Last weekend, a string of unfamiliar women appeared on my Facebook feed. Nothing so unusual about that, but there was about them. There was finger-waving Betsy in blue who "wants you to know that no self-respecting Republican would vote for that dreadful con artist". That is, Trump.

Meanwhile, "her sister Nuvola, née Dorothy, now lives in Colorado and has other things on her mind". Judging by her hippy garb and heavenly gaze, she was close to attaining Nirvana. Then there was the blousy Italian musing on Mussolini, the butch grease monkey planning to punch out someone's lights, and an exhausted waitress in a pink pinafore who'd been taking abuse all day.

On closer inspection, they seemed somehow less unfamiliar after all. Turns out they were all costumed portraits of Joan Juliet Buck, the ex-editor of Paris Vogue. Shot by fine art photographer Andrea Blanch between 2010-2013, these and other images form an ongoing body of work entitled American Women.

"Andrea saw me in a production of a play which mixed Marguerite Duras and Virginia Woolf," Buck explains by phone from New York. "She came up afterwards and said, I'd love to take your portrait. And I said, My portrait's kind of boring – let's do something different. Let's play."

Buck was an idiosyncratic choice to edit a magazine like Paris Vogue, but during her tenure from 1994 to 2001 she elevated the intellectual tone of that title, appealing to the cultured intelligentsia as much as consumers of luxe. While the other editors air kissed and gossiped, Buck could be spotted front row at the collections, reading a book during the interminable wait. "Usually something by Philip Pullman – I needed sci-fi to get me through the shows."

Flinging vitriol

Her Facebook posts intrigued me, not just for the deft interpretation of American female types, but for the vitriol flung with the texts. "What the f--- is this dieselturkey talking about?" ponders the mechanic. The lab-coated plastic surgeon offers "...some Seroquel and a side of cyanide". Uptown Betsy refuses to be "punished by a vulgar groper from Queens". Each of the characters is acting in the Theatre of Absurd that is American society in the lead up to next Tuesday's presidential election, which has become nastier by the week.

A few days after Donald Trump's "nasty women" gaffe during the third of the presidential debates, this one held in Las Vegas, Buck decided to send her own nasty women out into the world.

The first Facebook post was last Thursday, October 27, then, says Buck of her reactions and that of her Democrat-leaning friends, "by Friday, when the shit hit about the head of the FBI investigating Hillary's supposed emails on Anthony Weiner's computer, the levels to which the discourse had been dragged down by Trump just got worse. By Saturday morning, me and everyone I know was just in such a funk. It felt like there was this generalised meltdown, that we can't believe what's going down in America."

The exhausted waitress who has taken abuse all day from a cantankerous customer is an allegory of Hillary Clinton's plight: "It's like 'There's a hair in my eggs', and no, there's no hair in your eggs, but I smile and say 'I'll change that plate out right now', and then it's 'There's a bug in my salad', and no, there's no bug in your salad, but I say 'I'm sorry, I'll give you another one, or would you prefer something else?' and take away the salad that doesn't have a bug in it, and bring the toasted bagel and it's 'The bagel's too dark', and I take away the bagel and bring back a fat, pale, bagel, and I'm still smiling, and it's 'There's slime on my bagel', and I finally say 'Prove it'."

The only daughter of movie producer, Jules Buck, Joan's godfather is John Huston who was best man at her parent's wedding. She has counted Angelica Huston, Jack Nicholson, Lauren Bacall and Federico Fellini in her entourage. Drawn to stage and screen, she was acting by the age of 11, but her father discouraged her.

Prolific writer

"As a producer, I guess he knew what I might be in for," says Buck. So she turned instead to writing, becoming a book reviewer at American Glamour at 19, and features editor at British Vogue at 23, "writing about culture and fashion as part of culture for the next four decades". That is, fashion not as an endless cycle of new consumables, but fashion as cultural signifier. 

Over the years, Buck has written film critiques, essays, two novels and "what feels like a thousand profiles", the most notorious of which is her February 2011 profile of Syria's First Lady, Asma al-Assad for American Vogue. The article depicts the wife of dictator Bashar al-Assad as glamorous (which she is), with British roots (that she has). Buck had initially refused the commission, but then accepted – a writer, she admits she was curious and wanted to see Palmyra. Besides, even Condé Nast Traveller magazine had been to Damascus and spruiked it as a new hip destination.

What Buck couldn't know, is that shortly after the profile appeared online, the Arab Spring would begin. The world learned exactly what was going on in countries such as Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt – and Syria. Ostracised, she spent the next two years a pariah and the butt of endless social media posts and jokes. The scorching criticism that followed still marks Buck who wouldn't now be drawn on questions about al-Assad. She did eventually write her side of what had happened in an article in Newsweek and it's one of the many moments of her life she will cover in her book, The Price of Illusion, to be published by Atria next March.

Illusion has played a big part in Buck's life. Her Hollywood upbringing, her life in fashion magazines and acting. "Acting, for me is not therapy, it's pleasure, it's play. After seven years at Vogue I wanted desperately to play. When you're acting – unlike when you're writing or editing – you and the other must be completely open, generous. When you're important in fashion, the deference with which people treat you is stifling."