Carmel Snow, who was the most powerful magazine editor in the worldfor more than quarter of a century, is almost unknown in her native Ireland, writes Robert O'Byrne
When the ambitious English photographer Cecil Beaton was visiting New York in 1929, among the people who gave him most support was Carmel Snow, the energetic editor of American Vogue. In his diary of the trip, Beaton described his new friend as "looking like a fox terrier" and wrote that "Mrs Snow has the most satisfactorily ordered life". Twenty-seven years later, he met her again and observed that she had "never lost her innate enthusiasm and lettuce-crisp enjoyment. She is an inspiration."
Carmel Snow was an inspiration to more than one generation of photographers, as well as innumerable writers, painters and fashion designers. For more than a quarter-century the most powerful magazine editor in the world, she's still admired by editors and graphic designers globally. But perhaps the one place where she is barely remembered - if at all - is the country of her birth: Ireland.
Born in Dalkey, Co Dublin in 1887, Carmel Snow spent her formative years here before moving to the US to join her mother. Her father, Peter White, was managing director of the Irish Woollen Manufacturing and Export Company and, as a result, had been invited to look after arrangements for an Irish village at the Chicago World Fair in 1893. When he died shortly before this event, her mother took on the task and, once the fair was concluded, brought the rest of the family across the Atlantic.
Although the US was her home thereafter, Carmel Snow never lost her Irish accent or her memories of Ireland which infuse the memoir she prepared shortly before her death in 1961. Published the following year, it makes frequent reference to her country of origin, as did many people who wrote about Carmel Snow.
In the early 1920s, she was hired by Condé Nast as an assistant fashion editor of American Vogue and within a decade had become its editor. However, she always felt blocked by her immediate superior, Edna Chase, and in 1932, while in hospital giving birth to her youngest child Brigid, she accepted an offer from William Randolph Hearst to become editor of Vogue's great rival - Harper's Bazaar. Hearing the news, Condé Nast became drunk for only the second time in his life, while Edna Chase later wrote to Carmel Snow that her defection has "killed in my heart an affection and a faith that nothing but your own words could have destroyed".
Both had good reason to be fearful over her departure, because during Carmel Snow's time with Harper's Bazaar, she made it the most admired and influential publication of the period. In achieving this feat, she was assisted by a number of appointments made at her insistence, especially that of the Russian-born Alexey Brodovitch as the magazine's art director. Between them, Snow and Brodovitch redefined editorial design, thanks to the deployment of ample white space, clean typography, unexpected but powerful cropping and juxtaposition, plus a constant interaction between text and images.
And many of those images came from the most significant names of the period: artists like Chagall and Dufy; photographers such as Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Man Ray, George Platt Lynes and the youthful Richard Avedon. Carmel Snow also recognised the importance of good writing and among the authors she persuaded to contribute to her magazine were Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Colette, Virginia Woolf and Truman Capote. Carson McCullers's Ballad of the Sad Café was published in its entirety in one issue of Harper's Bazaar. As one commentator observed, she never saw fashion and its publications in isolation but rather as "an aspect of highly developed culture".
Carmel Snow always had an eye for encouraging potential talent, not least that of Diana Vreeland whose reputation as an editor would subsequently overshadow her own. In Vreeland's 1984 autobiography D.V. she recalls being offered a job by Snow after the latter had spotted her dancing at the St Regis Hotel in New York: "The next morning she called me up. She said she'd admired what I had on . . . and she asked me if I'd like a job."
Diana Vreeland later called Carmel Snow "a wonderful editor" and similar plaudits were awarded by the majority of those who worked with her. But many people could also testify to a ruthlessness when it came to getting what she wanted for Harper's Bazaar. On one occasion, she came upon a private portrait of Greta Garbo which the photographer George Hoyningen-Huene had promised would never be published. "I don't care if George rots in jail," she announced. "I want that picture."
In the post-war era, Carmel Snow usually got what she wanted because her position in the publishing world appeared inviolable. But she always used that power to help other talents.
She was one of the first people to recognise the merits of Christian Dior and the woman responsible for coining the term, the "new look". Similarly, she was an advocate of possibly the greatest designer of the 20th century, the Spaniard Cristóbal Balenciaga. When his clothes met with bafflement in Paris, she applauded him in solitude. "I didn't start a demonstration for Balenciaga then," she wrote afterwards, "but when I turned over the Paris issue of Harper's Bazaar to Balenciaga's collection, the rest of the fashion world began to pay attention." In later years, she probably wore his clothes more often than those of any other designer.
If Ireland forgot Carmel Snow, she never forgot Ireland. When Sybil Connolly staged her first important show at Dunsany Castle in 1953, the editor of Harper's Bazaar was in the audience, accompanied by Richard Avedon. In her memoirs, she remarked that what particularly pleased her about Connolly's work "was that she revived many of the old handicraft industries" which had once been the concern of Carmel Snow's own father.
After her retirement from Harper's Bazaar in 1958, she and her husband Palen Snow bought a house on the Co Mayo coast, Rossyvera, but were defeated by the Irish climate and returned to the US. There, although dead more than 40 years, she is still recalled and revered. Two of her granddaughters in New York are hoping to encourage a wider appreciation of Carmel Snow by writing a new biography of their famous forbear. As one of the finest editors to have come from Ireland, she certainly deserves to be remembered here as well.
