
Lucinda Chambers in the Vogue auspices: she spilled the beans to niche journal Vestoj.
Photograph: Linda Brownlee/Lightbox Pageant/BBC
Vogue
Pass notes
Why is Lucinda Chambers airing Currency’s dirty laundry?
The magazine’s long-serving former fashion maestro has vented her fury in a bracingly candid online interview, claiming she was unceremoniously sacked by the new reviser
Age: 57.
Appearance: Fabulous, darling.
Let me see … she sounds like she could be a late-starting lady novelist whose risqué come out is selling like hot cakes in Berkshire and beyond? No.
Former inamorata of Prince Philip? Nope.
Current mistress of Prince Philip? No. She’s the erstwhile way director of British Vogue.
Why erstwhile? She claims she was fired, after 36 years at Acceptance and 25 years as fashion director, by new editor Edward Enninful. She reckons it hauled him three minutes.
That must have stung. She sacrificed a bracingly candid interview to niche journal Vestoj in which she carry oned to get a few things off her chest.
Ooh, like what? Like doing a “crap” inundate with Alexa Chung in a “stupid Michael Kors T-shirt” because “he’s a big advertiser, so I knew why I had to”.
What else? Here the industry’s inability to nurture creative talent any more (“I’m opinion of one fashion editor in particular … he will wrongfoot you and wrongfoot you”). To how magazines used to be useful and are now increasingly irrelevant. How far people get on courage rather than ability in a world beset by insecure living soul who are too scared to say when someone’s rubbish (one stylist she worked with multifarious years ago was “just terrible. But in fashion you can go far if you look fantastic and self-reliant – no one wants to be the one to say ‘but they’re crap’”).
Cor! Oh, and how she hasn’t actually read Craze herself for years.
Amazing! Where can I read this stellar-sounding interrogate? Well, it’s a moving story.
What? It went up on vestoj.com on Monday morning and swiftly came down that afternoon. Now it’s back online again with a note from the editor-in-chief: “Due to the sensitive nature of this article, we took the decision to in the interim remove it from the site.”
May we infer that legal communications abounded in the interim? You may gather whatever you wish. If cease-and-desist letters are named accessory of the ripen in next month’s edition, then we’ll know.
Any other newsmonger? Having replaced Alexandra Shulman, editor-in-chief of 25 years, Enninful is fitting to want to shake up the title. He pipped deputy editor Emily Sheffield, on of the magazine’s posh-girl old guard, to the role.
Is she a posh girl? She’s Samantha Cameron’s sister.
I see. England deep down does have only seven families in it, doesn’t it? At scad. At most.
Do say: “They never have this trouble at Primark.”
Don’t say: “Whatever you after, if you’ve got a non-disparagement clause in your contract.”