Why In Vogue, the Nineties makes me want to throw up

Plus, I have broken ground at the allotment, retro recipe of the week, and the latest extract from my racy revenge thriller…

I’ve just watched the first three episodes on Disney +, and I was underwhelmed, and incredibly angry. It was all so self congratulatory. There is the rise of the supermodels, the waif, grunge, Galliano, McQueen, Moss, Campbell. Numerous Botoxed talking heads stroking their own egos. The Vogue editors and stylists, models and designers want you to believe they made the decade, that they shaped our lives. But the whole thing is so devoid of humour or even reality. We weren’t all attending McQueen or Marc Jacobs shows, we were at home watching Friends. The stylist who put Kate Moss in a vest for Vogue, prompting cries from the Establishment that the shoot promoted drug use, is held up as some sort of artist. When in fact she fuelled an epidemic of self loathing.

Vogue Office, New York yells the headline. It’s not the Vatican, though these people worship at the altar of youth and money. Nicole Kidman, ‘When Anna put me on the cover it was like, what?’ You were married to Tom Cruise and are a movie star, get over it (Nicole sneaked chicken fillets down her bra for a shoot with my Nineties glossy, Marie Claire). The lauded Lauren pink gown worn by Gwyneth Paltrow for the Oscars? Way too big. Oh, and Paltrow, queen of woo woo? At her overpriced Goop day in London, she actually walked among us, her disciples, accompained by bodyguards. What did she think we were going to do, kill her with bad vibes?

These people are all ghastly. John Galliano, after I showed him a video of a fox crying while being skinned alive, then sent feathers and fur down the catwalk for his Versailles catwalk show for Dior. Lee McQueen wasn’t very nice to his staffies and, according to a biography, deliberately infected himself with athlete’s foot, as he found the scratching of the itch so delicious. Michael Kors, interviewed on screen here, told me he felt Whitney Houston had put on weight. Many of the models were heroin addicts; coke was routinely laid out in lines on shoots. Donna Karan, heavily featured, had her PR stand me by a wall for one of her shows as some sort of punishment. Tom Ford, who only flew first class, had me barred from his shows. Famous pop star I flew to Africa to cover a famine? ‘I only fly business class.’ The Spice Girls were huge, of course, and Victoria Beckham is a talking head here. So self deprecating, humble, nice! When I shot her for a cover of Marie Claire, the late photographer Patrick Demarchelier, who always asked on a casting, ‘Does the model ‘ave a boyfriend? If so, I don’t want ‘er’, took a black and white photo of Victoria with her naked newborn baby son, Brooklyn. I soon got a stern letter, threatening me were I to publish the photo. I got Patrick to sign a print, had the photo framed, the negatives desstroyed, and couriered it to her home. I never did receive a thanks. Much is made of George Michael’s Freedom video, featuring Tatjana, Naomi, Linda, Christy et al. Having dinner with George in Hampstead, he told me I was the first person to ever pick up the tab since he became famous. Christy Turlington, featured on my cover and interviewed inside, was so incensed her private life was written about she posted me an angry letter, ‘You, Editor!’ Not very yoga zen at all.

         But the Nineties, outside of the narrow parameters of Vogue, were fun. I was at the Sunday Times, and we squished all the supermodels – Kate, Naomi et al — onto a photocopier for a shoot. I went to Poland with hot girl band All Saints; the entire time, Nicole Appleton was on the phone to Robbie Williams; the girls refused to come with me to visit Auschwitz. I asked a security guard if birds fly over the concentration camp. ‘They fly, but they do not sing.’ I fought to get black artists Prince and Maxwell onto covers. I failed, though, with a cover of Sade for Marie Claire: she was deemed, at 42, too old, too black. I flew to LA to interview the Friends girls, the airline lost my luggage and so Jennifer Aniston gave me her undies. Oasis were in their prime, and I was assigned to ghost write a column by Meg Mathews, then married to Noel. She would drive, in her Porsche Boxter, to a five star hotel on Marylebone Road to drop off a photo; it was hilarious, we felt like spies. We once ran a column about her rescue dogs, and she insisted on having black bars across their faces on publication, in case Camden gangsters tried to get them back. I would write her jokes, and Noel could be heard yelling in the background, ‘Don’t let Liz write that! I look like an idiot!’ Meg never, ever got my sense of humour.

         Where is the OJ Simpson trial? Dunblane (I was barred from reporting on the massacre as ‘You’re not a mum’)? The burgeoning black British music scene of Young Disciples, Roachford et al? Tony Blair? I remember driving past the Blairs’ Islington town house, the morning after the victory. Seeing Cherie in her nightie, bed head hair. Invited to Downing Street, I was flattered Tony knew my name, job title. Little did I know a minion was feeding him biogs via an ear piece. There were some lovely people, as rare as snow leopards. Grace Coddington, featured in the Disney doc in her role as Vogue’s fashion director, who happily donated some drawings for my book to raise money for a cat charity. Tracey Emin, who couriered two drawings to me to auction. But the people at Vogue? Detached, dictatorial, and eminently irrelevant and forgettable.