When, in 1945, after six long years, the Second World War ended and peace came at last, British Vogue had acquired a gravity unexpected when the conflict came about. This was chiefly thanks to two women from very different backgrounds and of very different temperaments, one British and one American, who found enough common ground to propel Vogue into the modern age.
Their story is told in Lee, out this Friday. On the face of it, it’s the story of Lee Miller, played by Kate Winslet, the American half of the partnership: a spirited, beautiful and ambitious model turned photographer. From 1940 to 1944, there was barely an issue of Vogue without a fashion photograph, still life, beauty picture or portrait credited “Lee Miller.” She was tireless in the role of chief fashion photographer—often the magazine’s only photographer as established figures, such as Cecil Beaton and Norman Parkinson, were now engaged in vital war work.
But Lee also explores Miller’s relationship with British Vogue’s tenacious editor-in-chief Audrey Withers, played by Andrea Riseborough. It was with Withers’s encouragement that, in 1944, Miller obtained accreditation as a war photographer with the US Army and, after D-Day, followed the Allied advance across France and into Germany, where she became a battle-hardened warrior in combat fatigues wielding a Rolleiflex and hammering out words on a battered typewriter.
Where Miller was impetuous, outspoken, and uninhibited, Withers—an unlikely choice as editor of Vogue, with little discernible interest in fashion—was quiet, determined, and in possession of a will of steel. The one complemented the other and in short order they jointly placed Vogue at the center of Britain’s home-front struggle. The pictures Miller wired back to Withers gave readers a ringside seat at a theater of war they never expected to encounter—at least not in Vogue.
A libertarian socialist, Withers was politically connected. Behind the scenes, Brendan Bracken at the Ministry of Information was quick to recognize the part women’s magazines—and above all, this woman’s magazine—could play in the morale of the home front and opened up a dialogue. In return, Withers secured an extra paper allocation which enabled British Vogue to survive when other magazines pulled down the shutters. Its circulation soared sky-high. There was a story at the time, never refuted, that a subscriber had to die before a new one could sign on.
