Julie Summers is the author of 14 works of non-fiction including Fashion on the Ration and Dressed for War, the biography of the wartime editor of Vogue. Born and brought up in the North West, she studied at Bristol University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 1984 she worked at the Royal Academy of Arts and the Henry Moore Foundation as a curator and became head of exhibitions at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford before becoming a full-time writer.
This is a fascinating book. Impressively researched, full of new insights, and a joy to read, it puts into proper perspective Vogue's unrivalled role, not merely as a fashion magazine, but as a record of British cultural, social and artistic life in the changing world of the 20th and early 2lst centuries. I loved it. * Josephine Ross, author of The Crown in Vogue * This excellent book chronicles the entire history of British Vogue accurately and enthrallingly. It is important, because it records the ever-changing creative climate and cast of characters of a publishing phenomenon, and preserves it all lest it ever be swept away * SIr Nicholas Coleridge * A gem. Julie's book is a delicious reveal on how gently revolutionary a glossy magazine has been, charting everything from the open acceptance that wildly creative editor Dorothy Todd was living with VOGUE's fashion editor, Madge Garland, to the platonic bond between war correspondent Lee Miller and the editor she could not have survived WW2 without, Audrey Withers. It takes us right up to the modern age and the brilliance of Edward Enninful's editorship when the world was locked down for COVID-19. Every page has some rich and juicy fact I didn't know before.... * Marion Hume, former editor of Vogue Australia, co-writer of the screenplay for LEE starring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller and Andrea Riseborough as Audrey Withers * Julie Summers has written the first book to give British Vogue its rightful place at the centre of an impeccably researched biography...always changing and always fascinating * Alexandra Shulman, former editor of British Vogue *