Ellen Burney writes for magazines, lives in London, and has about as perfect a haircut as you can get.  But mostly I love her for her blog Vagabondiana, with its word-heavy blog posts and her long, rambling paragraphs (I’ll take words over pictures any day).  She writes so well I was a little intimidated to ask her to do an interview for the blog, but I’m glad I did because, well, read for yourself . . .

1.  How old were you when you first knew you wanted to work in the fashion industry in some way?

When I came out of hospital and realised I had no career options left. No really, I remember loving Just Seventeen as a teenager but never really understanding the point of fashion writing. I can remember where I was when I thought it, under a school stairwell drinking cherry coke. I thought ‘who reads this?’ when they could just be looking at the pictures instead. But maybe I was reading the wrong sort of fashion writing. I always knew I wanted to be a writer though, although I had the inevitable stylist stint too. I grew up in Manchester but travelled to London in the school holidays to intern at various magazines in the features department and then, post-tarot confirmation, my mother agreed to let me skip university and move to London aged 18.

I remember seeing the newly re-launched Nova in my local newsagent, falling in love with the Mariacarla Boscono front cover and needing to intern there immediately. Venetia Scott was the fashion director and looked amazing in the office with no make-up, jeans and a borrowed lilac cashmere jumper from the fashion cupboard. Stylists like Camille Bildaut-Waddington were always coming and going and I was really sad that the magazine closed after only last eleven months or something. It seemed such a waste and still does.

2.  You’ve written for Elle, Russh, and Nylon, but I think I’m most interested in hearing about your work for Lula! Can you describe a bit of what you do for the magazine and what drew you to it?

The projects I am working on for Lula are so different to anything I would have been able to do for more commercial magazines and much more interesting to me. Lula is not a plugging circuit, it’s not product placement made of dead trees. There is no ‘so and so’s new film is now out’ at the end of every reluctant and contracted interview. There was an interview with Eva Green in a supplement recently where she said: ‘being too commercial is quite difficult for me.’ At the end of the interview it stated: ‘Eva Green is a brand ambassador for Montblanc, which has just released a Meisterstuck Diamond fountain pen.’ I mean really, truly, how idiotic?

You also have to remember that most magazines are primarily run as businesses, to make money, and editors are reluctant to take a chance on new concepts. The untested seems oblivious to them. They rely on satellites to bring them in but there’s an extra jeopardy to that as they are almost bound to trust the satellite. We trust the satellite to show us Saturn but we don’t know if that’s what Saturn really looks like. Hence, magazines literally jumping onto a bandwagon a few years too late and cringingly featuring certain bands as hot new artists. Essentially commercial magazines don’t set trends, they follow them. Street style photography has literally only just made a come-back. It disappeared for so long as editors obviously didn’t see the relevance of civilian style. Everybody else was yearning for it though, as fashion editorials were so far-removed from what anyone could really achieve. But only once it was deemed acceptable by one editor, did another and another and another grant it any pages. Of course then it’s in fashion and everyone bites. It’s embarrassing.

Before now – a time when we have unlimited access to vintage-clothing colliding with affordable designer-knock-offs on the high-street the week after the show – editors had the security guard of elitism. What came from the couture house stayed in the couture house, and the magazines of course. But all of a sudden ‘ordinary’ people had access to a once-expensive uniqueness that only ever used to come from the top … and suddenly Joanna Blogs is painting in colour. Now, anyone with an ounce of creativity is given the capacity to create something different. And as street style accelerated across the internet, editors had to take notice. Although everything becomes too commercial too quickly to ever be a counter or sub culture today; clubs, fashion and blogging, it quickly becomes a fashion establishment instead as it’s more stylish than what the magazines are offering. The only thing that grows on towers is ivory – isolated and elite.

3.  Any favourite fashion films or books?

I cannot not mention The Godfather trilogy, or moreover, The Godchildren; all those bib-collars and general Catholic-wear. I search ‘confirmation dress’ on eBay. Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie is a favourite if you are brave enough to watch it and I think that for all of my love of the 1960’s there is a lot of 1970’s within me that has not come yet come out to play. I need more Karen Walker in my winter wardrobe, more Shelley Duval sweaters in The Shining. Sometimes above fashion however, I can get meticulously obsessed with hair in films; Julie Christie in Shampoo and the 1968 film Secret Ceremony with Mia Farrow was the reason I recently dyed my hair back dark from red. I also recently posted about Bronco Bullfrog, a film made in 1969 in the east end of London that was made up of a cast of unprofessional local working-class teenagers. It starred a girl called Anne Gooding as ‘Irene’ and she is so mesmerizing and stylish but I found out recently that she died somewhere on the dance-floor, having never acted again. I am especially sad as she probably lived around the corner from me now.

4.  You write a lot about having a love-hate relationship with fashion, which I can definitely relate to. What is it about fashion that keeps you coming back?

History. And historic stories attached to style. My boyfriend’s grandmother Doris lived through the east end Blitz and would paint stocking lines up her legs in gravy due to rations. That’s the kind of thing that inspires me, that I tried to put in my ELLE column, that would be subbed out. Or Mary Jane Kelly sleeping rough in Spitalfields just so that she could afford to buy a fresh black flower each morning to put in her hair. Vagabondiana takes its nom de plume from a book of illustrations by the early-19th century artist John Thomas Smith. His day job was to observe and draw the idle yet moneyed debutantes of the day but for his book he sketched who considered to be the best-dressed, the vagabonds living in ‘Vagabondiana,’ drinking gin by day and sleeping by the light of the moon. He essentially took the ‘lowest forms of life’ – the street people hated by one and all – and made them beautiful. Fortunately today, we can most probably see a little irony in that story.

Thinking about it now, even the re-launch of Nova was a step back in time. I really have no love for the likes of fast-paced magazines like LOVE. I’ve only seen a couple of issues but it reads so basically and I hate that patronising toddler style of writing and obsession with youth and ‘new.’ I once interviewed the make-up artist Kay Montano and she told me she believed society was devolving. To me nothing says it more than ‘serious’ fashion magazines hiring teenage it-girls as columnists when so many people study, read, absorb and intern for years. Perhaps of course it’s nothing new but it’s so insulting and assumes the reader to be an absolute arse. When Nylon started – and never stopped – obsessing over it-girls, that was when something had gone seriously wrong from a magazine my generation once-worshipped.

5.  In one of your blog posts you said that you were fonder of little bits of magazines rather than the things as a whole. What are your favorite pages in magazines? And what would your ideal, dream magazine be like?

In British Vogue I like the meatier features by Hadley Freeman, Sarah Harris and Daisy Garnett. I was sad to see Natalie leave as RUSSH editor and I’ve noticed an immediate difference in direction of style travel but am interested to see what [my old ELLE colleague] Jamie Huckbody is going to bring to RUSSH as its new European Features Director as he’s fantastic. I love The Observer food Monthly supplement and most British broadsheets do a ‘food special’ very well. Can someone please inform me when Nylon turns the lights back on?

6.  What are you excited about wearing next season?

My birthday dress made for me by Maggie Cassidy’s and co-designed by my (non-designer) boyfriend. It was perfect but I received it in April but it’s made from Yorkshire wool and so I am being ever so patient. Other than that; Orla Kiely, Cacharel and Miu Miu. Now that I’ve dyed my hair back dark I think I will probably be wearing a lot of black and a red lip again. Rewind to Secret Ceremony and all that. Every winter sees a welcome return of Wednesday Addams. I also need new Chelsea boots and black flowers in my hair.

Photos:   1. Ellen in what might be my favorite Ellen Burney outfit; in her birthday dress . . . . . . 2. Ellen with Julia Melbourne at Lula’s 5th birthday party . . . . 3. Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow in Secret Ceremony . . . . 4. Anne Gooding in Bronco Bullfrog . . . . . 5. Pages from John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana . . . . 6. a look from Orla Kiely’s fall collection.

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