and squeeze them.”
From there she went to the Evening Standard as fashion editor, then back to the Times, and thence to the Independent. In 1988 she joined the Herald Tribune. Along the way she became a fashion celebrity, as recognisable as Karl Lagerfeld or the late Isabella Blow. “Like a slightly mad auntie, she is,” Kate Moss told the New Yorker when it profiled her in 2003.
Her reputation for being the only critic whose verdict designers truly care about has perhaps been exaggerated down the years; what passes for acerbic in the fashion world, moreover, is just a statement of the bleeding obvious to the rest of us. Nevertheless, when she had the temerity to declare the classic Chanel handbag “over”, the company took out a full-page ad in the Tribune by way of refutation.
Her hairstyle, it lies behind her sometime nickname, Samurai Suzy also dates from her move to the Tribune, and there are two stories about its origins. The first has Menkes asking her hairdresser how she might best keep her fringe out of her eyes while working.
The second has it that she was in search of a visual trademark, in the manner of Anna Wintour’s sunglasses, or Karl Lagerfeld’s fan. Which one is true? She says it’s the first. “I can’t bear my fringe flopping in my face, so now I’ve got this quiff and I’m stuck with it. But maybe I won’t be stuck with it for ever. Maybe I’ll surprise everybody.”
It is the kind of hairstyle, she insists, that can be constructed while “walking down the stairs”, and, as such, matches her lifestyle.
“Women pamper themselves so much now, but I wasn’t brought up to that. I’d rather pop into a museum than seek out Gwyneth Paltrow’s masseur.”
As she says when we talk about her beloved Issey Miyake: “I just can’t cope with clothes that are demanding. Who are these people who travel with irons?”
Her refusal to accept free stuff is, she says, less grand than it sounds. “I’m not standing up against some terrible trend. When I came into journalism, no one accepted freebies. It just doesn’t feel right to me.”
Did she never covet any of the gifts? “Mostly, I didn’t open them. I just sent them back with a note saying I’d accept only flowers or chocolates. People got the message fairly fast.”
She believes that some bloggers — the kind who write mostly about the bountiful parcels they receive — are unaware to what extent they’re being used.
“They [the companies involved] are trying to disenable fashion criticism, which was much harder and sharper before bloggers. But who am I to say they [the bloggers] shouldn’t do it? It’s part of the culture of their generation.”
As for her reputation as a workaholic at the Tribune — she used to produce upwards of 200,000 words a year — this is “a myth”: she simply writes fast. Nevertheless, you can’t help but wonder.
Given the speed required for blogging to be wholly successful, and the ever more crowded schedule that comprises the fashion year, how long can she keep it up? How long would she want to keep it up? She isn’t sure. But she also knows that it’s best to keep a career like hers in proportion.
“I am a realist,” she says. “I’ve always known that if I leave my job the flowers would stop, the invitations would end; that there’d be no more 2,000 white-candle events, as my husband used to call them. It’s a cruel business. But it has never been the whole of my life, and if I was forced to write about things I’m not interested in, I don’t think I’d do it.” Beneath the quiff, jaunty as bunting in a breeze, her smile brooks no argument.
