The Press: A Well-Bred Magazine

Fresh from a New Jersey village, the young Quaker girl seemed hopelessly out of place at the snobbish weekly. But from her very first day in 1895, the trim, bright-eyed mail clerk named Edna Woolman Martin somehow felt “a proprietary interest” in the affairs of Vogue as it chronicled the genteel caprices of New York society rounding out a comfortable century of progress and optimism.

“As we were staffed by ladies and gentlemen,” she recalled when she had become the famous Edna Woolman Chase, “no one worked very hard and anybody who wanted extra duties was welcome to them.” For more than a half-century, Edna Chase gracefully collected unclaimed duties. By the time she retired as editor in chief in 1952, she had carried high fashion from the salons of Paris to the sidewalks of Wichita, and expanded Vogue from a mirror of New York society into an international arbiter of taste, a cultural force icily confident of its ability to decide what the world’s females should wear. “Vogue,” Editor Chase once simply explained, “is a well-bred magazine.”

The expansion of Vogue into self-appointed molder of the female silhouette really started in 1909 when Publisher Condeé Nast bought the magazine from the estate of its founder, Arthur Turnure.

Shortly after Nast made her editor in chief in 1914. Edna Chase scored one of Vogue’s biggest coups. World War I cut off the U.S. from style-setting Paris designers. To clothe fashion’s nakedness, she assembled New York society for America’s first fashion show, using clothes by a handful of neglected American designers. The fashion show, which became a national institution after the war, and the slick pages of Vogue, showing only what Edna Chase deemed acceptable, remade the nation’s clothing industry. American manufacturers suddenly discovered a healthy market for mass-produced versions of the best models. Said Publisher Nast: “Taste percolated downward.”

Pursuing the ideal of high fashion, Edna Chase looked more like a society matron than a dedicated editor. Although she often joked about her large mouth (“Do put thy hand up when thee smiles.” her mother had warned), she had a refined beauty plus forthright personal charm, and dressed, as she preached, with simple elegance. She was first married to Frank D. Chase, a hotel manager and the father of her only child, Actress and Author Ilka Chase. This marriage ended in divorce, and she later married Engineer Richard Newton, who died in 1950.

Causes That Succeed. Searching for the “elegant, modern, beautiful, and cultured,” Edna Chase was a shrewd, resourceful scrapper. For years she feuded (but always in discreet modulations) with Publisher William Randolph Hearst, who bought Harper’s Bazaar to compete with Vogue in 1913, later wooed away much of her top talent, including her heiress apparent, Carmel Snow. (Although they often appear to be identical twins, Vogue still leads Harper’s Bazaar in circulation, 392,507 to 365,023, and Old Rival Snow, now editor in chief, readily admits “Edna Chase really started fashion journalism.”)

Determined to keep up with changing times, Editor Chase gradually expanded Vogue’s scope to include far more than clothes fillies, set up sister editions in London and Paris, and won the Legion of Honor from a French government grateful for her grooming of Dame Fashion. Occasionally, Fashion defied Chase: her crusade against open-toed shoes (“inappropriate, unsightly, dirty”) got nowhere, and her scorn failed to stop the rise of the gaunt-cheeked fashion model. “I’ve never seen so many slatterns in my life,” she once huffed, flipping through Vogue.

But more often than not, Edna Chase backed causes that succeeded. Vogue gave Humorist Dorothy Parker her first break, printed huge chunks of Novelist Thomas Wolfe’s Niagaran prose, and evolved the elegantly stylized fashion ad. One day in 1937, while driving across New York’s lofty Triborough Bridge, she conceived an annual issue celebrating the glories of America—steel and concrete as well as female. During World War II, Vogue sent off reporters to the battlefronts, later grimly printed atrocity pictures of Buchenwald. “Edna Chase wanted her readers to be able to pick up Vogue and see the world they lived in,” explained Condeé Nast President Patcevitch.

After her retirement, Edna Chase kept a grandmotherly eye on Vogue, often dropped into the office on Lexington Avenue for a quiet lunch and a worried chat about the fading numbers of ladies and gentlemen. Last month, a handsome and regal lady who was about to celebrate her 80th birthday, she slipped south to Florida for a vacation. There last week she died of a heart attack. The news reached Vogue as staffers were handing around the latest postcard from their editor emeritus: “I think of all you busy Vogueites,” said the neat hand, “and envy you your full days.”