There is a moment in former Condé Nast maestro Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir The Glossy Years where he recounts losing his magazine virginity. Aged 16 and ill in bed at home he picked up a copy of Harpers & Queen belonging to his mother and in an instant was spellbound: the wit, the glamour, the ‘understated snobbery’. ‘That first couple of hours with a glossy changed my life,’ he wrote.
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So I felt when Vogue was delivered to my school library each month: a sliver of high-end bliss among the daily-end drudgery. It was the start of a teenagehood marked by circles of shame in Heat and sticky ink on my thighs from reading Grazia on sweaty school coaches (temporary tattoos of gossip). The teenage years, endlessly horizontal, lent themselves to Tatler in a hammock, More on a sofa, Elle in bed. I was magazine binging long before I was ‘doom-scrolling’.
