Raúl Martinez on Shaping the Global Image of Vogue

With more than three decades in the fashion industry under his belt, Raúl Martinez has defined how generations have come to see beauty, celebrity, and pop culture — first across magazines and advertising, now across an increasingly interconnected global media landscape. Back at Vogue as Global Creative Director since 2024, Martinez oversees the creative vision of the international tome across all owned and operated editions, guiding the visual identity of 12 markets — the U.S., U.K., Italy, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Arabia, Spain, Taiwan, and China — while keeping a cohesive creative dialogue running across print, digital, social, and video.

That global fluency was earned in two very different rooms. Martinez arrived at Vogue in 1988 as associate art director, working alongside Anna Wintour from her debut issue and rising to art director by 1990, before leaving in the mid-nineties to co-found AR New York with Alex Gonzalez, then the creative director of ELLE and his partner in both life and business. Over the years that followed, the boutique branding agency grew to over 100 employees, building campaigns for Calvin Klein, Valentino, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Yves Saint Laurent while extending beyond fashion to clients like PepsiCo and Mattel. By the time AR was sold to Publicis Groupe, it had become one of the industry’s most quietly consequential shops.

In January 2021, Martinez took on one of fashion’s most scrutinized rebuilds, joining Victoria’s Secret as Head Creative Director before later becoming EVP. The remit spanned imagery, visual merchandising, and media across the lingerie, PINK, and beauty divisions, arriving at what he describes as “a very particular moment in time for the brand.” The challenge, he says, was “how do you bring authenticity of diversity and female voices into a place that had not? Not only through visuals, but also internally in the company.” That philosophy reshaped Victoria’s Secret’s visual language, replacing fantasy with a more editorial and documentary spirit, anchored by the VS Collective.

He left in early 2024 for the company he had already helped shape twice over. His current appointment as Vogue’s Global Creative Director was a third act at Condé Nast following his original run from 1988 to the mid-nineties and a second stretch that began in 2009 and saw him named chief creative officer in 2015. The role itself was one Wintour had carried alongside her editorial duties since 2013, when Vogue globalized its operations, and Wintour framed the hire as a homecoming, praising both his instincts and his knowledge of the magazine. Filmed at Condé Nast headquarters and directed by Will Pippin for Models.com, Martinez speaks with Editorial Director Irene Ojo-Felix about leading one of fashion’s most influential global creative networks, nurturing the next generation of image-makers, and why the photographs that endure are never simply about clothes, but about the emotions they leave behind.