‘Vogue’ and the Airbrushed Crossroads of Fashion and Politics

But through it all, the magazine’s interest in women in politics has been unabated and partisan, ready at the drop of a crisis or poll number to give aid and comfort to Hillary Clinton at each stage of her stormy career. In 1993, when she was under assault as the uber-assertive “new kind of First Lady,” Vogue was there with a photo shoot that made her look like an old kind of temptress, “a dishy, dreamy, First Lady posing—head tilted over and blonde hair draped—like the old Catherine Deneuve perfume ads Johnny Carson loved to mimic,” as Maureen Dowd wrote at the time. The Irish Times called her “Hillary the sex goddess,” and the Economist ran a story on her “pussycat look,” with the headline “Come up and vote for me sometime.”

Five years later came Monica and impeachment, the blue dress, the vast right-wing conspiracy, and the meaning of “is,” and there she was on Vogue‘s Christmas cover, beaming and radiant in sumptuous red velvet, with a story that opened, “The First Lady has never been more popular—or effective,” and contained quotations to the effect that “She’s a phenomenal person” and “she looks much better and younger than on TV.”

In December 2009, when she was secretary of state and made a trip to Africa, Annie Leibovitz came along to take a great many carefully posed and retouchable photos, and Jonathan Van Meter to write pages and pages on how human she was, how lively she was when one got to know her, and how people loved her so much. In 2012, he followed up with a gushing story on Chelsea. And in February 2016, he was there again, with a story called “Will Hillary Clinton Make History?” timed to coincide with the nomination prize that had eluded her grasp just eight years earlier, and with every word shouting, “Yes!” The pictures this time were so retouched as to be unrecognizable.

When Vogue‘s formal endorsement was made halfway through October, the picture used was from the 1993 dishy, dreamy, Catherine Deneuve-like shots that had so irked Maureen Dowd. Airbrushed out, along with the wrinkles, were the political warts that made her candidacy so problematic: the greed, the truth-shading, the private email server she had used as secretary of state. Airbrushed, too, were any memories of the “bimbo eruptions” she was said to have quelled, along with the humiliations, horrors, and horrible choices that afflicted her protégée, “second daughter,” de facto sister, and aide, Huma Abedin.

Never a sylph, like the long-legged and lovely first lady of Syria, Hillary had always been an aesthetic stretch for the Vogue crowd, so it was probably with relief that the magazine was able to turn to Abedin, a stunning brunette 30 years younger—rail thin, with a great sense of style, sloe eyes, and yards of black hair—close in style to the late Mrs. JFK Jr., and who stood out from the usual run of women-in-politics just as the first Mrs. Kennedy had from the first ladies before her, Eleanor Roosevelt, Mamie, and Bess.

Huma debuted in Vogue in August 2007, in the opening phase of Hillary’s first run for president, when “after the second set of Democratic debates [she] has had three hours of sleep and four cups of coffee, but her black Prada suit is wrinkle free.” Her rapport with her patron and mentor was seen as remarkable. “I’m not sure Hillary could walk out the door without Huma,” said Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald. “She’s a little like Radar in M*A*S*H.” Her second Vogue appearance was her wedding in July 2010, an affair of state, or at least of political royalty, which she had by that time become. The scene was a Gilded Age mansion that resembled a chateau; the dress custom-made by Oscar de la Renta; the groom a congressman with a very bright future; the ceremony performed by Bill Clinton himself. The message was clear that the bride, while looking like Jackie, was expected to act more like Hillary Clinton, as part of a young Power Couple that would work with the old. The groom had his eyes on New York’s Gracie Mansion (which would have made Huma first lady of something), and the governor’s mansion in Albany was not thought unattainable. Had those things occurred, Vogue would have been there with stories and pictures by all the best people. But Vogue would not cover what did happen next.

It was not Vogue, but the New York Post, Daily News, and of course the National Enquirer, that would publish, not to say exploit and revel in, the news that Anthony Weiner, Abedin’s new husband, had a habit or hobby of sending pictures of his genitals over the Internet to women he had never met. No photographers captured her expression when she discovered what happened, or what she was wearing or felt days later when her husband was forced out of Congress and became unemployable, or what she felt concerning her obligations to him, his to her, and both to the child she was expecting, no doubt influential in her decision (like Hillary Clinton before her) to stand by her man. In April 2013, she would explain to Van Meter (this time for the New York Times Magazine) her decision to stay.

As a “reformed family man,” Weiner entered the New York mayoral race that May as the frontrunner, and the pair appeared in a video surrounded by flowers, she with her hair loose, smiling and radiant, and lovely in blue. But it was Reuters that would photograph her on July 23 in a black sweater with her hair in a tight, straggling bun that Vogue would not have accepted, looking strained and unhappy as he explained to the world and the voters that under the name “Carlos Danger” he had a prolonged online affair with a woman named Sydney Leathers and other relationships since he resigned. Two months later, he would lose the primary (coming in fifth with 4.9 percent of the vote), failing to mention his son or his wife in his concession, and flipping his middle finger to a reporter as he left.

As all this occurred, Abedin was in Washington at an event with the Clintons, which is where she would largely remain. “My compass was my job,” she said. “It was where I could go and life was normal. Nothing horrible had happened there.” As the presidential campaign geared up she would be there more often, reverting to her old identity as a Clinton “relation,” as she distanced herself more and more from her husband at home. It was in this context that Vogue felt free in mid-2016 to produce the piece called “I’m With Her” that ran in the September issue, centered around their campaign relationship and painting the closeness between the two of them as the key to both women. In about seven pages of print, half of a page was given to Abedin’s marriage, which having been raised was then abruptly dismissed and never mentioned again.

But life doesn’t always accede to Vogue‘s dreams, and by the time the issue hit the newsstands Weiner had been outed again, sexting a minor with his son beside him, causing the marriage to end with a bang, not a whimper, as Abedin started separation proceedings and gained sole custody of their son. It also caused the FBI to seize his computer, on which it found a large number of government emails, dating from Hillary Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, where Huma had been her top aide. The emails turned out to be copies of those already seen in the course of the investigation into the email misconduct of Hillary Clinton, but FBI director James Comey did not know this when he was told of them less than two weeks before the election, and had no way of knowing whether they held anything that would cause his decision not to recommend bringing charges to change. If they did, and he said nothing, he might look like he had engaged in a coverup that had affected the outcome of a presidential election. On the other hand, if he said something and the emails proved inconsequential (which is what had happened), then people would say the same thing.

Caught in this bind, he would choose to say something, and so he did, 11 days before the November election, in a letter to Congress. And it was just at that moment, the Democrats would claim later, that their fragile lead started slipping; and the second letter he wrote, on the Sunday before the election, would do nothing but make matters worse. It was the Weineresque angle that stupefied everyone: “When the movie is made,” said someone on Twitter, the opening scene would have to be the big wedding, in which Bill Clinton welcomed into their family and political world the outsider and serpent who at a singular moment would grind their dreams into dust.

The film All the President’s Men ends with the scribes typing away as a TV carries live the Nixon inaugural, aware that the president, who had won 49 states in the recent election, had already committed the many misjudgments that 20 months later would make him resign. By the same token, on the glorious day of the Abedin wedding, Hillary had already set up her illegal server, and Weiner’s addiction, by his own admission, already was well under way. Six years later at the optimum moment they would collide to deny and destroy their ambitions, a plot line the Greeks would surely have recognized, but no modern writer would dare to describe.

A great book remains to be written by the next Henry James (or Edith Wharton) about this saga of folly and failure, but it needs to be told minus the cosmetics, minus the airbrush, and minus excisions, with all the follies and failures laid bare. We don’t know when it will come, or who will produce it. But we know we won’t read it in Vogue.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Washington Examiner.