Landels was not a numbers man, famously advising staff that the key to happiness was “never, ever, making eye contact with a bank statement”. In his memoir The Glossy Years (2019) Nicholas Coleridge, who would take over as editor, recalled that for Landels things were either “so amusing” and “quite chic, I think” or else “perfectly ghastly, My Dear”: “There wasn’t a lot in between.”

Landels, who cycled to work and wore a crocheted gypsy shawl and green velvet slippers in the office, carried his own insouciant style into every aspect of the magazine. Relaxed and witty, with a crisp Italian accent, Landels focused on the visual side, employing photographers such as Norman Parkinson, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton, and making the lay-outs edgy.Īs for the written content, he supported and was supported by the magazine’s brilliant features editor Ann Barr, who introduced readers to the talents of such figures as Nicholas Coleridge, Craig Brown and Loyd Grossman, and was credited with coining the terms “Sloane Ranger” and “Foodie” (both categories well represented among the magazine’s readership).

Harpers & Queen was born out of an amalgamation of Harper’s Bazaar, a fashion magazine which had launched in the UK in 1929 but had lost direction, with Queen, a society magazine for, as one journalist put it, “the sort of minor aristos who’d been dabbling in the Swinging London scene” – and of which the Italian-born Landels had been art editor.ĭuring Landels’s years in the editor’s chair, Harpers & Queen – aimed, he claimed, at “Caroline, who has two houses, two dogs, two children and, sadly, one husband” – became London’s most talked-about magazine. Willie Landels, who has died aged 94, became best known as the editor of the newly formed Harpers & Queen magazine from its foundation in 1970 to 1986, but he combined this distinction with a career as an artist and designer which stretched back to a first prize for painting at the Youth Biennale in Italy in 1948.

The fantasy world of josephine wall