Untold secrets of The Glamour Awards
Until now. Part one - 2004-2009
I met about 400 women over the weekend at the She’s Electric events that I host. And most of them wanted to talk to me about one thing: Glamour magazine. I feel torn in those moments. On one hand, I would hate anyone to think that ‘former editor of Glamour’ is the only way I define myself. But then I’m also deeply proud of how much the magazine clearly meant to so many people, under me and my team. So I am really happy to chat about it.
With that in mind, I thought I would write a little whistle stop tour through the history of the event that became the centre of the universe for anyone who worked at the magazine - The Glamour Women of the Year Awards. It was always the first Tuesday in June, which admittedly that doesn’t trip off the tongue quite as nicely as ‘the first Monday in May’ . But that first Tuesday in June became, over time, a really big deal in the UK events calendar, which is another thing that makes me proud.
A few things to remember when you’re reading these stories. It sounds very ‘life or death’ for something that is just a celebrity awards show. And that’s mad, I know. But bear in mind that the whole thing was being bankrolled by a sponsor - be it Next, Nokia or Vaseline (more on that later) - to the tune of hundreds of thousands of pounds. That brings with it some major pressure to make it a success. And my role in making it a success was to guarantee (gulp) the attendance of multiple A-list celebrities. Without them, the press would all write that it was an embarrassingly crap affair, which has a major affect on the standing of the magazine and therefore its profitability. So I took it very seriously. One celebrity drop-out? Not such a big deal you might think. But I never knew how many drop-outs I might be dealing with, so we treated every celebrity’s attendance as a life and death matter. Everyone had fun at the Glamour Awards, but only because a small team at Glamour had had very much no fun in the run-up. Every single year, about three weeks before the event, I would start having the recurring dream where I’m standing by myself in the purpose-built marquee, save for Dan Wootton and the 3am girls standing there pointing and laughing at me.
Anyone who’s still in my orbit from those days - photographers, celebrities, publicists, former advertisers and so on - all want to talk to me about the Glamour Awards; how much fun they were and how much they miss them. We really did have some laughs in making them happen. We also had plenty of tear-soaked breakdowns, but definitely more laughs. We launched the event in 2004 and the last one I worked on was in 2017. Here, I offer my personal stand-out memory from each of those 18 awards shows, in a special two-part newsletter.
2004: Surviving David Schwimmer
I can still feel the terror I felt in this first year as if it was yesterday. Launching this event was way more stressful than launching the magazine. We’d signed a beauty brand - Biotherm - to sponsor and they'd been promised this thing would be marvellous and crammed with celebrities. It was a tough thing to get celebrity agents excited about. If it wasn’t known and tried and tested, they rarely liked to make a leap of faith for you. I also needed to make sure that our winning Woman of the Year would be someone who could attend but also feature on the magazine’s cover. So they needed to be someone who would sell magazines as well as turn up to the event. Our first ‘woman of the year’ was Christina Aguilera. She was all in for the cover but declined to attend our unknown event. In trying to balance the success of the event and newsstand sales, I gave in and gave her the cover. Kim Cattrall also opted for the cover and an award, but to stay home.
At this point, the publisher was getting cross with me because I couldn’t personally force any celebrities to attend an event they’ve never heard of. Oh was I stressed.