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Elizabeth Ann JonesFor Elizabeth as her first name see (born 5 September 1958) is a British journalist.
She began her career as a fashion journalist, but her work has broadened into confessional writing. Jones divides opinion. While she has gained positive responses, a "beautifully natural writer, as well as a funny one" according to Deborah Ross in The Independent, some of her articles have been fiercely criticised.
A former editor of Marie Claire, she has been on the staff of The Sunday Times and the Evening Standard. Jones writes columns for the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday.
According to Jones, "I was six when I first realised how hideous I looked", and she has been an anorexic since the age of about 11. By the age of 17 she wished to look like model Janice Dickinson. Discovering Vogue magazine in Southend Public Library in August 1977, was a revelation for her. It "wasn’t just a magazine to me, its cover was a mirror: how I wanted to look, dress and be". Jones tells Decca Aitkenhead that she discovered Vogue at 17, in other words a year or so earlier.
In 1989, she began an 11-year stint at The Sunday Times Magazine, becoming deputy editor of their "Style" magazine in 1998.
In April 1999, Jones was appointed editor of the UK edition of Marie Claire. An announcement by Jones during June 2000 that the leading fashion magazines were setting up a self-regulatory body concerning the size of models was "contradicted" by the editors of rival magazines. Faced by a declining circulation,An article from this period asserts that circulation initially rose after Jones became editor. See she was sacked from this post two years laterLiz Jones's Diary: How One Single Girl Got Married p. 70 for refusing to use bulimic models and (according to Jones) listing in the magazine the freebies she had been offered in the previous month. She has continued to write about the fashion industry.
Often considered somewhat self-obsessed, with the veracity of her confessions questioned, she has been defended by Tanya Gold who wrote: "There are many confessional journalists in Britain, but none as forensic or as self-critical as Jones." Jones wrote about an alleged current love interest, the Rock Star (RS), in her weekly diary in The Mail on Sundays You magazine from July 2010. Despite dropping many heavy hints that the "rock star" was Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, in a November 2011 interview in the London Evening Standard, she finally admitted it is not Kerr.
Until the end of October 2012, Jones lived in Brushford, just south of Dulverton, Somerset. Her comments about the area and in the book The Exmoor Files angered local people. The journalist Jane Alexander thought Jones opinions were "a clichéd, stereotypical and, frankly, lazy image of the countryside." After moving to the Yorkshire Dales, a Mail on Sunday column on her surroundings was the subject of four articles in The Yorkshire Post in September 2016.
She has reported from Bangladesh, and was sent by her newspaper to cover the famine in Somalia in the summer of 2011; her suitability for this assignment was questioned by Rosalind Coward.
In June 2012, she attracted attention by slating Holly Willoughby for posting a photo of herself on Twitter without makeup as a "betrayal to women". This Morning TV co-presenter Phillip Schofield defended Willoughby, saying "I swear there can be no greater force against all womankind than Liz Jones. She is inconsistent, bitter, nasty and unhinged".
Her first novel, 8½ Stone, was published in 2020.
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