Case Study

THE VOGUE ARCHIVE

Before Vogue, magazine archives were basically all similar: you could browse page scans, and search text to see article matches. You would click on a headline, which would link you to the first page of an article. Simple. And it worked beautifully for The New Yorker, which, from its founding in 1925 until the 1990s, published little color and no photography.

But that wasn’t going to work for Vogue. The “fashion bible” was a feast for the eyes, an authoritative repository for the visual history of an entire industry. The articles per se were important, of course, but the photographs were the pure gold. No magazine archive had harvested thumbnails or indexed captions for each photograph, but the idea of a Vogue Archive felt far less compelling without an image search. It would have to be figured out. And what about the ads? They quite often featured the same models that appeared in the editorial spreads, wearing the same designers, shot by the same photographers. Ads were not incidental, but a huge part of what made Vogue such a rich resource. Surely people would want to search the ads alongside the edit. To prove this out, we interviewed potential power users from the world of fashion — the creative director at a major brand; a well-known photographer; a Hollywood period costume designer; editors at the magazine itself.

Our intuition proved true: these users craved a highly visual product with powerful search across both editorial and advertising. But from this market research, a specific demand emerged: the ability to search garments within photographs. These users wanted to search “green wool dress” and find dresses that were both wool and green — not simply a photograph whose caption contained all three of those words fairly close together. For the Vogue Archive to reach its full potential, to fully leverage the brand’s history (since 1892!), meant being able to conjure images in which a certain model wore a certain color, a certain photographer shot a certain designer, or a certain trend was represented by a certain type of dress during a certain three year period.

My saw enormous opportunity, but to seize it would mean an immense amount of work. The tagging, yes — we would have to take apart captions and associate metadata with every garment pictured; identify uncredited models; map terms like “emerald” and “plum” to “green” and “purple,” assign the proper first name to “Mrs. John Kennedy,” and make sure she came up if someone searched “Onassis” or “Bouvier.” But beyond even that, we would have to reinvent everything from the digitization process to the tagging tools to the search interface. We would end up partnering with WGSN and Proquest to market this tool to the fashion industry as well as schools and libraries. And we would need the editors, the marketing bigwigs, the IT brass, and the lawyers to sign off on everything.

The result was a game-changer. The project paid for itself in the first year with institutional and professional subscriptions. A curated selection of the archive was offered on Vogue.com, along with a public-facing “Voguepedia” wiki that my team prototyped for the editors as a layer of context uniting the past and future of the magazine and the industry. Image search became a standard feature for magazine archives, the best of which licensed the Bondi platform, which the company completely reengineered for Vogue.

My role, over two and a half years:

• Directed all aspects of the digitization and productization of the Vogue back catalog since 1892, including content strategy, business plan, contract negotiations, budget, and technology solutions

• Conducted focus groups to explore the value and possible uses of a Vogue archive. Interviewed likely users from the fashion industry and other creative fields about how the content could best serve them, and used this research to guide our business rules, feature set, and metadata approach

• Built consensus and orchestrated teamwork among Condé Nast executives, Vogue editors, and a complicated array of designers, lawyers, programmers, business partners, and vendors

• Piloted the creation of Voguepedia, a wiki of Vogue-centric articles about designers, models, brands and trends, to serve as an inviting front end to explore the vast archive. Included in the relaunch of Vogue.com

• Oversaw a dedicated staff of photo taggers and Voguepedia writers, and a budget of more than $1 million annually

• Collaborated with Proquest and WGSN to integrate with or update their interfaces to leverage our groundbreaking metadata. Visited Proquest’s headquarters in Ann Arbor and their scanning vendor’s facility in India to meet and train their staff.