The Press: Fifty Years on the Crest

At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, a struggling, six-year-old magazine gave a piece of stern advice to U.S. women: "Don't be so violently, alarmingly and visibly patriotic as to wear the tri-colors on everything. Bad taste never yet helped a good cause."

The upstart young magazine was Vogue, whose circulation was hovering around 5,000. Since then Vogue has boosted its circulation (now 415,400), added the successful British (circ. 140,000) and French (circ. 25,000) editions and has become the world's No. 1 fashion magazine. The credit goes largely to Edna Woolman Chase, who at 77 has spent 59 years on the magazine, most of them as Vogue's editorial boss and arbiter of good taste. Last week, with an assist from her actress-author daughter Ilka Chase (Past Imperfect), Editor Chase published her autobiography, Always in Vogue (Doubleday; 381 pp.). In it she spins a rich, half-century history of the world of high fashion that revolved around her magazine, in which one must "be always at the summit of everything that is elegant, modern, beautiful, cultured."

The Perfect 36. Edna Chase herself was hardly elegant or beautiful. She got her job at 18, addressing envelopes for $10 a week—"a factotum, a kind of little widget, young, eager and ignorant. I think I was not an unattractive young woman . . . but the only permissible bust measurement, the perfect 36, I did not possess."

Since Vogue's founder, Arthur Turnure, had announced that the magazine's "definite object is the establishment of a dignified, authentic journal of society, fashion, and the ceremonial side of life," Vogue covered Manhattan's glittering social life with rapt attention. Thus the big story of 1895 was the marriage between Consuelo Vanderbilt and the young Duke of Marlborough. For its readers, Vogue carefully described the Vanderbilt trousseau: "The markings consist of the name 'Consuelo' embroidered on the nightgowns, chemises and corset covers on the left side, while on the drawers it adorns the left knee." For the new rich there was advice on etiquette. Sample: "A word about the treatment of servants. One should always be kind to them. I always make it a point to be scrupulously civil to inferiors. I frequently stop in the street to pat a vagrant dog on the head or to say a kind word to a horse."

Patterns & Paris. Vogue's audience was as small as its view of the world until Conde Nast, who helped give Collier's its start, came east from St. Louis to buy the magazine and its 14,000 circulation in 1909. Elegant, wealthy Publisher Nast poured money into his new property, changed it from a weekly to a fortnightly and gradually expanded its coverage beyond the confines of Park Avenue and Newport. Edna Chase rose like a rocket through the magazine. By 1914 she was editor (at the age of 37) and began playing to the rising U.S. upper middle class. Vogue began publishing whole sections of photographs of well-dressed society leaders in all their finery and sold dress patterns around the U.S. so that every U.S. woman could look as chic.