Life in Vogue: The fashionable world of Alexandra Shulman

Alexandra Shulman is riled. Fashion, she passionately believes, gets a rough ride: "Scarcely a day goes by without me reading in some newspaper or other about some unethical aspect of the industry that they've uncovered. Fashion is blamed for paedophilia, landfill, drug addiction, animal rights ... Every kind of goody-goody projects on to fashion as the epicentre of all that is wrong with the Western world and I do get irritated about it, because you just think: 'Why?' "

Blimey. And Shulman – editor of Vogue for 16 years now and well established as one of the most powerful people in British fashion – hasn't even mentioned eating disorders, the obsession with looking youthful unto death, the generation of a consumer debt unequalled by any other country on the planet, or regular exposés of sweatshop working practices. I've mentioned some of this though, and it has not gone down terribly well. The article I'm intending to write, Shulman asserts rather witheringly, is just going to be like all those reams of other anti-fashion articles that make her so annoyed.

I'm not, I assure her, "anti-fashion". All I'm trying to suggest is that the huge growth in demand for more and more new clothes, has played a significant part in fuelling the boom that has now been so clearly revealed as a hypertropic, transient bubble.

I agree with Shulman that it isn't, and wasn't, Vogue's job to report on the iniquities of store-card APRs, or to carry long editorials questioning the wisdom of aggressive, globalised consumerism. Neither the 220,000 people who buy the venerable and expensive magazine each month, nor the companies that buy its advertising space and contribute to its status as Britain's most profitable glossy, do so in the hope that Vogue will tell them that their paradise might be a foolish one. But surely Shulman cannot be entirely impervious to the idea that things may have got just a little bit crazy?

Shulman insists that fashion is about design, while I'm talking about retailing. Yet Shulman's own belief in "fashion values", she freely admits, involves strong identification with the fashion consumer. In fact, Shulman's embrace of the fashion mainstream is part of what has made her editorship of the magazine distinctive. The editor of French Vogue, Carine Roitfeld, covers fashion as an esoteric art form. The editor of US Vogue, Anna Wintour, counts her understanding of the corporate aspects of fashion as part of the formula that has made her two-decade tenure such a success. But Shulman has always taken a more democratic approach, and the editor of British Vogue lauds Primark with as much enthusiasm as she does Prada.

"I really do like buying things and spending money," she says. "It gives me a lift. I'm a real sucker for that feeling that your world will change because of something you've bought. I know that it won't, really. But I totally buy into that idea that for a brief moment everything seems better, when you've got a new dress that you look good in. I've always felt that. So I'm not a great fashion person in terms of a huge knowledge or body of work within pure fashion design, but I love clothes and the whole thing of looking at them and shopping and all of that stuff."

As hobbies go, shopping is hardly an unusual one. But it is quite unusual for a Vogue editor to boast that she's "not a great fashion person". Shulman's appointment in 1992, when she was 34, was greeted as a controversial one, precisely because she was considered not to be "a great fashion person" – and she's gone quietly along with this myth ever since.

Actually though, virtually everyone in Shulman's immediate family has been involved in journalism or high-end fashion glossies, at some time or another. Her father was the theatre critic Milton Shulman; her mother, Drusilla Beyfus, was for a time a Vogue features editor; her brother, the artist Jason Shulman, was once the highly respected art director of Tatler; and her sister, the writer Nicola Shulman, was for a long time a contributor to Harpers and Queen. Shulman herself, divorced from the journalist Paul Spike – with whom she has a son, Sam, born in 1995 – now lives in north-west London and is in a relationship with the writer and magazine editor David Jenkins. With all this in mind, her successful career at Vogue publisher Condé Nast can't have come as that much of a surprise.

Anyway, after stints on Over 21, Tatler and the Sunday Telegraph, Shulman herself served as Vogue's features editor under Liz Tilberis, the editor she was to replace, and was moved into the top job from her editorship of another Condé Nast flagship title, the men's fashion glossy, GQ. Certainly, Shulman was hired at Vogue with a brief that involved recapturing an "intellectual range" that it was felt had been "slightly jettisoned" during the 1980s. But under Shulman's editorship the magazine has increased circulation by diversifying its coverage while maintaining a tight focus on fashion as its defining subject. Which was exactly what she was hired to do.

Shulman took her place in the editor's chair just as Britain was coming out of another notable recession. The 1980s had been dubbed the "designer decade", and characterised as the period when Britain – and Vogue – took to its heart the concept of conspicuous mass consumption. But at the start of the 1990s, there was some speculation that the last decade of the millennium would mark a return to wider, more inclusive values. Green politics, it was suggested, might start to dominate. People would start asking whether money was really everything. Society would become more gentle, more caring. Shulman's appointment was no doubt made in part in anticipation of such a shift. It didn't work out that way.

Shulman remembers that period well. "I'm not sure if it was actually classed as a recession, or just a downturn, but I remember all the 'For Sale' signs ranked in rows on terraced houses and everything. Certainly we'd lost a lot of ad pages in the previous year, and business for Vogue was a lot tougher than it had been in the 1980s.

"But at that time a whole slew of new designers bubbled up – like McQueen, Stella McCartney, Hussein Chayalan Clements Ribeiro. A new generation came up through that period ... actually the whole Brit Art thing bubbled up then. I'm not sure whether it encourages creativity, whether it's because people are looking for alternatives to what's fed to them on a mass scale, whether they are more interested in what's happening on the underground, or what it is, but you do get new names, new businesses, during recessions. Things happen. It can be quite an exciting time creatively. And old names often die."

Shulman is far too much the diplomatic businesswomen to be tempted to speculate on which of the old names will die, although she is pretty sure that Vogue won't be one of them: "We had, up until the end of last year, as good a year as the one before, and that was a record year. That's in ads. Circulation, I think we're going to be 1 per cent down on the newsstand, which compares to other people being 20 per cent down. So we've been really lucky. The first issue we've lost some ads is February. And I'm still waiting to hear about March which is a big fashion special. Nobody thinks it's going to be as good next year as last year, but it's a question of: 'How bad?' "

But she will go as far as to admit that while Vogue has experienced only advantage during the boom, the recent, seemingly insatiable, demand for product has not always been unequivocably welcomed by the designers whose work the magazine primarily exists to analyse and assess. "I talk to Matthew Williamson or Alber Elbaz at Lanvin or Alexander McQueen," she says. "They will all say that they are being pressurised into designing more and more lines and merchandise by department stores. Because up until now there have been people coming in with a lot of money and wanting more different things to go in, to look at, and to buy.

"During this worldwide recession there are going to be far fewer of those people able to walk in and buy a new handbag every week, or three a week, or whatever – whether they were right or wrong to do it, I'm not making that point.

"And I'd never say: 'Debt-fuelled consumerism has damaged Karl Lagerfeld's creativity'."

This is just as well. Few people would find it easy to accept that fashion designers have been the helpless victims in the fashion boom, reluctantly labouring away at filling the shops with new stuff, and unable to protest because the gold that has been stuffed into their mouths has rendered them dumb.

Yet while Shulman is comfortable discussing the less beneficial effects of the demand for novelty on designers, she is loath to say anything critical about decadent buying patterns that have driven this market, or the fashion market more generally. She is keen to get across that there's a difference between high-street fashion and designer fashion. But she admits that the retail model for both has been for a long time driven by novelty and volume. "Topshop for instance. I'm a huge fan of Topshop, I think it's great, I think their designs are fantastic; they have a huge range now, they have an endless amount of new merchandise coming in, and that's a totally different model.

"There's no department store saying we need more Topshop, it's totally Topshop saying: 'We need new things.' That is again because they've got people coming in every week wanting to see something new to buy – shopping as a leisure activity and so on. And people just aren't going to be able to buy like they did. There is going to be an organic change. So, yes, maybe things have gone too far, and there is going to have to be a readjustment."

What, exactly, has "gone too far" though? Shulman herself experiences the act of purchasing as "a lift" or "a hit", and one that fades quickly, leaving the purchaser dissatisfied and disappointed. Even though this spiral of need is the same as that described by a smack addict, Shulman firmly denies that there may be anything dysfunctional about questing relentlessly for that perfect new top that will make everything wonderful.

Yet isn't the creation of want the very thing that may have "gone too far"? And isn't that most obvious in fashion because – unlike technology, say – the industry is often striving to sell the illusion of novelty, rather than the benefits of actual innovation? If even those who are involved in fashion as an art form, rather than fashion as a retail opportunity, are complaining of the insatiable demand for "new things", isn't something awry?

"Fashion designers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don't supply something new – one season it's skinny-leg trousers, the next season it's peg-top high-waisted trousers – then fashion critics will say: 'Oh, so-and-so has no new ideas, there's nothing new on the catwalk.'

"I don't think that is right. We don't say it here at Vogue, and I'd never say that personally. But designers do quite often get hammered by the press. So I think fashion journalists play a part in that desire for something new."

Shulman warms to her theme, gets up from her white table in her white office, and picks up some sort of unguent. "This? Right! A bottle with a liquid in it. You've got to make this bottle in some way stand out from another 3,000 other bottles that aren't that dissimilar. I think a lot of people who are engaged in this process, in this fevered, febrile thing ... including me, probably ... develop a disengagement with what's happening at the other end."

Yet "disengagement" is – in a broader sense, across the economy – exactly what has got us into the mess we are now in. The classic example is that bright sparks in finance decided it was a good idea for the people granting mortgages to become "disengaged" from those recovering the capital that had been lent. But strange, dangerous firewalls have developed in all kinds of industries.

Shulman has great sympathy with designers, the people she talks to, when they say that vast demand has its downside. But when other critics point to the difficulties created in other parts of the industry by the same thing, she suspects they are "anti-fashion". Shulman is personally attractive for a number of reasons. One of them is that she is not herself a super-thin, over-groomed, clothes-horse. Another is that she is not afraid to say: "I don't know".

She admits she does not know much about the working conditions of those involved in the mass manufacture of clothes, or about the glut of discarded cheap clothing that has become so great that only a small fraction of it can be recycled in any form. Narrowly, she is right to say that these are not the concerns of Vogue. But the problem is that the Big Picture has become the concern of no one. The fashion industry, like so many other areas of commerce, has been atomised, and while Shulman is reluctant to address this, she does, even in her defence of shopping, concede that context is crucial.

"I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with liking shopping and liking clothes," she says. "The problem comes when you don't want anything else. If you're not reading any poetry, or interested in discovering new films ..." But Shulman also asserts that, "it's a very elitist view, to say that it's all right to buy a new book every week, or see a new film, but not to buy a new T-shirt."

While we are on the subject of books, I bring up the subject of Susan Irvine's recently published first novel, Muse. Irvine is the long-term partner of Shulman's brother, Jason, and straddles nicely the parental preoccupations of her boyfriend's parents by combining fashion writing with theatre criticism.

Irvine's book combined these preoccupations as well, and offers a theatrical and vivid portrayal of a young woman trying to make it in the fashion media, and becoming unhinged as she does so. At one point her only regular income comes from a freelance contract which obliges her to supply copy for a magazine's "This Week's Must-Have" spot. What did Shulman make of this?

"I liked the book very much, it's a very good novel. But it was about a small area of the fashion business, an obsessive area. There's an obsessive quality about all – I don't want to sound wanky here – but about all those creative areas, if you work in the music industry, if you work in the art world. When you're dealing with things that are intangibles. Fashion is smoke and mirrors – a lot of it. We create images, we create a world of stuff, yes, ultimately to make people want to have it. Yes, most people in the Western world don't need another expensive coat. They probably don't need another white T-shirt either. They don't need it. What we're trying to do is make people want it. There is an argument to say that is evil. But obviously I don't believe that."

Perhaps some people do believe that the creation of want is evil. For most people though, there is only a problem when want is created without attention to anything but the price on the tag.

The March issue of 'Vogue' is out on Thursday