WOMEN IN REVOLT

I remember when, as editor of Marie Claire back in the early 2000s, I would first of all have to secure a star for my cover, and then I would have to ring round all the top designers to see if they would dress her. If the star was British, or edgy, or a bit fat, the designers would turn their noses up and tell me to find someone else. I remember I had a black, female contestant from the first series of Big Brother lined up for the cover, and I naively asked Giorgio Armani to dress her. 'No way,' came the reply. 'Have you tried getting Natalie Portman?' I once tried to put the singer Sade on the cover: beautiful, black, in her 40s. I was told by my publishing director that Sade was far too ancient. This for the cover of the so- called 'thinking woman's magazine'. ( Remember Vogue's Age issue, a few months back? It featured the hardly-geriatric Uma Thurman on its cover.) So much for editorial autonomy. And as for the beauty pages, they seem not to have progressed since the Seventies. In Vogue, in a piece on how to obtain a perfect posterior, is the following gem: 'A flat butt isn't much sexier than a fat butt.'

Liz Jones
Former editor of Marie Claire
Daily Mail
July 20 2009