In the interview you will read:
How he remembers the case with Vogue’s support for Danuša Nerudová. How much did the most expensive fashion editorial in the history of global Vogue cost? When did Andrea Běhounková feel like she was in the movie The Devil Wears Prada? What influencers have deprived the fashion industry of. Why the editor-in-chief of Vogue can’t take a selfie. Who really brings coffee to Anna Wintour.
On August 17, 2018, Vogue Czechoslovakia appeared on the stands for the first time with Karolina Kurková as Olga Havel on the cover. Right from the first issue, it was clear that Czech and Slovak Vogue would not be what some excited fans might have expected.
The front page was melancholic, Kurková’s back was on it, in a gray wig, so she was not completely recognizable, and a second-hand coat was sliding down her bare back. Fashionistas thought it was daring, majority female readers and readers were surprised.
“That was our intention. We wanted original, local content. What is common for other magazines – to take over and share content – used to be forbidden at Vogue,” says Běhounková.
At the time, did you expect the public response that the cover with Karolina Kurková in the role of Olga Havelová aroused?
Of course! If there was no response, I would have to remove myself from the position of editor-in-chief. Other magazines, not Vogue, can afford cute banal covers.
We prepared the first edition for about three months. At that time, de facto every work and personal meeting I had was accompanied by one single question: Who will be on the cover of the first issue? And today, five years later, I am convinced that we could not have chosen better.
Olga Havlová was our track and field’s first First Lady. She represented all the values that Vogue CS stood for, and the first cover simply couldn’t have belonged to anyone else.
I admit that the original intention was a little different, but in the end we decided on Olga or Karolina, and we did well. It’s one of my favorite covers and I’ll never stop being proud of it.
Czechoslovak Vogue began to be published at a time when other famous fashion magazines such as Elle and Harper’s Bazaar had been active here for twenty-five years, while others had time to disappear… Wasn’t it too late when the golden era of magazines ended?
It wasn’t, because a magazine like Vogue was simply not here and was missing. I never thought that Vogue in 2018 could be the goldmine it was in the nineties. We knew that what Martin Shenar experienced with Antonin Herbeck (main publishers and founders of premium lifestyle magazines in the Czech Republic, editor’s note) the days when magazines made big bucks and clients faxed ads were gone forever.
But we believed that Vogue could make a living and, above all, that it could bring something new, different, unique. Something that no other magazine can afford. Vogue has been the best fashion magazine in the world for decades. It is not just a catalog of the latest collections, Vogue defines and interprets fashion, which takes courage. And we wanted to build this here as well. Not to translate the American Vogue, but to build our unique, Czechoslovak one.
Most people flip through a magazine and have no idea how much money and time each photo cost. Does it make sense in this day and age of Instagram?
It has, but not for everyone. A lot has changed in just the five years I’ve been running Vogue. And I’m not talking about the zero years. When I ran Zna a život, we sold over 100,000 copies twice a week. We had so many ads that we couldn’t fit in the number and had to reject them. Of course, it will never be in the magazines again.
Could you give me an idea of how much a photoshoot for Vogue like this would cost?
It’s a big expense and might have been one of the main reasons why Vogue didn’t come out here for a long time. Today it’s different, but I remember that when Annie Leibovitz shot a fashion story for American Vogue in Versailles with Kirsten Dunst, there was talk of a budget in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The most expensive fashion editorial in history is
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2023-08-17 04:30:47
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