Tonight, in celebration of our 130th anniversary, Vogue will host a fashion show and street fair the likes of which have never been seen. It’s not the first time that the brand has organized such an event, however. In November 1914, 108 years ago during the First World War, a Fashion Fête was orchestrated to raise money for the Committee of Mercy, supporting women and children in areas of conflict.
Since its founding, Vogue has never been just about the rise and fall of hemlines, but focused on cultural and societal shifts as well. For many years, the Vogue covers featured colorful “storytelling” pictures by leading illustrators that romanced “the woman of leisure” as she followed the sun, hit the slopes, and lived for the night. Once fashion photography was deemed an art circa the mid-1930s, the magazine began greeting its reader with stylized snaps of real-life beauties and professional models. Eventually it began showcasing actors (Cate Blanchett, Angelina Jolie, Lupita Nyong'o) and entertainers (Cher, Beyoncé, Rihanna). We expect to see more than a few boldfacers tonight.
At 130 years young, we’ve taken a nostalgic look back at the history of the brand and pulled out some fun facts. Here, Vogue by the numbers.
2897 . . . and counting
Number of issues of Vogue published (through October 2022).
Founded in 1892 as “a dignified authentic journal of society, fashion, and the ceremonial side of life,” Vogue was a weekly for the first 17 years of its existence. One of the first changes Condé Nast made after acquiring the magazine in 1909 was to make it a biweekly publication. For 25 years (from 1948–1972), Vogue was published 20 times a year, becoming a monthly in 1973.
916
Number of pages in the magazine’s largest issue, to date.
For the September 2012 issue, with a Marc Jacobs–clad Lady Gaga on the cover, the magazine was more than an inch thick, and weighed between 4.2033 and 4.6896 pounds (depending on the edition).
90
Number of dogs that have appeared on Vogue’s cover.
Vida, Gisele Bündchen’s late Yorkie, was the most recent canine to have the distinction (in December 2001). The magazine’s first editor, Josephine Redding, who served from 1892 until 1900 and is credited with naming the publication, was known to prefer animals to fashion. “During her regime,” Edna Woolman Chase recounted in her memoirs, “the pages of Vogue barked, meowed, cheeped, and roared with accounts of animal life.” On several occasions, the cover went to the dogs, literally.
82
Years since the first Hollywood star appeared on the cover.
Vogue’s appreciation of the dramatic arts is as long as its history, however. In 1901 (when movies were still silent) the cleft-chinned Shakespearean stage actress Julia Marlowe was featured. Thirty-nine years later, in 1940, Gene Tierney, who had just made the transition from the stage to film was the first Hollywood star to be photographed for the cover. Models dominated as covergirls right up until 2002, the first year that more actors than mannequins were tapped for the honor.
26
Times Lauren Hutton has appeared on the cover of Vogue.
Hutton’s (enduring) all-American appeal is such that three of Vogue’s editors—Diana Vreeland, Grace Mirabella, and Anna Wintour—chose this multifaceted beauty to be the face of magazine. “Lauren is, in fact, Tom Sawyer, 1973,” wrote Kate Lloyd in that same year. “She is adventurous, imaginative, jaunty, ethical in an old-fashioned Golden Rule fashion, direct, and brave. She is impetuous, too.”
10 cents
Cost of the first issue of Vogue.
The inaugural issue of the magazine, “written by the smart set for the smart set,”[vii] as one newspaper wrote, featured a drawing of a debutante by A. B. Wenzel. This same artist would later illustrate Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, a Gilded Age tragedy about the New York elite, who formed the core of Vogue’s earliest audience.
7
Number of editors the American edition of the magazine has had.
Edna Woolman Chase, who started out addressing envelopes, held her tenure the longest: 37 years. At one time, Chase oversaw the British, French, and German editions of the publication, in addition to American Vogue. This year, Anna Wintour, who became Editor in Chief in 1988 and was named Condé Nast Creative Director in 2013, was made a dame.
7
Count of just some former Vogue employees who found fame beyond its masthead.
Some of the talents, who found a home at Vogue, went on to become household names. They include the wit Dorothy Parker, who contributed the famous 1916 caption, “brevity is the soul of lingerie,” to the magazine; Clare Boothe Luce, congresswoman and ambassadress, who once said that she “kind of oozed on” Vogue; author Joan Didion; actress Ali MacGraw; interior decorator Chessy Rayner; and designers Mary McFadden and Vera Wang.
10
Number of professional athletes who have appeared on the cover.
“Fashion’s love affair with sports” (as noted in a 2015) cover line is ongoing. The first Olympian to be featured was that star of track and field Marion Jones, in 2001. Tennis champ Serena Williams, winner of 23 grandslams, is the only athlete who has three cover credits.
3
Number of Vogue covers signed by Salvador Dalí.
It wasn’t until July 1932 that the first color photograph, by Edward Steichen, appeared on a cover of Vogue (1959 was the first year all of the magazine’s covers were photographic). Before then, illustrations were used in full, or part. While most of these charming “storytelling pictures” were created by leading fashion illustrators, subscribers were also treated to designs by fine artists including Marie Laurencin (1923, 1931) and Giorgio de Chirico (1935). Two years after collaborating with Elsa Schiaparelli on the “lobster dress” (worn by Wallis Simpson in Vogue), the mustachioed surrealist Dalí contributed the first of his three covers.
3
Number of celebrity couples to make cover appearances.
Love, believe it or not, existed before the #WorldsMostTalkedAboutCouple. Then newlyweds (now exes) Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere were the first celebrities to share a Vogue cover, in 1992. Newly weds Justin and Hailey Bieber followed suit in 2019.
2
Number of Vogue editors who were also cover girls.
Both Babe Paley (then Barbara Cushing Mortimer) and Muriel Maxwell appeared on the magazine’s masthead and covers. Paley, an arbiter of style, with a cover count of two, would become one of Truman Capote’s “swans,” per his celebrated nonfiction, and later, a thinly veiled character in the vengeful Answered Prayers. Maxwell, one of Horst P. Horst’s favorite models, and a Barnard graduate, with nine covers to her name, was not only featured in Vogue’s famous 1947 “12 Beauties” photograph (on the set of which Irving Penn first met his future wife, Lisa Fonssagrives), but she styled, and starred in, the shoot.
3
Number of pregnant women to appear on the cover.
In 2003, Brooke Shields, wet and pregnant, posed for Annie Leibovitz. It was her 14th cover shoot for the magazine. Rihanna is the latest to so, in a red lace bodysuit befitting a supermom-to-be.
2
Number of princesses to cover Vogue.
Royal fascination is part of Vogue’s DNA. The magazine was founded, after all, during the Gilded Age when “dollar princesses”—wealthy American women who married titled foreigners—were big news. Countess Divonne, née Florence Audenried, made a cover appearance in 1893, but the most famous of these brides was Consuelo Vanderbilt. Her 1895 wedding to the Duke of Marlborough has been described as “the great romantic event . . . of the entire fin de siècle era"—no matter that the bride cried herself down the aisle, the marriage having been arranged by her mother. The magazine devoted a cover to Vanderbilt’s bridesmaids’ dresses, and many interior pages to the event. Much later, in 1971, the Princess of Monaco, born Grace Kelly in Philadelphia, was featured, as was the most photographed woman in the world, Princess Diana, in 1993.
1
Number of families depicted in three generations on the cover of Vogue.
Annie Leibovitz photographed “The Presley Women”: Priscilla and Lisa Marie, and the latter’s daughter, Riley Keough—who was nominated for a 2017 Golden Globes award—for the August 2004 cover.
15
Number of group model covers.
Cast with Supers or Instagirls (who were introduced on the September 2014 cover), Vogue loves a more the merrier model cover. The precedent for which was set by an editorial, “12 Beauties: The most photographed models in America,” photographed by Irving Penn for the May 1, 1947 issue. It’s on this shoot that Penn met Lisa Fonssagrives, who he married.