Vogue quietly corrects errors to Philly travel guide
The updates were made after a campaign by Billy Penn's 21-year-old deputy editor.
Vogue had the right idea when it published “An Insider’s Guide to Philadelphia: Where to Stay, Eat, and Shop” last month on its website.
Just 90 miles down I-95, Philly’s a bedroom city to New York — and full of a lot of great places to stay, eat, and shop.
But the Vogue fact-checkers needed to do a little bit more fact-checking. The piece was filled with inaccuracies that a local could pick apart. C’mon, man. New York media should know by now that Philly don’t play that.
“They wrote that Frank Gehry designed the entire Philadelphia Museum of Art, but that was impossible because the building opened a year before he was born,” said Billy Penn editor Beatrice Forman, who wrote an open letter to Vogue in Billy Penn that called out the venerable fashion publication.
Other factual faux pas included confusing with El Vez with El Rey — there is no down-low speakeasy at El Vez. The Vogue article suggested tourists visit Rikumo in Center City, but the Japanese tea and tchotchke shop moved to Ardmore in 2020.
The piece also pointed fashionistas to Meadowsweet Mercantile, but that boutique closed its storefront, too. (As Forman noted: “Philly’s coolest young people are ordering their trendy prairie-wear online from Madewell and Reformation, anyway.”)
Ouch.
Forman also emailed the website’s editors and offered to write her own guide that she wrote wasn’t a “stilted version of Philly that takes its cue from overly-filtered travel porn of Rittenhouse Square rowhomes.” She offered her services for a price, of course.
As of Monday the inaccuracies were removed. Vogue, Forman said in a tweet, did not issue a correction nor did it take her up on her offer to write a new and improved version.
“I mean, I feel vindicated,” Forman said Monday afternoon. “It’s always nice to know that you were right and that someone listened to you. But the fact they didn’t do their due diligence, as a fellow journalist, that leaves me a little peeved.”
Not only was Forman miffed with Vogue because she’s a proud Philadelphian, she also grew up reading fashion magazines like Vogue and one day, she says, she hopes to work for one. “They report on stories I care about,” Forman said. “So to see mistakes like this gives credence to the idea that fashion journalists don’t take things seriously and that they are not real journalists and that’s the farthest from the truth.”