The Deborah Ross Interview: Alexandra Shulman

Shulman, the editor of Vogue, has reigned over her impeccably stylish magazine for 10 years. During that time, hemlines have risen and fallen, and models have grown up (well, some of them). But, does she still get excited about the ever-changing designer whims? Or would she rather be out on the school run?

So, here I am, in Vogue House, Hanover Square, home of Condé Nast and its stable of pure-bred, gorgeously glossy magazines – Tatler, The World of Interiors, Traveller, House & Garden and, of course, Vogue itself, the fashion bible so powerfully influential that, should it suddenly decide footbinding is the thing (perhaps using strips of pashmina, which are now so last year), we'd all jump to it. Unless, of course, we'd got onto it early and had already started, in which case we'd hobble to it.

Whatever, I am here to meet Alexandra Shulman, who is celebrating her 10th anniversary as Vogue editor. But I could happily just sit in reception all day, as it's such a chic, happening kind of place: dazzling male models proffering their portfolios ("Hi, I'm Shane, and here's my book"), as well as the endless comings and goings of slippy blonde girl employees in slippy black dresses. They are probably called Pippa or Camilla or Candida or Victoria or Serena and every other girl's name ending in "a", because these seem to be very Condé Nast names, and might even be obligatory.

That said, though, ones like "Plum" also seem to be acceptable, although Plumella might be more so. I promptly decide that should I have to introduce myself to anybody, it's going to be: "Hi. Debelinna. Nice to meet you. That's double 'n' and then, of course, an 'a'."

Eventually, it's up to the fifth floor, then along a white, chic minimalist corridor, covered in framed Vogue covers, and past an open-doored conference room where yet more slippy girls in slippy black seem to be having some kind of meeting. A planning meeting? I don't know what planning meetings are actually like at Vogue, but have always hoped they go along the lines of:

Pippa: "I'm thinking lace for the December cover."

Camilla: "I'm thinking lace, too. I'm thinking... Kate Winslet in lace!"

Plum: "I'm thinking Kate Winslet in lace and a gypsy-style, drawstring top!"

Pippa: "Plum, that's inspired."

Camilla: "Plum, have you ever thought of changing your name to Plumella?"

Plum: "Gosh, these meetings are tiring. Lunch, anybody?"

Into Alexandra's – See? See how you'll never get on in this building without that crucial "a"? – office, which is also white and minimalist and chic. Alexandra is 44 and very pretty, with rich brown hair, rich brown eyes and short fingernails that are faintly grubby, which is both something of a shock and a comfort. She's a size 14, I would guess, with a proper bosom, which is also something of a shock and a comfort, this being Vogue and everything. I ask her how she has resisted the pressure to be... well... you know... really, really thin. I mean, Sophie Dahl and Kate Winslet didn't hold out for very long, did they?

I say all this and then realise it sounds just so horribly insulting. It sounds like I'm saying she's fat, which she very much isn't. She's just normal. But, in the world of high fashion, isn't the normal the freakish? Oh, lord. Talk about digging yourself in deeper and deeper. And she isn't fat. Although the more I stress that, the more it seems as if I mean the opposite.

Thankfully, Alexandra stops me burbling on and on in this ridiculous way. "Everyone always asks me about that," she says. Oh dear. "And to be honest, it's not a subject I'm very interested in."

Oh, double dear. "But in answer to your original question, no, I don't feel that pressure. I don't confuse myself with the magazine. I'm not tall and I'm not 19 either."

Now, there is nothing wrong in not being 19. Not being 19 is quite, quite normal... best change the subject, I think.

So, what is she wearing today? Well, today it's Patrick Cox open-toed sandals, a Collette Dinnigan embroidered skirt, a black Gap top and a Tracey Boyd bomber jacket. I know this because I just adore Collette Dinnigan's work, which is always so eye-catchingly individual, and that Tracey Boyd jacket is, of course, such a must-have.

Alas, only teasing! I know because I asked. (I've heard of Gap, though). I wonder if she gets fed up of everyone casting their eyes over her attire, as they must surely do. After all, if she were the editor of Dentist Weekly, we'd all want to see her teeth. (Heaven help, by the way, the editor of Genital Hygiene Today.) She says she's used to it and, anyway, people very quickly lose interest once they realise, "I'm not a clothes horse and have never set myself up to be."

This is the thing about Shulman. She isn't Vogue in the way that, say, Diana Vreeland was and Anna Wintour is. She isn't its bosom-less, French-manicured, divinely dressed, Chanel-scented, Dior-lipsticked embodiment. She isn't even tanned, fake or otherwise. Indeed, her bare legs are that scary English white.

Oh, all right. Maybe she is a bit divinely dressed, but there is this sense that she wears the labels not because she would die if she didn't, but because they just happen to come her way. She's not, she says, into the absurdly expensive. Yes, she owns a £2,000 Hardy Amies black evening dress, bought for a fashion fund-raiser, "but I prefer to spend money on lots of cheap things. I prefer going to Topshop and buying lots of T-shirts."

She is also thrillingly literate. She adores poetry: Louis MacNeice, Carol Ann Duffy, Sylvia Plath ("Daddy is amazing, one of the all-time great poems") and Thomas Hardy. "I like his poetry, but not his fiction so much." She is very into novels, too. She is currently reading Trollope (the one who isn't Joanna), and has just read Sarah Waters's Fingersmith, the book that didn't win the Orange Prize but should have. We agree that it's a brilliant book, much better than Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, which did win, but neither of us managed to finish. "I had to admit defeat on that," she says.

Now, this is all very confusing as, in most instances, successful publications are their editors who, in turn, live that kind of life. Think what James Brown did at Loaded, Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan, Tina Brown at Vanity Fair, Tyler Brule at Wallpaper* and me at So Not in Style, which, if I may blow my own trumpet, I single-handedly managed to completely turn round. (Although I accept the discount offer at Primark might have played its part.)

However, I can now see that you do not necessarily have to be something to understand it, and Alexandra, perhaps both instinctively and intellectually, understands absolutely what Vogue is, and what it has to be. Yes, it's about selling clothes – "if we feature a £1,000 skirt, and the shop has three in, they'll be gone in two days" – but it is as much about offering its readers a little package holiday away from themselves and their lives.

True? "Well, maybe not a package holiday." What, more a luxury villa, own maid, cook, private pool, near golf course, helicopter pad, sleeps 10? "Yes. Marie-Claire is more the package holiday. We're a treat, something you splash out on."

Interestingly, or not, depending on whether you are interested in these things, women's magazines that attempt to investigate real women's lives – like the now-defunct Frank – notoriously fail. If Marie-Claire is that package holiday, and Vogue the top-notch luxury villa, then Frank was a day trip to Toxteth via a sightseeing tour of female circumcision in Moo-Moo Land. It's just not what women buy wo-men's magazines for. Spare Rib was OK, but could have done with quite a few more lipsticks in it.

We sit at her large, beech meeting table, where, together, we flick though a copy of the current issue. Of all the frocks in here, I ask, which do you most covet? She says it probably has to be the Alexander McQueen pink, ruched chiffon jobbie on page 127 (£905, at Selfridges, and unarguably gorgeous). Unusually, because she's much more an editor than a writer these days, she's interviewed Naomi Campbell for this particular issue. Naomi, who would be a little tinker if only she wasn't six foot or so, kept Alexandra waiting for four hours, but the resulting piece is excellent.

I compliment Alexandra on it, and tell her that for what it's worth, which is probably less than nothing, it struck just the right note between irritated and sympathetic. She says that might sum up her general world view. "You know, always vaguely irritated but sympathetic."

I ask who she would most dearly like to interview. "Camilla Parker Bowles," she says. "Cherie Blair. And what I'm most interested in is domestic detail. All I want is lists. How many bras do you have? Things like that. Lists, lists, lists."

Right-o, how many bras do you have, Alexandra Shulman? "Twelve."

Your favourite? "At the moment, a blue Calvin Klein."

How many pairs of shoes? "I've got lots of shoes."

How many? "30."

That's not so much. "Maybe it's more than that."

On the other hand, you don't have to apologise for not having enough. We laugh.

I am certainly interested in some aspects of fashion. Like? What's the new black. White? And if it's white, where does that leave black? Homeless, on the streets, selling The Big Issue? Poor lilac. That was once the new black, but now it can't get a job anywhere and, as I understand it, survives solely on hard drugs and the occasional appearance on Blankety Blank.

"Black," announces Shulman, possibly as much to shut me up as anything (and who can blame her?), "is the new black." This is a relief, as I like black, and didn't want to see it living on the streets or anything. It might even get its own show now. Blackety Black? But where does this now leave white? Poor white... [Enough! Ed.] But I haven't got onto lime yet. [Stuff lime!] Chocolate? What's happened to chocolate? [Get on with it!]

OK, then. How, Alexandra, do trends actually start? That first ripple, the one that builds into a mighty, full-blown craze – like the gypsy-style, drawstring tops that are everywhere at present – where does it happen? "On the catwalk, when you see two or three people doing the same thing," she says. "It's just out there. It's what you are looking at."

Yes, but what happens pre-catwalk? What causes two or three designers to do the same thing? "That," says Alexandra, "is the zeitgeist." Which, I suppose, you either get (like Alexandra) or don't (like all of us here at So Not in Style).

And how do you know when something is over? "Because when it's over it's over," she says. Is the pashmina so very over? "Actually, I think we cremated the pashmina too soon. People are still wearing them."

Oh, good. No, I've never been able to afford a proper pashmina, but I've got a nice little picnic blanket (plastic one side, tartan the other) that does just as well.

Perhaps I'm missing something. I usually do. But Alexandra does seem quite remarkably well balanced and un-neurotic, as real as Vogue isn't. She lives in the fashionable London suburb of Queen's Park, with her seven-year-old son, Sam, and we have quite a long talk about what fussy eaters young children can be. Sam, it turns out, exists on an extremely limited diet. "It's pasta with pesto or chicken breasts with new potatoes."

She is a single parent, having separated from her husband, the writer Paul Spike. Sam does, yes, sometimes whine about mummy having to go to work. "He'll say: 'Why don't you pick me up from school? Why does the nanny always have to do it?'And: 'You don't have to go out tonight. You just want to.'"

Ouch! Yes, she says, but she does see a lot of him. "I'm not one of those mothers who breeze in and out. We have a very committed relationship. And I've got to work. Who's going to pay the mortgage if I don't? I'm lucky. I've got a job I like that's well paid. If I look at the package, it is not a bad deal."

Ah, but will you be in goal, when it's demanded of you, in the park of a Sunday morning? "Yes. I will and I do," she says. She adds that the great thing about Vogue is that it is blissfully child-friendly. "Some days the place is deserted because everyone is at some sports day or another."

Journalism might be in her blood. Her father is the former Evening Standard theatre critic, Milton Shulman, while her mother is Drusilla Beyfus, the writer and former editor of Bride's magazine, here at Condé Nast. (Another "a", note.) Alexandra attended a posh little school in Kensington, then St Paul's Girls School in Hammersmith. She was always a big reader. "I remember The Constant Nymph, then it was everything by Jean Plaidy or Georgette Heyer. All my knowledge of French history comes from Jean Plaidy."

I wonder if she remembers any particular childhood clothes. "I had a dress my mother bought for me. It was white, with little red ribbons, but when it was washed the colour ran." She says she can still see it now, a tragic thing, "hanging over the bath with all the red dripping down".

Her next memory is a dress she bought at 13 to attend an 18th birthday party. It was from Forbidden Fruit in Kensington market, and "was pink, with lacing down the front, but my mother cut out a length of material from the hem, and stitched it under the lace before I was allowed to wear it. The one thing I do like about clothes is that they do all tell their own stories."

We discuss Kensington High Street in the Seventies, then the place to shop. Remember Chelsea Girl? Remember Biba? I say that Biba was great for shoplifting because the assistants were always much too busy painting their nails dark blue to worry about who was getting up to what. She says the police once came to give a talk at St Paul's, about all the shoplifting that went on at Biba. And? "We all sat there listening, in our stolen Biba scarves."

She went on to Sussex University, to study social anthropology, which she didn't much care for, but her parents were keen for her to further her education. "I hated it. Didn't want to be there. Didn't want to study. I'd have preferred being a secretary in an office to studying kinship patterns in New Guinea. The whole university experience didn't open my eyes to anything, apart from the Brighton-London timetable."

She left for a secretarial job in the record industry. Her first ambition, she says, had been "to become a pop star called Gillian". She can't remember why it had to be Gillian, but thank God she didn't go for it. She'd have got nowhere at Condé Nast as Gillian. Although, of course, Gilliana might work. Her job in the record industry, in an A&R department, did not last long. She was sacked after five months. "I think it was because I didn't take drugs, and the secretary was expected to deal with all that. On the other hand, it could have been because I was completely hopeless."

She turned to journalism, working all over the shop – Tatler, GQ, The Sunday Telegraph and Vogue, as features editor, before being offered the editorship. How did it feel? "Frightening." There were mutterings when she first arrived, 10 years ago, that she did not have the necessary fashion credentials, and that she was too intelligent. But she quickly silenced her doubters by attracting 20,000 new readers with her broader mix of features.

I wonder, though, if she doesn't sometimes get fed up. Or bored, even. It's ultimately a sublimely superficial world, isn't it? Plus, all that air kissing, mwah, mwah! She says: "It operates at two levels. There is that level, which can be irritating, but it's also big business and full of people who know what they're doing. These are very driven, intelligent, creative people."

Time to go, as she has a lot to do. She knows she has a lot to do because she has a To Do list that says so. She is a great one for To Do lists, even though: "I'm always losing them." She seems to be a wholly decent, smart woman, although I'm still a little confused. Just how interested in fashion is she? "A bit more interested than you are," she replies.

I would feel hurt, but then I think, no, it says a lot for my editorship of So Not in Style. Would she mind if I quoted her in the promotional material, do you think?