1920–2020 Vogue Paris - 100 Ans Anniversary by Guy Bourdin

Vogue Paris was founded by Condé Nast in 1920 and is the oldest French fashion magazine still in publication, as well as the only edition of Vogue named after a city rather than a country. Its centenary fell in 2020, but the celebration was delayed by the pandemic, and the anniversary issue appeared in October 2021. It went on sale on 28 September, a few days before the exhibition Vogue Paris 1920–2020 opened at the Palais Galliera, the fashion museum of the City of Paris. The issue runs to 420 pages and draws largely on the magazine's archive. It was also the last issue under Emmanuelle Alt, who had led the title since 2011, so it marks both a centenary and the end of an editorship.

For a century Vogue Paris presented the city as the centre of fashion and cultural life, and the Parisienne as the embodiment of its reader. The Palais Galliera exhibition that accompanied this issue, open from October 2021 to January 2022, traced that history through the photographers the magazine supported, among them Hoyningen-Huene, Horst, Bourdin, Klein, Newton, Lindbergh, Testino and Inez & Vinoodh. It also gave space to the couturiers the magazine championed throughout their careers, notably Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, and to the two women who appeared most often on its covers, Catherine Deneuve and Kate Moss. The anniversary issue belongs to that institutional moment, when the magazine's archive was being presented in a museum as part of the history of French fashion.

By 2021 print magazines were reconsidering their place alongside digital media, and their archives had become one of their most distinctive assets. A century of covers, editorials and commissioned photographs forms a record that a newsfeed does not replace. Building an anniversary issue largely from archival material reflects that shift: the magazine's past is treated as content in its own right, and the issue works partly as a reference volume. Its appearance alongside a major museum exhibition reinforces the point. Fashion magazines, once read and discarded, were being collected, exhibited and studied as documents of visual culture.

The cover reuses a single photograph by Guy Bourdin, first published in Vogue Paris in April 1979. Bourdin is the photographer most closely identified with the magazine: his work for it, from the 1950s into the 1980s, combined saturated colour, precise composition and a deliberate strangeness that set it apart from conventional fashion imagery. A red heart, isolated and graphic, shows no garment and no model. Its selection suggests that the anniversary is about the magazine's visual authority rather than any particular season or face. Reusing an image from the archive, instead of commissioning a new cover, also makes the issue's argument visible on the newsstand: the history of Vogue Paris is its subject.

The issue sits at a turning point in the magazine's history. It closes Emmanuelle Alt's decade as editor and coincides with the museum exhibition that placed Vogue Paris within the history of French fashion. Anniversary issues keep their interest for collectors of fashion print because they summarise a title's identity in a single volume, and this one does so through archival photography and a cover by the photographer most associated with it. Condition is part of that value. Large-format issues of more than four hundred pages are prone to spine damage and cover wear; this copy has an intact spine, clean pages and only light shelf wear.