BEING A MAN AT VOGUE : by william norwich.

When I got to Vogue in the late 1980's, it was like coming in from a blizzard. The daily panorama of women thriving there, working women who seemed to rise from the very pages of the magazine -- it was, to say the least, a heady experience.

Strong feelings of attachment were established, but it was a job first and foremost. Vogue could be extremely festive, but it was not a party. For instance, I learned very quickly that as a man in the office, one did not comment about a colleague's clothes or appearance. Usually a comment like ''I love what you are wearing,'' especially to the editor in chief, Anna Wintour, was met with a polite stare or curt ''Thank you.'' The reason for this became evident when, during one of my first days there, I wandered off to the office of Shirley Lord, then the magazine's beauty director, whom I had known through family friends since I was a teenager.

''God, Shirley, it sure smells good in here,'' I said.

She looked at me as if I had just fallen off a cabbage truck. ''Well, it should,'' Shirley said.

What was it like to be a guy at Vogue, where the ratio of women to men is about nine to one? To tell you the truth, I never really noticed. But then, I am not exactly Derek Jeter, if you catch my drift. At Vogue -- where, in addition to holding assorted newspaper jobs, I was an editor until 1997 -- you were either on the beam or off the beam, whether you were female, male or, I suppose, undecided. By way of providing lighthearted instruction to a lost soul on his staff, a colleague once explained: ''At Vogue we worship one god. Her name is Anna Wintour.'' In exchange for our devotion and our understanding of the beam, subject to change each season, Anna provided her staff with the greatest gift an employer can give: ready access and rapid decisions. Management -- what a concept!

Unlike publications dealing in straight news, a magazine like Vogue exerts its bias like a big, beautiful red balloon. Its mandate is not only to bring fashion news to its readers but also to champion the industry, merchandise its bounty and encourage designers it believes in -- and sometimes does not believe in, except for all of their lovely advertising -- as well as enthusiastically celebrate everyone from artists to zoologists who alight within fashion's orbit. Why would it be odd for a guy, even if in the laboring minority, to work in such an environment?

''I attended an all-boys' school growing up in England, and in my 18 months at Vogue I attended an all-girls' school,'' says James Truman, Condé Nast's editorial director, who was Vogue's features editor in the late 80's. ''Both had their merits. But on the whole, I enjoyed the girls' school more.''

My sentiments, too. I attended an all-boys' school in New England. As an only child, I grew up with a mother who loved clothes, and clothes loved her right back. She was sick most of my teenage years, but there were good days when there was always some kind of interest in fashion, whether it was a new dressing gown, some lipstick, a bottle of Estée Lauder's Youth Dew or her new copy of Vogue, precipitating, I recall, a long discussion about the gap in Lauren Hutton's teeth. I thought, on those days, we might live forever.

From childhood, I associated fashion with vitality. But make no mistake. Vogue's women did not run around the office exclaiming and gesticulating like a saccharine charade of ''Funny Face.'' (Well, Polly Mellen was occasionally given to symphonic articulations.) Their conduct was concise and disciplined. Despite the racks and racks of the latest frocks, Vogue was not a costume ball. No one played with the clothes, except for that one time a Vogue fellow was caught on the security camera in the main closet, trying on high heels. Manolos, of course -- he was a Vogue man, after all.

The best ''sittings'' editors function as the best journalists do, except that their medium is pictures, not words. But photo shoots are absurdly difficult. The sittings editor proceeds with all the care and exactitude of a surgeon, placating everyone from the famous photographer to the model-agency booker just back from rehab to the new assistant just down from some Ivy League tower, in a state of disbelief that everything her parents and her schooling told her were her entitlements in life has led her to this, standing on the sidelines in charge of safety pins and a Polaroid camera while some cockney camps it up!

Even Vogue mice become divas, as a short missive lingering one morning by the fax machine would attest. From an assistant to the sittings editor, Phyllis Posnick, concerning a shoot with Irving Penn, it read: ''Phyllis, I spoke with the person who is in charge of the mice at Rockefeller U. and he said that he can sedate them if once we start shooting Penn thinks they're too active. He is checking to see if he can get thin mice that look like the fat mouse.'' (New paragraph.) ''If everything works out with the Rockefeller mice and scale what day should I tell people we are shooting?'' (New paragraph.) ''Also Penn wants two days for the mice photograph. . . .''

At Vogue, gender politics was nothing compared to that portentous question ''What does Vogue think?'' What does Vogue think of mitral-valve procedures, flirty prints, pulse-point pedicures, Aimee Mann, the new Martin Amis novel and ''clothes with a delightfully down-the-rabbit-hole feel''? New editors and assistants in the features department suffered the most; sometimes it was like watching someone landing on a new planet without a cushion to soften the impact. ''Working one's way up the ranks is so mid-20th century,'' a young assistant once told me.

On the other hand, too much ''beam'' at Vogue, and the twinkle could blind you. A young man just graduated from Yale once interviewed at Vogue for a job as a features assistant. Last step in the process was meeting Anna.

''Why do you want to work at Vogue?'' Anna asked.

(Reports that Anna always wears sunglasses indoors are highly exaggerated.)

''Because I think Vogue is the best general interest magazine in America,'' he enthused.

Oops, wrong answer. Despite its broad coverage of contemporary culture, Vogue is a fashion magazine for women put out (mostly) by women. Of course, there have always been a number of men who have contributed to the magazine's fashion allure. At present, André Leon Talley and Hamish Bowles are two of its most iconic representatives. In fact, in Talley's soon-to-be-published memoir, ''A.L.T.,'' he tells how, as a 6-foot-7 African-American teenager in North Carolina, his ritual, after church on Sundays, was to walk across to the white section of town to buy Vogue. Once, he recalls, white boys threw stones at him from a passing car. Vogue, he explains, ''had a distinct and worldly style that seemed innately right to me, and to which I felt an immediate connection.''

Unlike Talley and Bowles, most of the men at Vogue work in either the features department, on the publishing side or, as Nicky Haslam puts it, ''in the men's department.'' Meaning: the art department, where Haslam, an interior designer based in London, worked in the early 1960's.

Also in the men's department over the years were Alexander Liberman, the legendary art director and artist; the esteemed literary editor Leo Lerman; and in 1936, when Vogue merged with Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield. Crowninshield, Vanity Fair's founding editor, was a reluctant fashion contributor, however. ''A gentleman knows how to dress,'' he once retorted to Edna Chase when discussing a service piece about men's wardrobes. Many years later, Graydon Carter, the current editor of Vanity Fair, cut his teeth at Condé Nast as a contributing editor to Vogue while he was still editing Spy, the satirical monthly.

''It was a bit like being a fox in a chicken house,'' Carter remembers. His debonair presence in the Vogue office for the weekly 11 a.m. features meeting caused great distress to Shirley Lord, who was a favorite Spy target. But never mind. Carter, dressed in what I recall was an especially smart tailor-made corduroy suit, held sway by frequently suggesting an illustrated story on fishing flies or duck decoys while the ladies listened, unconvinced. The recollection still amuses Anna. ''I always thought he used to suggest these stories to provoke us,'' she says. Seated at her office desk in her silvery aerie overlooking Times Square, Anna explains: ''Men are not second-class citizens at Vogue. They can do anything the women can do, except wear the clothes.'' She pauses, shrugs her shoulders, laughs and adds, ''Well, not as much.''

For nearly 25 years, until his retirement in the mid-70's, the Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, a Russian émigré who came to Manhattan by way of Paris, was ''basically the fashion voice of Vogue,'' Anna says. Chicer than thou, the Baron, as he was called, never wore socks. Why should he? His shoes were lined in silk. Pencil-thin, poker-faced and wickedly funny, he always dressed in black, with a white shirt. He was born in 1904 to a wealthy Jewish banking family that had been ennobled by the czar, but when his father died, the only money he could find was an amount already deposited in a checking account. After an exhaustive search, the Baron gave up and decided to come to America and find work. But before he left Paris in the 1930's, he spent the last of his money giving a fête champêtre, or rural gala, at his house near the Bois de Boulogne. Cole Porter composed a special score, and Christian Bérard did the decorations, covering the entire house in blue satin. Elsa Maxwell, who helped organize the party, concluded that there ''would be far less unrest abroad in the world if all farmers were as gay as our 400 'peasants.'''

Before arriving at Vogue, the Baron played the lead role in the 1932 vampire film ''Vampyr, or the Strange Adventure of David Gray,'' and worked at Town & Country and Harper's Bazaar. His eye for talent and his nurturing of American designers like Calvin Klein, Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta were instrumental in making Seventh Avenue an international fashion force.

''Niki had such personal style and chic,'' recalls Susan Train, the Condé Nast Paris bureau chief and a Vogue editor since 1951. ''He didn't do photo shoots, per se. By today's terminology, he was a market editor. He was adored by Seventh Avenue. 'Send us the Baron,' they would say, and he would sweep in and advise them, explain to them what Vogue was thinking.'' The women of Vogue, as the former editor Grace Mirabella once observed, ''didn't walk then, they swept; and they didn't speak, they intoned.'' So, too, did the Baron. Louise Grunwald, who worked at Vogue during the Diana Vreeland regime, remembers de Gunzburg for his wry sense of humor: ''He was very droll and straight-faced. I bumped into Niki at a party when I had on this sleeveless - aren't they always sleeveless? -- black mink jerkin that hooked in the back -- très chic -- and he said, 'Next year you can afford the sleeves.''' Before he died, on Feb. 20, 1981, the Baron, a friend recalls, asked that his black boots be put on, ''because he had to leave now.'' Which is very Vogue, very reminiscent of Vreeland's last words: ''Don't stop the music, or I'll tell my father.''

After we finish reminiscing for this article, Elizabeth Saltzman, a former editor at Vogue and now the fashion director of Vanity Fair, says: ''Admit it. Vogue was all the sisters you never had and always wanted. The girls competed to look good for Anna, but the boys were so far and few between that they were all just adored.''

Adored? I don't know. I certainly had my share of bad days at Vogue, usually if I didn't get an assignment I wanted, and then I could slide right off the Vogue beam faster than anyone. Sisters? Sometimes when I shared an office with Miranda Brooks, the gardening editor, I would hear a thump and turn around and find beautiful Miranda standing on her head, ''to relieve stress,'' she explained. Made sense to me. Sometimes when the hallway was jammed with racks of clothes awaiting Anna's perusal, some of the racks would be diverted into my office, which was across from hers, especially when someone important was visiting, like S.I. Newhouse. If I had to go to the loo, or lunch, I thought nothing of scrambling out from under silky frocks with the latest furbelows. The clothes were always fabulous!

Then there was the week I thought it would serve a writing exercise if I wore skirts -- skirts for men were particularly prevalent that season. My first look was a Burberry tartan kilt. Seeing me in the hallway, Grace Coddington grabbed the kilt at the waist and turned it around. I was wearing it backward. ''If a man wears a skirt, the idea is to look rugged, like a girl stepping off a lacrosse field,'' Grace said.

My next look was some long black wool number to the ankle. ''This skirt is by Jean Paul Gaultier,'' I told Anna.

''I can see that,'' she responded.

''Is your fanny cold?'' Elizabeth asked. ''Why don't you tie a sweater around your waist to keep you warm?''

Of all the Vogue ''sisters,'' Anna was Queen Bee. For all intents and purposes, hers was a loving realm. I recall a particular evening riding downtown in her car after work. I was meeting someone special on our third date. Eager to please, nervous about my chances, I had bought my new friend a shirt that day at Giorgio Armani. ''What's in the bag?'' Anna asked as we drove down Fifth Avenue.

I told all. Third date, new shirt, Il Cantinori for dinner. ''I'll keep the shirt,'' she said.

''Excuse me?''

''Give me the bag -- it's too soon for presents,'' Anna said, reaching for the Armani sack. ''Trust me.''

I did. And here my friend and I are, nearly nine years later. During one fashion week in New York, my ''sisters'' and I went en masse to a Richard Tyler fashion show. Botox was pretty new then, and we suspected that one of our colleagues was using it. But it was not until that show, when her expensive new Jil Sander coat, resting on a floor lamp, started to smolder that we knew for sure. Her face could not register any reaction.

Returning to the office, we were squawking over this exciting revelation in the back of a taxi when the driver spoke up. ''What's the big deal?'' he asked and invited us to look closely behind his ears, where there were raw, scarlet scars from his, yes, just six-week-old face lift. Needless to say, in that moment, I knew that Vogue, or at least what interests Vogue, does not discriminate.

[copied from the New York Times]

Speechless. Such a great article. Proves to me that men can fit in there.