What I wore to my interview at Vogue

… where I was hate-crimed

The Devil Wears Prada is back for a sequel. The premiere was in London this week. I wernt to see Wayne McGregor’s really incredible ‘Alchemies’ show at the Royal Opera House instead.

There has been A LOT of content about the glory days of magazines, and what it was like working in them in the pre-dot-com era. Town cars! $10-a-word! Bottomless budgets! Heels at work and size-zero! Hmm…

Obviously, there have been plenty of books about this—because it makes for juicy, glamorous storytelling, and enough time has passed that people are feeling nostalgic. Graydon Carter’s When the Going Was Good is literally called that for a reason. Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries reads like a rollercoaster through the 80s, where interest-free mortgages are quietly taken care of and stylists forget to cash their cheques. André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches ultimately feels like a tragic paean to a lost world of high-octane glamour and ego. And Michael Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America lays it all bare, right down to the pop-cultural entrance exams required to pass muster at Vogue.

I heard a former American Vogue editor, Filipa Fino, is coming out with a tell-all this summer that is set to be “even more explosive than The Devil Wears Prada”, which was a novel originally meant to satirise the industry and hold a mirror up to its demons. This sequel to the movie, from what I can tell, feels far more ingratiated into the system itself: Meryl Streep on the cover of Vogue with Anna Wintour. Times have changed. Fashion is entertainment now.

I had to stop reading a lot of these books because I worked in magazines When The Going Got Bad. Post-credit crunch, budgets dried up. Advertisers became more demanding. Teams shrank through layoffs. And the way the world reads – watches? – information changed completely. Hi, Substack!!

One of my first jobs out of Central Saint Martins was at the Evening Standard, then based in Northcliffe House on High Street Ken, a glass-fronted adrenaline machine that also housed The Independent and the Daily Mail. Our days started at 7AM. Copy was written on the fly, passed through a dozen copy editors, and by noon the paper had already gone to print and was being handed out to commuters across the city.

It was some of the best training I ever had, especially since I never formally studied writing or journalism. Most days I left with a migraine – the newsroom was loud, frantic, shouty – and every morning, it felt like you might not make it. There is nothing like several looming daily deadlines to sharpen your teeth.

I sat next to the paper’s lead political correspondent, an older Irish woman who, every morning at 7AM, poured herself a generous glass of gin. She insisted it helped the creative juices flow. We got along very well.

Until I read her Spectator column. She was, it turned out, an alt-right Nazi in a Marks & Spencer tea dress.

We also shared our desk – strewn with books, landlines, scribbled notes, and various bottles of alcohol – with the books editors of The Independent. I will never forget when that paper shuttered its print operations and laid off most of its editorial staff. The deputy books editor was crying as she packed up her pot plants, at one point turning to me (the most junior person on the desk) to ask if I knew of any jobs for… a deputy books editor in London.

The ship had already hit the iceberg by that point.

Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Where was I? Oh yeah. Vogue!

It was a different time. Long before Edward Enninful walked through those revolving doors on Hanover Square, there were mastheads filled with people named Bluebell and Muffie. (Muffie, incidentally, became a dear friend years later when I worked on the relaunch of Style.com.) Everyone either had grand, sprawling surnames that sounded vaguely Hogwartsian, or pithy little names straight out of an Enid Blyton novel.

A friend who worked there told me it was considered uncouth to ask for money. If you went to HR to request a raise, you might be asked whether you had an aunt or uncle you could borrow from. Internships were unpaid. Assistant salaries hovered around £16,000. Hence the mantra of those who eventually left: Daddy can’t afford to send me to Vogue anymore.

Still, I grew up reading that magazine. I have its images pinned to my mental Rolodex: fizzy, intelligent copy; great and often less commercial photography than other editions of Vogue (and often starring Kate Moss) and a sense that it held the keys to the London media world I wanted to enter.

So when I was invited to interview there, it felt like a make-or-break moment. I thought I might be the next André Leon Talley.

I had just returned from a year in New York, where I’d worked in the Condé Nast archive and spent time with Diana Vreeland’s papers at the New York Public Library. I had graduated from Central Saint Martins, where my final project examined the rise of “on location” photography—something Vogue had helped pioneer, especially during the Vreeland years. I felt fluent in the language of the magazine.

Truthfully, I didn’t remember what I wore. Probably black Chelsea boots, black skinny jeans, and, at some point, a 3.1 Phillip Lim double-faced navy bomber I’d picked up at a sample sale and wore to everything important. I was probably also wearing some kind of neoprene sweatshirt, because for some reason it was during the peak of Opening Ceremony, when every designer (and therefore every high street brand) became obsessed with making sweatshirts in scuba-like materials. Which, in hindsight, was really just the influence of designers like Nicolas Ghesquière and Riccardo Tisci.

See? I really did know my fashion.

I was nervous, but prepared. I had bylines, internships, and – most importantly – a recommendation from one of the most respected fashion writers in the world, who believed Vogue was where I should begin. I thought I’d neutralised my East London accent. My shoes were polished—my father had taught me that. I was sure I could pass for Vogue.

And so there I was sat in front of one of the grande dames of the ancien régime at Vogue House. She had, I think, been there since the 1960s. Within thirty seconds of the interview, this lady asked me where i was from and where i gew up and swifctly informed me my mother was A CHILD BRIDE.

It was intense. But also familiar. People often looked at you as if you were some kind of novelty—as though you’d escaped the zoo and tidied yourself up nicely. More than anything, I felt embarrassed.

The interview continued. I was determined to prove I belonged.

At one point, when I described my thesis, she exclaimed in a very Vreelandian manner: “AFRICA will always be the girl on the jeep in a Saint Laurent safari suit!”

Who was it that said the past is a different country?

We spoke for a long time. It wasn’t like The Devil Wears Prada, where the interview is over in minutes because Anne Hathaway is “plus-size”. Lol.

I thought that had to be a good sign. Then, at the very end, she said, completely deadpan:

“Well, you’re probably not right for British Vogue, but maybe we can find you something with our friends at … Vogue India.”

The fact is, for a long time—and arguably still today—legacy titles have been staffed by a certain kind of person. Often brilliant. Often very talented. But a certain kind of person. The Devil Wears Prada was light entertainment compared to the reality of fashion just over a decade ago. Can you imaging if Anne Hathaway had been … Black? It would have been less Nora Ephron, more Jordan Peele.

I find it interesting that, perhaps because of the new film, there’s such an appetite for this archaic era. I keep seeing “What I Wore to My Vogue Interview” content. I’m sure it was fabulous for those who made the cut. But from where I’m standing, it feels like elitism repackaged as nostalgia.

Assistants were overworked, underpaid, and often subject to abuse. The surest way up was to arrive with connections—and know how to use them. Connections matter, of course. But they take time to build. There was definitely a different attitude to internal promotions – the idea was that if you came in as an assistant, you’d always be seen as one, so you would have to leave and come back in a more senior role.

Anyway, it all worked out.

I did start writing for the brilliant Bandana Tewari at Vogue India, which led to writing for multiple international editions.

In fact, things have come full circle: I was recently appointed a Contributing Editor at British Vogue.

The stories I’ve been working on feel fresh, thoughtful – and, crucially, they like my voice. This month, I wrote a beauty essay about why maximalist makeup is considered “revolutionary” on the runway but “too much” on certain faces—a polite way of saying that “clean girl beauty” is just a rebrand for calling everything else dirty. Fun fact: Black and brown women spend ten times more on cosmetics than any other demographic! The story I filed this week, I can’t quite believe when I think about my origin story at the mag.

And yes, like most editors of my generation, I’d love the town cars, the budgets, the $10-a-word fantasy. I also know that world isn’t coming back.

There’s far more value in what I once saw as a failure, redirecting me somewhere better. I don’t know if I would have thrived in that environment or found my voice at all.

That interview happened in a different time, with a different kind of editor, in a system that wasn’t built for someone like me.

And in hindsight, I didn’t get the job, but I did get the story.