Audrey Withers

Elizabeth Audrey Withers OBE (28 March 1905 – 26 October 2001) was an English journalist, also active as a member of the Council of Industrial Design. She edited the British magazine Vogue between 1940 and 1960 and was the author of The Palaces of Leningrad and an autobiography.

While she used her own name professionally, in some other contexts she was known by her married names, Mrs A. H. Stewart from 1933 to 1952 and Mrs Victor Kennett from 1953 until her death.

Early life

Withers was born at Hale in Lancashire (a parish later transferred to Cheshire), the daughter of Dr Percy Withers (1867–1945), a physician and author, by his marriage to Mary Wolley Summers (1870–1947). Her mother, who had lost both parents at an early age, belonged to a family which owned John Summers & Sons, a company operating a steelworks on the Wirral, and was herself a graduate of Somerville College, Oxford. The family soon moved to the Lake District, where Withers grew up with an older sister and a younger brother on the shores of Derwent Water. The girls were first educated at home by a governess.

On the home front, Withers joined the London Fire Brigade as a volunteer and acted as a driver to senior officers. Meanwhile, Harvey Nichols advertised in Vogue "Especially designed gas protection costumes ... in oiled silk and available in dawn apricot, amethyst, eau-de-nil and rose pink". Her personal style was frugal, preferring sandwiches to expensive restaurants and buses to taxis, and she became a member of the Council of Industrial Design. so she delegated fashion coverage to others. She later wrote

She resigned as editor of Vogue in 1960, sensing a wind of change. They also collaborated on the introduction to In the Russian Style (1975), edited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.