White gay privilege exists in fashion – at Anna Wintour’s Vogue I experienced it first-hand

The anti-racism protests that have erupted around the world following the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white policeman have shaken corporate America to the core, forcing it to reconcile with issues such as a lack of diversity, pay gaps and outright racism.

Fashion and beauty brands haven’t fared well on that front. While they were quick to post statements of solidarity on social media, those truisms rang hollow, and it didn’t take long for former employees to reveal some uncomfortable truths about their inner workings.

From beauty giants Estée Lauder and L’Oreal to start-ups such as Reformation, a long list of companies were called out, resulting in the departure of top executives and founders.

In a memo sent to her team, Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue and artistic director of the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast, recognised the many mistakes that the magazine and the company have made.

While a top Condé Nast editor and an executive were shown the door, Wintour has survived yet another controversy, in spite of rumours that top management at the legacy publisher would finally put an end to her almost four-decade reign.

The accusations against Vogue and the wider fashion publishing industry struck a chord with this writer. They made me reflect on the time I spent working as an intern at American Vogue in 2004-2005.

Back then Vogue, and Condé Nast, were completely different beasts. Those were the pre-social-media glory days of September issues chock-full with ads, of unlimited editorial budgets and fat corporate accounts.

It was also a time when a lack of diversity was par for the course at an institution like Vogue. No people of colour were on the team during that time, if you exclude the African-American and Latin-American receptionists who acted as gatekeepers to the hallowed grounds of the twelfth floor of 4 Times Square, where Condé Nast was headquartered back then; and then editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley, who has recently released a memoir in which he openly criticises Wintour and her regime at Vogue.

The rank and file of the Vogue team consisted mainly of white, blonde and pretty women from well-off families, who often didn’t need to work and could afford to live on meagre publishing salaries in Manhattan thanks to their personal wealth.

The homogeneity of the staff extended to the army of interns working in the legendary Vogue closet, most of them from privileged backgrounds and, barring an Asian male, all white people who could afford to intern for free while studying at fashion schools like Parsons or elite colleges such as New York University and Columbia University.

Within this homogeneous world, some people benefited from their status and, in the case of us interns, it certainly helped to be a gay man.

While I like to believe that my hard work, dedication and eagerness to please played a role in the way I was treated, I couldn’t help but notice that my female colleagues had a much harder time and were under more pressure to look and behave a certain way – and this in an environment where female camaraderie should have been the norm.

When you’re an intern at a place like Vogue, you’re basically a nonentity, and have to put up with all sorts of demands, long hours and a great deal of routine and administrative work. Simple things like being addressed by your first name can truly make a difference to a 20-year-old who wants to work their way up in fashion. I still recall how young editors always remembered my name, yet addressed female interns with a curt ‘Hey!’

Wintour herself, who has championed young American designers throughout her career, has been accused by publications, such as The New York Times in a 2005 article, of favouring young, good-looking gay male designers such as Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, founders of Proenza Schouler, or Zac Posen, often at the expense of equally talented female creators.

It took the rise of the #MeToo movement for Wintour and her team to use Vogue to truly support the work of emerging female designers and to finally cut ties with disgraced photographers such as Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, both long-time friends of Wintour and both now shunned by the fashion community after allegations of abuse surfaced in 2018.

While the discrimination I witnessed at Vogue in that era shouldn’t take away from the much more pressing diversity issues facing fashion publishing today, it shows the many different shapes and forms white privilege can take.

I never realised it while I was at Vogue, but in hindsight I can see that there is such a thing as white gay privilege, and nowhere is this more prominent than in the fashion world.

That a publication like Vogue is elitist and operates like an exclusive club is nothing new. It mirrors the fashion industry at large, where a kind of unspoken hierarchy still dominates.

Not long after I ended my internship at Vogue, two films – one fictional, the other a documentary – turned Wintour into a true global celebrity, and the person who came to represent fashion to the world.

The Devil Wears Prada, based on a book written by one of her former assistants, and The September Issue, a documentary about the creation of Vogue’s biggest issue of the year, were quite accurate in their portrayal of an all-white clique of young women, bossed by a powerful woman with the support of a few male gay sidekicks.

It wasn’t long after my experience at Vogue that I decided to leave the insular world of New York fashion and move to Asia, where I came across institutionalised racism at international editions of Vogue and other magazines. In Asia and the Middle East, where I also spent some time working in fashion publishing, top editors had no qualms about expressing blatant discrimination regarding the content they would put out.

That kind of behaviour would have not been condoned in the more politically correct environment of an American publication such as Vogue, where the racism was tacit and implicit rather than overt, although just as painful and equally unjustifiable.

While Vogue and what it represents mean less and less to young kids raised on Instagram and TikTok, its power as a brand is still invaluable, and so is that of Wintour, who is a true survivor – the last celebrity editor who’s too big to fail, as she has shown over and over again.

Vogue, and the fashion publishing industry at large, have made strides in their attempts to be more welcoming since then – British Vogue editor Edward Enninful, the first man of African descent to lead the title, has been a champion of diversity – but change is hard to come by.

As recently as three years ago, while undergoing an orientation session before the launch of an international edition of Vogue, a top Condé Nast executive summed up succinctly what Vogue stands for. “Think of Vogue as your slightly arrogant friend who’s always ahead of the curve,” the executive said. “Vogue is not Elle or Harper’s Bazaar.”

It certainly isn’t. Last week Harper’s Bazaar announced the appointment of its first black editor-in-chief, Samira Nasr, while Nina Garcia, an American of Colombian descent, has been at the helm of Elle since 2017.

Wintour, born in London to an English father and American mother, has been the editor-in-chief of American Vogue since 1988.