Avowedly leftwing, an unabashed highbrow and, on her own admission, with no training in - and little feeling for - fashion, Audrey Withers, who died on October 26th aged 96, was an unlikely choice as editor of Vogue when she was appointed in 1940. Yet, over the next 20 years, through war and peace, she transformed the size and content of the magazine, introducing numerous new writers, photographers and fashion artists, and opening up the pages to a far wider range of cultural topics than had previously been considered Vogue's meat.
Her intent was evident from her first editorial: "Women's first duty is to practise the arts of peace so that, in happier times, they will not have fallen into disuse." Readers quickly caught the idea: keeping up appearances was a battle to be won on the home front. And, indeed, wartime was an ideal chance to change the magazine's tone of voice.
Kingsley Amis wrote on puritanism, modern painting was analysed, the operas of Gian Carlo Menotti celebrated. Photographs and bulletins from the front, contributed by Vogue's war correspondent, the beauteous Lee Miller, were given a radical amount of space. Cecil Beaton's celebrated shot of a model dressed to arrogant perfection, and posed against the bombed ruins of the Temple, in London, became a patriotic icon and spoke for the caption, "Fashion is indestructible". Once the post-war party got going, Audrey Withers was able to make full use of a roll call of ace photographers in Vogue - Irving Penn, Norman Parkinson, Henry Clarke, Clifford Coffin and the young Lord Snowdon (who took the photograph on right) among them.
Audrey Withers is credited by Elizabeth David, then Vogue's food editor, as the inspiratrix of the treatment of a food column that was more a commentary than straight cookery.
Audrey Withers's inaugural Christmas issue in 1940 had run to a meagre 84 pages. When she retired in 1960, the December issue numbered 299 pages. The cover price was two shillings and six pence And, due in part to her professionalism, the Vogue she left was able to enjoy a greater degree of autonomy in its relationship with the proprietors in New York.
Audrey Withers was born in Hale, Yorkshire. As a youngster, she was sketched by Paul Nash; among those who corresponded with the family were AE Housman, Walter de la Mare, Sir William Rothenstein and Max Beerbohm.
Following boarding school she went to Somerville College, Oxford in 1924. After graduation, she initially set her cap at working in book publishing. She subsequently answered an advertisement for a sub-editor at Vogue. The post was worth £3 a week. She joined an editorial department consisting of the managing editor and a secretary. The magazine was published fortnightly at a cover price of 1 shilling.
"After about three years, for some extraordinary reason, they asked me out to lunch," she later recalled. Soon she was assistant editor, and, in 1940, the American editor, Betty Penrose, returned home, leaving the editor's chair vacant. Audrey Withers was appointed to the post and, shortly afterwards, joined the board of CondΘ Nast. On occasions in her early days, she chaffed against the steely consistency of the magazine's underlying policy. Her ambitious plans to do a big feature on Aneurin Bevan's launch of the National Health Service, for example, did not get very far. But she could count on the loyalty of an exceptionally strong team of feature writers.
On the fashion side, Audrey Withers admitted she relied on the judgment of others. She did the collections, once they started up again after the war, but the direction of the editorial owed its thrust to fashion hounds such as Pat Cunningham, the fashion editor.
She backed the London couturiers to the hilt - Norman Hartnell, Hardy Amies, Victor Steibel, Digby Morton and Charles Creed among them - both in the pages and in her personal wardrobe. A shot by Parkinson, published in Vogue, portrays her in character, attired in Hardy Amies, with gloved hands clasping a small, but business-like, briefcase. Her bonnet, a little confection in straw, is by Vernier, the leading milliner of the day. "Hats were Audrey's one fashion statement," an underwhelmed fashion editor once remarked.
The coverage was safely authoritarian and didactic. Readers wanted, and were offered, a precise blueprint of what was good taste. "Skirts should not go above 18" from the ground . . . " was the given word in 1941.
Audrey Withers was a fiendishly hard worker, who frequently stayed late at the office correcting proofs in a personal blitz against misprints and errors. Her pleasure lay in editing and shaping copy. She used to say that she read every word in all her issues three times - in manuscript, in proof and in print. She raised a blizzard of paperwork from her desk, holding that "a written note is far less liable to misinterpretation than the spoken word." Committed as she was to the task in hand, she never really fell under Vogue's spell, and found much amusement in some of the manifestations of such total belief. A cherished account concerned a Vogue expedition with Lady Mendl, the well-known American interior decorator, who, at first sight of the Parthenon, exclaimed, "Beige! My colour".
Audrey Withers bowed out as the 1960s came in, bouncing with new approaches that she found unsettling. It was no secret that in her last lap of office, handicapped as she had been with an acute spell of ill health, the magazine had gone quiet.
Remaining on the board of CondΘ Nast for a period, she became more fully engaged in public life. She helped to found a branch of the Women's Press Club in the City, which stayed open for members who worked at night. She was awarded an OBE in 1953.
"How seldom one is allowed to have everything," she once observed of the failure of her first marriage. But fate had a bonus in store. She found great happiness with her second husband, Victor Kennett, a Russian ΘmigrΘ. They farmed in Essex, and, in 1974, collaborated on their classic travel book, Palaces Of Leningrad.
In 1994, Audrey Withers published her memoirs, a short account entitled LifeSpan, in which Vogue occupies barely half the book.
Elizabeth Audrey Withers: born 1905; died, October 2001