As She Appears On Her 50th Cover, Karen Elson Looks Back At Her Life In Vogue

If the November 2023 issue comprises a farewell salute to Vogue House – British Vogue’s Mayfair headquarters for 65 years – it represents a personal milestone for Karen Elson, too. On one of this month’s triptych of covers, the model – a defining face of the late ’90s and early ’00s – leans casually against a Royal Mail postbox in front of the W1 office in a scarlet Alexander McQueen gown, staring down the camera in what marks her 50th Vogue cover.

“God, I can still remember going to Vogue House for go-sees when I was starting out and being like, this is where fashionable things happen, you know?” Elson says now with a raspy laugh from her home in Nashville. “I felt so intimidated by the building with all of its legends and lore. After I shot my first Vogue Italia cover with Steven [Meisel], I got cast in two shoots with Arthur [Elgort] and started to appear more frequently in the magazine from there, but British Vogue never really lost its allure for me.”

Elson might have appeared regularly in Vogue’s pages, but there was nothing regular about her shoots. If her first editorial for British Vogue saw the Oldham girl tearing around London’s parks in silk slips, glittering tights and Manolo Blahniks, her second – fittingly titled “Opulence” – featured the then 18-year-old swanning through the grounds of a stately home in Jean Paul Gaultier Couture, her flaming red hair obscured by an ostrich feather hat.

It’s about this time that she met a young fashion editor by the name of Edward Enninful, and the two immediately clicked. “Obviously my background and Edward’s background are very different, but I think we bonded because we were both outsiders in this glamorous world, in a sense. Growing up in northern England, my family lived pay cheque to pay cheque. I was at the bottom of the food chain in the fashion industry, and I had to climb my way up. Every step of the way, there were people who said, ‘Oh, you’re never going to amount to anything.’ And it just fuelled me to work harder. Here we are, 50 covers later, and it was still so fun going into Vogue House for the November cover shoot, seeing Naomi and Linda, Mona and Precious – all of these models from different decades of the zeitgeist who all consider Vogue House a kind of home.”

As the November 2023 covers are unveiled, revisit some of Elson’s earliest shoots for British Vogue, below.