In case you haven’t heard, Lucinda Chambers, a former fashion director at British Vogue has thrown some serious shade at the current state of the fashion industry, in a tell-all interview with Vestoj, a critical fashion journal based in London.

So, who is Lucinda Chambers and why should you care? Well, she is one of the industry’s most important stylists and she had spent more than 36 years at British Vogue, working her way up from Grace Coddington’s assistant to holding one of the title’s most senior positions. She’s worked with the industry’s biggest and best photographers and some of the world’s most visible models and celebrities.

Chambers told Vestoj that she was unceremoniously fired from Vogue following news that Edward Enninful OBE would join the title as Editor-in-Chief, after Alexander Schulman stepped down from the top job. In the original version of the Vestoj piece, Chambers said she didn’t know the firing was coming and it all went down in mere minutes. However, this paragraph has since been removed at the request of Condé Nast and Enninful's legal team. BoF suggests that perhaps some of Chambers’ allegations were not fact-checked.

However, the fact that Chambers agreed to a totally honest, unfiltered interview with a small magazine is a rare feat in itself. In the interview, she boldly bashes figures like Renzo Rosso (president of the OTB Group which owns the likes of Maison Margiela and Marni), publicly admits she doesn’t even read Vogue, questions the relevance of magazines in 2017 and calls out the pressures placed on designers to design a ridiculous number of collections per year.

Seriously, this is ripe, juicy gossip at its most superbly succulent, and Lucinda Chambers really doesn’t hold back. It’s not every day that a seasoned fashion insider speaks so candidly about the state of fashion and casually drops lines such as; “The [Vogue UK] June cover with Alexa Chung in a stupid Michael Kors T-shirt is crap” and “There are very few fashion magazines that make you feel empowered” as well as “You’re not allowed to fail in fashion.”

The real tea is that not soon after the interview went up last week, it was swiftly removed by the editors at Vestoj. Of course, at this point, the news had circulated, screenshots were made and “receipts” were saved. It all went viral.

The article was later republished with an editor’s note stating: “We’ve been contacted by lawyers on behalf of Condé Nast Limited and Edward Enninful OBE and have been requested to amend the interview. This request has now been granted.”

There’s no doubt the publishing giant strong-armed the independent publication with hefty legal threats, forcing Vestoj to oblige. Even the most independent of publications aren’t immune to the pressures of the industry, which is exactly what Chambers touches on in the scathing piece, and in a bitter twist of irony, Condé Nast didn’t shy away from its power to apply pressure.

You can read the amended piece in its entirety here.

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