Vogue chief editor Anastasia Sokolova on favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, Anastasia Sokolova, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, the author of the book How to Become the Best Gloss Editor, shares her stories about favorite books.
I don’t think that it will be interesting to anyone to find out how old I was when I started reading and how I was moving this case. I just want to say that I, like any humanist, have loved books since childhood. There was no Internet, there were no magazines, cartoons were rarely shown on TV, and all were strange. The colorful world, full of adventures and miracles, was only in books, and until the age of eighteen I read everything indiscriminately: what was at home or in the library of the city of Protvino, where I grew up, read it. I also remember how I handed over waste paper to get a ticket for the coveted "Viscount de Brazhelon".
Now I read significantly less, but I don’t read novels at all - only sensational ones, such as Donna Tartt and Little Life. For some reason this genre has sharply ceased to interest me. I found an explanation in one interview with Tatiana Tolstoy: answering the question why she does not write purely artistic prose, but autobiographical, almost documentary, she said something like: “What is a novel?” Someone entered the room, sat down on a chair and looked out the window. "So, I do not believe - no one entered, and no one looked, there was no such thing." And I have the same feeling: I no longer believe that someone came in and looked. The world around has suddenly become so real that what I want most of all to understand, I can no longer float on the waves of fantasy six hundred pages long. There are, of course, novels that have sunk into my soul in recent years, for example, Mikhail Shishkin's "Lady's Hair" - sorry, he caught me ten years late. But non-fiction predominates on my bookshelf: biographies, memoirs, some documents of the era. Or short stories and short stories - like, for example, my favorite story by Tolstoy “Light Worlds”: I reread it thirty times.
Marnie fogg
"The history of fashion. 100 dresses that changed the world"
I am not a fashion historian, but I often have to write small notes about things or edit fashion-writers. Save the book of experts - among them the British Marnie Fogg. This, in my opinion, is her latest book and just the perfect textbook on costume history. First, the book came out in excellent translation, which is rare - not always the translator is equally proficient in the language and is aware of the realities of modern life. Secondly, Fogg understands the main thing: the history of the dress is always the history of society - and it’s great to put everything on the shelf. It is wildly interesting to read about why Egyptian-style dresses, bag dress, harlequin dress, apron dress came into fashion. And the story of a flowered dress! Fogg traces his path from the poets of Elizabethan times, Spencer and Shakespeare, to Victorian England, when she became the first urbanized society in the world - in contrast to this, the movement of arts and crafts with its flowers appeared. In the 1960s, the flower on the dress became flower power, that is, a symbol of resistance to the state.
Olga Khoroshilova
"Young and beautiful. Fashion of the twenties"
It's great when our people also write about fashion - and even dig as deep as Olga Khoroshilova, an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University of Industrial Technology and Design. Yes, everyone knows in general: in the 1920s, girls cut off their hair, put on dresses with a low waist, began to dance wild dances, drink a lot and drive cars - this is a great film about Ivlin In "Golden Youth." But all these are general ideas, and only about high society. But the 1920s - this is, in fact, the first decade, when fashion broke out of the grand salons and became “for everyone”: Olga tells what processes led to these haircuts, to these dresses, to these parties. Khoroshilova has a lot of interesting details about flappers, garsonerki, passion for African dances, Art Deco, avant-garde, about the West and the USSR. And also about the main troublemakers of that time - Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda.
Kate de Castelbajac
"Face of the Century: 100 Years of Makeup and Style"
When I came to work at Vogue, this book was shown to me by the editor-in-chief Victoria Davydova - I immediately ordered it on Amazon, but the edition was old and was only in the "Used" section. She wrote in 1995, the ex-model, the ex-wife of designer de Castelbajac Kate, and we are all grateful to her for this - this is the best guide for beauty editors. Because it’s not enough to write "the most fashionable shades - pink" in the article. It would be nice to tell the reader where they came from, what kind of image they create, whether such shadows already existed in makeup history - that is, to give context. This book has everything you need: the author has broken the twentieth century into decades and consistently describes when what makeup was in fashion and why, what tools and when they were invented. She writes about why the bend of the upper lip began to be called "Cupid's bow", as Max Factor invented contouring, which sixty years later glorified Kim Kardashian when it became indecent to go outside without a completely made up face, and when it became indecent to use lipstick. Plus a brief history of beauty concerns from Elizabeth Arden to Shiseido. Sorry, the book ends with the section "1980-1995", that is, the 1990s, Kate already parses not so detailed, because she writes in their midst, and much is not yet clear. I'd love to read about the 1990s and the 2000s in its performance.
Jennifer Scanlon
"Behind Cosmopolitan Magazine" Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown
There are many biographies of Helen Gurley Brown, the legendary editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, but it turned out that I came across this one, and I read it to holes. The book was written by a university teacher-feminist, so the text pays a lot of attention to the development of feminism and its second and third waves. But first of all, the book is interesting in history: as in the midst of the 1960s, at the age of thirty-something, Helen took up a new business for her, stood at the helm of the bending Cosmo and turned it into a mega-successful franchise, making her publishing house naked. Helen's life is proof that a strong and successful woman is not congenital, but acquired qualities. And it's never too late to start over. And that if you loved and respected other women so much that you revealed to them all your secrets - how to earn money, protect your rights, have sex, be beautiful, communicate with men - then you will be loved and remembered forever. And even turn a blind eye to the fact that in life you were an eerie meanie. By the way, Helen is the author of the expression "Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere".
Alexander VRiland
"Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years"
Another goddess of gloss is Diana Vreeland, in the 1960s she was the editor-in-chief of American Vogue. A woman from high society, but in a sense, too, made herself: mother considered her an ugly duckling, and she created her own style and dictated it to other women. As she said, in Vogue they write not about dresses, but about how a person will sparkle in them with new facets. This book is simply unique: it is not the memories of Diana or Diana, but the documents that allow you to look at the magazine kitchen of the 1960s. The whole book consists of official memos that Diana wrote to subordinates (from stylists to editors), and diplomatic letters to the chief editors of other Vogue and fashion designers. It’s as if someone has printed an editorial chat in the office today. That is, we have a chronicle of political maneuvers: Diana teaches how to talk to a photographer so that he removes the cover, how you need it, not how you want him, and what to write to the designer so that he would change the cut of the dress. He also discusses how to make up interview questions and what the article in the “Beauty” section should actually tell.
"Helmut Newton. Pages from the Glossies"
This book was presented to me by my friend Nastya Lykova, when she learned that I was dreaming of building a library on the history of magazines. Helmut Newton is now perceived by many as an art photographer, but, as he himself writes in the preface to this book, he always wanted to publish in magazines - that was his main goal. The weighty volume covers almost forty years of his work with magazines; The most interesting is the little-known pictures and comments of the author. For example, when Newton received his first ever shooting order (for Paris-based Vogue) and called in to pose for the stranger he saw on the street. Not just curious reading, but also useful: you can find out how photographers built relationships with magazines, how they set tasks for stylists, how they fought for the shots they needed. As a girl photographer, this is especially interesting to me.
Katie Birkenstein, Gerald Graff
"How to write convincingly. The art of argumentation in scientific and popular science works"
One of the pressing problems of gloss is the lack of an editorial school and, as a result, the inability of young journalists to write large texts: the position of the author is not clearly formulated, its justifications are given somehow, everything looks unconvincing. So when I published a book called How to Write Convincingly, I immediately downloaded it — I thought it would help me better explain to my colleagues what they are doing wrong. It turned out I needed her myself. It is based on the great idea that everyone should be able to present their point of view in a smooth and accessible manner in order to participate in the discussions that arise in society. And it doesn't matter that some kind of discussion has been going on for a hundred years, and you are only twenty! Do not feel like a yellow-faced chick, who missed the previous one hundred episodes of the series “liberalism vs totalitarianism” and therefore must now be silent in a rag. Not! Imagine you are entering a room where people have been arguing for five hours now. Listen for ten minutes, what the participants say, and join. Build your speech according to the scheme "you say - I say." That is, repel one thought of your opponent and formulate your own. This will help you avoid a situation where people understand what you are saying, but do not understand why you are saying it. There are many such schemes in the book - this is an excellent textbook for those who want to be understood both in the article, on the podium, and in the dispute on Facebook.
"How new media changed journalism. 2012-2016"
A team of authors led by Serge Paranko, editorial director of the Mail.Ru Group, provides the key to the profession of the site editor. How to filter information? How to interpret information? How to check the facts? How to submit material for different platforms? And the most difficult: how to evaluate the media consumption of the created product? Plus a review of the most important online trends. This is a great tutorial for print media journalists: the weekend is at this book - and you have a new profession in your hands.
Nadia Papudoglo
"# tyzhemat. Motherhood by the rules and without"
I am now preparing for the birth of my daughter, so I reread Nadia Papudoglo’s book about the first months of life with my child, which was published in winter. Nadya for me - the ideal mother. If she had opened maternity courses, I would immediately sign up. First of all, she is very clever: she defended her thesis at the history department, was the chief editor of the website interfax.ru, and then became a mother and began studying children with the same seriousness. But it's not even that I trust her opinion about colic or choosing a car seat. Most of all I admire, as Nadia explains to her son Kostya, what is war, what is civil liability, and other complicated things. I hope that in two years she will write the continuation of this book, where the emphasis will be precisely on psychology, because it seems to me that the most difficult thing is to explain to the new person something about this world.
Truman Capote
"Other voices, other rooms"
Everyone, I think, has an author-tuning fork, according to which he checks himself - he does not write off his style or try to copy the style, but he checks whether everything is like that with the ear and other senses. For me, this is Capote. He was both a journalist and a writer, as well as a psychologist and humanist. His stories are clear as tears and never bother.