CONDE NAST COLLEGE: WILL YOU BE ENROLLING?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

On Friday, I spent a few brilliant hours at Vogue's Fashion Festival. One of the events on the agenda was Kate Hudson in conversation with Stella McCartney. As you can imagine, the auditorium was packed out. Towards the end, the floor was opened up for questions from the audience. One young girl, 16 years old, stood up and explained how much she admired Stella and the brand she has created and then proceeded to ask Stella for work experience with her. In front of 700 people. Stella said "Yes, of course. Give me your number NOW" How could she not?  Sometimes, that's the kind of thing you have to do to get noticed in a massively competitive industry like fashion.

Conde Nast has another project up its sleeve, just as innovative as the Vogue Fashion Festival. It's the Conde Nast College and will open its doors in January 2013 to its first cohort of students. There are currently two course options- the 10 week Vogue Fashion Certificate (£6,600) or the year-long Vogue Fashion Foundation Diploma (£19,560).  We all know, and I'm not going to repeat at length, that the ratio of eager Fashion industry wannabes to available jobs is way out of line. We also know that, whether we like it or not, the accepted way to get into fashion is to get internships and prove yourself through work which is often unpaid. That's the status quo. So I'm wondering whether the Conde Nast College will change that? Not really they told me when I rang earlier, "We will be arranging work placements and internships for the most promising students". So it's a great way in if you impress enough but you still have to do the work experience like everyone else.

One of the enticing images from Conde Nast college's prospectus 

Susie Forbes, former Editor at Easy Living and Deputy Editor at Vogue, will be Principal at the college. She told the BBC last year, "With access to some of the sharpest and most creative minds shaping the fashion, design and interiors industries today, we aim to educate students to the highest level. It makes perfect sense for Conde Nast to open its college doors in London, the fashion capital of the world."

The admissions team were frank about the reality of the Conde Nast College. They told me "The calibre of visiting lecturers will be like that at the Vogue Fashion Festival, but no you won't get loads of contacts". If that's the case, then I wonder what sets it apart from other fashion education providers?"The Conde Nast name" I was told. That's true, it's a powerful pull.  They added, "The courses will teach you what you need to know, unless you follow fashion religiously already".

It seems brilliant. If the Vogue Festival is anything to go, I'm imagining an editing master class with Alex Shulman one week, a mentoring workshop with Tom Ford the next... those sound like money-can't-buy-experiences. But Conde Nast IS offering them up for anyone willing to pay. Like A.C Grayling's New College of The Humanities, those with the funds can access the very best and most exciting people in the fields they're most interested in. Of course, A.C Grayling will give you an actual degree at the end of it whereas Conde Nast College relies on its name alone- there are no Undergraduate degrees or Masters being handed out here, just certificates and diplomas. What we want to know is would you pay?

Will dreams come true courtesy of Conde Nast College? 

I asked my Twitter followers if they'd pay and there was a mixed response. I think the draw is huge. For those aspiring to careers within Conde Nast's magazine repertoire, it could seem like the perfect way in. If you've got the funds, why wouldn't you? Libby said "I'm sure the contacts you'd make would be incredible, but it's such a daunting amount of money for most". This makes me think back to the girl at the Vogue Festival. If Stella does honour her promise to give her work experience then arguably she has only had to pay the price of entry ticket (£75 at most, not £19,560) for a golden key to the career she wants.

CAN VOGUE TURN THE TIDE ON THE CULTURE OF "THINNESS"?

Posted by Bethan Holt, Fashion Junior at Large

We, world, are messed up; on the one hand, one in four adults in the UK is obese with that figure projected to double in the next 20 years. On the other, there is a widespread obsession with 'thinness', which is almost always blamed on the fashion industry. But, do nine year-olds read Vogue? No, they watch TV, and use the Internet.

On the Daily Mail website today, a quick count down the infamous sidebar-of-shame shows 24 different stories which refer in some way to a female celebrity's body, whether she is 'showing off her tiny tummy' or 'heading to the gym after her fast food slip up'. Vogue has a circulation of around 200,000 while the Daily Mail has 52 million unique visitors each month. Nobody has boycotted the Daily Mail or Heat magazine yet, so all of us who check the site or the read the magazine, even as a guilty pleasure, are feeding the monster.

A Kardashian hits the gym today to work off the burger she ate yesterday. 

The Daily Mail today uses this picture as confirmation of Drew Barrymore's pregnancy. WHAT?

Vogue, Elle or Grazia would never be able to write a story along the "look at her cellulite", "ooh she is thin" lines;  they would be villified. So how does the Daily Mail get away with it?  The readership is complicit.  However, judging by a triumvirate of comments coming from Camp Vogue this week the power players of fashion are sick of the culture of thinness in the media and are fighting back, and to my mind winning.

On Monday, Vogue's new Fashion Editor Fran Burns told Business of Fashion," I never want to make women look ugly or depressing or too thin or miserable. None of those things."  Also on Monday, Vogue Italia editor Franca Sozzani told Harvard University "We will do our best, but it will be impossible to fight this widespread idea of thinness all by ourselves". In an interview which she gave to The Guardian this weekend, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman explained the thinness problem (which she has tried to address in the past by writing to the world's biggest designers) in this way-

'I find it very frustrating and I don't know quite where it comes from, but I think if I had to absolutely nail it, [it's] probably the designers, because they're the ones who are cutting the clothes so small. And if the girl can't fit into the clothes, then they won't get booked. So then you've got the model agent saying: 'You've got to lose weight.' And then, when it comes down the wire, the photographers – and to some extent the fashion editors – want to use the girls that they think are the cool girls, and the cool girls are the ones who have got to be working with the designers, so it kind of feeds itself'

I'd like to give high fashion magazines a break when it comes to this problem- they do seem to have a done a lot to address issues in the industry over the past few years. But it's hard, when on one side they are duty bound to use healthy but slim models for their pages, yet when it comes to actual celebrities their standards slip. They need girls like of of the moment, 'cool girls' like Alexa Chung on their pages, but if she were just a model they probably would not hire her because she is too thin. It is a catch 22.

Barely a week goes by when images of her wearing exactly the kind of fashion Vogue needs to feature are beamed around the world. Alexa in a Chris Kane dress or J.W Anderson paisley PJs are gold dust for British fashion. Alexa has become scarily thin of late yet she is still in Vogue and nobody dares mention it. There's a lot of skirting round the issue, like interviews which mention her playing with her food and sort of forgetting to eat it.

I think it IS terrifying that Alexa is the girl every fashion obsessed teen and twenty-something wants to be, but also that someone isn't making sure she's being looked after. We have to separate the fashion from the girl.

I hope people remember Alexa is not just a clothes horse (image from www.glamourmagazine.co.uk)

If you have an eating disorder, then you ARE ugly, depressed and miserable. And I know, because I had anorexia for four years when I was a young teenager. I'm no psychiatrist but I would hazard a guess that my problem, and that of hundreds of thousands of others, is not really rooted in fashion magazines but in our relationships, genetics and personalities. In fact, I'd be quite offended if someone had tried to explain away my problem with a prescription of fashion cold turkey. As Hadley Freeman said in her brilliant column on this subject last year, 'eating disorders have existed for hundreds of years, predating, amazingly, Kate Moss'.

Maybe designers need to use a bit more fabric so that they can make their sample sizes more realistic. But that's not going to un-fuck-up a world where a normal sized person thinks they're fat or where it's fine to say 'oh my god, you're looking so skinny' but unheard of to tell an obese person that they're doing themselves no favours. I am really happy that Vogue is taking up this issue, but I hope that everyone else doesn't think it's just Vogue's battle to fight. It's really patronising to those suffering with eating disorders to tell them that their life threatening, debilitating illness has been brought on by them looking at some pictures of thin people in nice clothes.