March 14, 2012 |
Angelica Cheung is the most powerful journalist in the world. On sheer numbers. She is editor-in-chief of Chinese Vogue, a magazine that has a potential audience way beyond any other magazine in the world. She isn’t there yet and it will probably take a couple of generations, but it is already clear that China is going to be a major fashion player in the future, if not the fashion player.
But future greatness does not weigh Cheung down. She is far too practical and pragmatic to worry about a future that won’t be hers, although she does take seriously the legacy that she wishes to leave if at any time she feels the moment has come to move on from Vogue.
Not that there is any sign of that at this stage. There is far too much still to do in order to augment her achievements during the first six years of Chinese Vogue’s existence, all of them under Cheung’s guiding hand. “We are the fastest-growing fashion periodical in China,” she says. “Our circulation started at 300,000 and it is now 600,000. We had to reprint the first edition. The first print ran out in five days. The second in three. Because we are different. Vogue took its time to enter the market. There were already Chinese editions of Elle, Bazaar and Cosmopolitan, but they were very Chinese. Heavily licensed, they used a lot of second-hand syndicated material featuring merchandise not yet available in China, so they weren’t really true fashion magazines. Vogue waited until there were enough good-quality fashion brands to support a title with real fashion clout.”
We are sitting in the lounge of the revamped Langham hotel, where Cheung, her English husband Mark and their young daughter Hayley are staying on one of her rare trips to London. Mark is from Yorkshire, so a trip to see the in-laws is part of the visit, although I suspect it will be short. Cheung doesn’t have the luxury of long family holidays. As she says, “The Chinese work incredibly hard. At peak times I am often at my desk until 4 or 5 in the morning.” Hardly surprising when she explains that, for the September and October issues of Vogue, 1,200 editorial pages have to be passed. So most of her trips to the West are business trips and she usually takes them alone – or with no more than one or two assistants when it is show time.
“I always do Paris and Milan,” she tells me. “Never New York, unless it is for meetings.” And she is more likely to come to London for Frieze than for London Fashion Week. In fact, she admits that she asks herself increasingly often, what is the point – the real point – of a fashion week in any case? As she says, “All of these ideas that have been going unchallenged for so long in fashion need a lot of rethinking and I don’t think it is happening.”
I have a feeling that Cheung might just be planning to do something about this. Her drive and intelligence are apparent after only 10 minutes of conversation – which is in perfect and completely unaccented English. Brought up in Beijing, she studied law and English at the University of Peking, obtaining degrees in both subjects. Her father was a diplomat and that, she says, is the reason her English was so good that she could skip a couple of years of the course. “I always wanted to be a lawyer, not a writer,” she admits. “And after university I went to Hong Kong, planning to go from there to America. But,” she smiles, “that didn’t happen. Instead, in 1990, I went into business. I worked briefly for Goldman Sachs. I became interested in the media and started to work on a newspaper in Hong Kong – Mark was my first newspaper boss.”
She rose quickly, becoming senior manager for an English-language newspaper before becoming an executive editor. Even then, she was not entirely committed to the media. “I really only wanted to play with journalism,” she said. “But somehow I never left.” Her first “China” Chinese experience was working with Elle China on a revamp, having cut her teeth on Chinese Marie Claire as editor-in-chief, but even then she confesses, “I kept thinking of going back to law. Even after Elle. But then, along came Condé Nast and that was that. Vogue seduced me from the law forever and brought me back to China at a good time. After two years with Elle I was bored but the challenge of Vogue sustained me, as it still does.”
“I always need to be intellectually challenged,” Cheung says. “I could see that there was a role for Vogue to play in nurturing talents, both business and creative. And I really enjoy contributing to this vast industry and influencing Chinese taste. The Chinese are like this – if they see something better they immediately want it, provided they understand. There are lots of things that a Western magazine can assume the readers will know about, which is not the case in China. So, any new movement that is retro will be known by Western readers, from the New Look to Swinging London. They will say, ‘I remember my mother wearing clothes like that!’ That isn’t the case in China. After all, their mothers were probably wearing the cheongsam then.
“But the Chinese are good at seeing the quality difference,” she adds. “And that’s why, in my opinion, Vogue has done so well here. It is the top of the three and that is what sophisticated Chinese women demand. It’s also why, although we had predicated all our profit predictions would take three years to show, we actually made a profit in year one. Also, Chinese people cotton on very quickly and they realise that fashion is not just a way of expressing yourself, it is also a way of positioning yourself. And that is very important in my country. But, in one respect, we are like anywhere else. New money always wants to be old money. And things move very quickly in China. What took 100 years to happen in Europe takes 10 years here. And the top of society is very sophisticated already. The logo is king in China and rich people are really rich. So it is a perfect place to grow fashion quickly – especially as the Chinese always know what they want, and they know the labels they want, from Vuitton to Mulberry.”
Of course, Cheung admits that the vast majority of Chinese are still farmers living a rural life but adds that they are very aspirational. As she says, with conviction, “the boom will continue. Second-tier cities are already copying the new lifestyle”, and then, almost as an aside, adds, “All my editors, for example, must be super-fluent in English, not just because they cannot function in an international world like fashion without it but, just as important, it is a proof that they have the two things necessary for success – intellectual curiosity and ambition. They know that, in this business, you need to be open-minded and use all your resources to support what you want to do. But, you know, all Asians work very hard. We are on call all the time. No six o’clock end of day. End of day is when everything is done.”
So, how does Cheung see the future? She begins her answer thoughtfully. “You have to remember that just two or three years is a generation in China. We are literally moving that fast, but there is still a lot of frustration that comes from a recognition of the need for change. And we have our own culture. The solution would not be to become too Westernised. I take very seriously what we put in the magazine. It is a balance between Western labels that our readers love – Marni is a favourite – and support for our own designers. Quite definitely, Chinese designers are becoming much more active and aware of the rest of the world. Many of them are coming back from abroad, having been trained outside China. They want to prove themselves and show what they can do in relation to international designers. But,” she laughs, “designer labels are fine, but 100 million pairs of trousers per year is still the real business.”
Her parting remark to me makes clear why Angelica Cheung is in the position she is. As she is phoning her husband and daughter to rejoin her, she suddenly says to me, with great intensity, “You are never allowed much time. You have to grab opportunity when it is there.” And, with a smile, she is gone.
by Colin McDowell
