At first, Shulman was dismissive of accusations of "heroin chic": "Not many people have actually said to me that they have looked at my magazine and decided to become anorexic," she said in 1998, with crass flippancy shocking to anyone whose family has been touched by this devastating disease.

But when starved models started dying in the 2000s — including one who collapsed on a catwalk — Shulman turned 180 degrees and was one of the first editors to take action. While Anna Wintour lends her authority to the Council of Fashion Designers "Health Initiative" — an exercise in which fashion designers solemnly promised to make sure that their models would be allowed "access to nutritious food during shows" (what happened before?) — it seems probable that without Shulman such an initiative might not have happened. High fashion must be the most dictatorial and woman-hating business in the world, yet in 2009 Shulman wrote to Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Versace and others to tick them off publicly for sending samples in ever-smaller sizes, as though for clothes to look better, women must get thinner. 

Launching Vogue's June 2012 edition, which contained an internationally agreed statement against size-zero fashion, Shulman took aim at model agents and photographers as well as designers and called for schools to sit up and take note. What gives Shulman more credibility in this endeavour than other fashionistas is not only her own pleasantly feminine size-14 (UK) figure, but her reputation as a hard worker who rose through the ranks by being good at her job, intelligent and likeable, rather than by backstabbing — a real-life Ugly Betty. 

She has made misjudgments; but her innate good taste would never have chosen a cover featuring a black athlete and a blonde posing in tribute to the 1933 King Kong movie poster, as the US Vogue notoriously did in 2008. Shulman's gift is to keep fashion in perspective and never to confuse it with politics. Her best-selling millennium issue, with its mirror cover, made the simple statement that the reader, not the model or the designer, should be the centre of the fashion story.

Can there be a better role model for our daughters: a normal-sized, middle-aged, attractive woman who enjoys elegant clothes, but who above all enjoys hard work and life itself?