‘Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance” – Coco Chanel. “I’m a kind of fashion nymphomaniac who never gets an orgasm” – Karl Lagerfeld. “Words are useless. Gobble, gobble, gobble” – Edna Mode.

Fashion does give good quote, but is there a pithy one-liner about fashion journalists trashing their former employer when they have been sacked, and that employer then duly freaking the freak out? Strangely, despite extensive research (AKA 10 minutes on Wikiquote), it seems not. So let’s just go for the cliche: it’s been HANDBAGS AT DAWN this week at Vogue House in London, with many of former editor Alexandra Shulman’s staff leaving as new editor Edward Enninful arrives, and some are detailing why without recourse to any of the usual fashion euphemisms.

Now hold up! This is a celebrity column – are we now saying fashion journalists are celebrities? Well, this story has been covered with the kind of breathless chinstroking not seen since the glory days of Brangelina. And given that this faction of the LiS family learned her trade at the knee of fashion, I fully endorse this. Indeed, think of me as the Henry Conway of journalism – the irrelevant Z-lister who ruins all the photos and occasionally gets invited to parties, although no one is ever sure why.

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Lucinda Chambers, Vogue’s now very much former fashion director, gave an interview this week to relatively little-known fashion website Vestoj, in which she suggested that some of her shoots were “crappy” because she had to please advertisers; that she hasn’t bothered to read Vogue “in years”; and that fashion magazines “cajole, bully and encourage” people into buying things “they don’t need”. There were other things, too, but, LiS is not allowed to detail them after a legal notice was issued by Condé Nast on Thursday, approximately four days after almost every paper on the planet laid out Chambers’ allegations in full. But remember, fashion magazines absolutely don’t “cajole and bully” needlessly. Vestoj, which has one high-profile American Vogue staffer on its editorial board, initially removed Chambers’ interview from the internet due to “pressures” from “powerful institutions and individuals”. That the interview has since been reposted (albeit with some amendments) similarly suggests these pressures aren’t quite what they used to be.

The main takeaway here has nothing to do with the specifics of Chambers’ allegations, most of which can be filed under the “Pope, Catholic” section of revelations. Rather, it is how interested outsiders are in this story, especially people who normally take no interest in fashion at all. Even the Today programme sniffed around it, which is quite a turn-up for an interview with a relative nonentity on a fashion website most fashion journalists had never previously read. Plenty of people badmouth their former employers – indeed, there is a whole industry of journalists making so-called careers out of doing just this, with an obsessive degree of ferocity. But there is always a sense of glee when backbiting breaks out in the fashion world, a sense of relief that the industry’s superficiality has finally been confirmed. Ha ha, we can all stop quoting Miranda Priestley’s speech about the importance of blue and go back to sneering at how stupid all this lady nonsense is! Because, of course, no other form of magazine journalism has to worry about advertisers, or tries to sell its readers crap. Certainly not manly car magazines or macho tech publications.

Let us end as we began, with a handy fashion quote, because it turns out Coco Chanel did indeed provide a nice summation of this story: “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” No sign yet of Lagerfeld’s thoughts on the importance of non-disclosure agreements, but LiS will keep you posted.