“How sweet!” she said.
Another time, on the way home from a shoot in St. Barts, Stephanie Seymour tried to use her miles to upgrade me so we could sit together on the plane. The airline wouldn’t allow it, but I was touched by the thought nonetheless. Despite my place at the bottom of the totem pole, I always tried to remember how lucky I was to be even the least important person on any of Patrick’s shoots.
After shooting a few rolls of film, Patrick suggested to Madonna that they try a few shots without the nose ring. What a process that was! First her assistant had to call the “nose ring changer,” and we waited for a half hour for her to arrive. The “changer” finally arrived and began the complicated process of removing Madonna’s nose ring. I guess retouching wasn’t the option it is today.
Later on, the whole production moved on to a studio set in South Beach. While posing, Madonna played us her new album and sang along to it. I was dying. “Mmm mmm, something’s coming over, mmm mmm, something’s coming over me, my baby’s got a secret . . .” At one point, Ingrid Casares showed up. She was famous for running the nightlife of South Beach, but, more than that, for being Madonna’s best friend. She instantly started flirting with Christine, Patrick’s first assistant, who happened to like girls.
At the end of the shoot, Madonna thanked us and invited us all to her birthday party that night. It was her thirty-fifth, and she was having a smallish party at her home. Before I got too excited, I remembered that Patrick, Christine, and Margaret were all due to fly back to New York that night. Because I was headed off on vacation straight from Miami, I would be taking a flight out the next morning. However, I knew I wasn’t in a million years going to turn up at Madonna’s birthday party on my own. As exciting as it sounded, I quickly resigned myself to not going. Later, as I was chilling out in my room after the shoot, the phone rang. It was Patrick. Madonna had convinced him to stay an extra night to go to her party, and he invited me to tag along with him.
I ran out of my hotel and went on a frantic mad dash around South Beach to find something to wear. This was no doubt the most exciting party I had ever been invited to and I had nothing to wear! I couldn’t even come close to affording anything in the designer boutiques, and the only other options were the more touristy shops along Collins Avenue. All I could find there were cheap Versace knockoffs—midriff-baring stretchy pastel mini dresses made of polyester with plastic-y hardware. Not my look.
In the end I wore my own floral slip dress from good old Contempo Casuals. I usually wore it with a T-shirt underneath (remember that floral-grunge look?), but it was so hot that I wore it on its own. I carried a black braided leather bag I had splurged on at Barneys CO-OP and wore the only shoes I had with me, flat black-and-white leather Jack Rogers sandals. My outfit was pretty, but I didn’t feel remotely cool. That moment has stayed with me throughout my life. I never travel anywhere—anywhere!—without being prepared for an impromptu fabulous night out.
Patrick and I arrived at the party on the early side, and there weren’t many people there yet. Madonna came right over to us, hugged Patrick, grabbed my hand, and led me around. She took me to the bar, got me a mojito, introduced me to all the other people at the party, and then sat me down next to Gloria Estefan, saying that Gloria would take good care of me. Gloria couldn’t have been nicer. She treated me as if I was as important as anyone else in the room and engaged me in conversation. There were probably forty people at the party and I didn’t recognize many of them, the majority being Madonna’s tour dancers and members of her staff, but Gianni and Donatella Versace were there, as well as Dennis Rodman and Mickey Rourke. The feeling of the party was cozy and friendly and I was having a good time, so much so that I lost track of Patrick and had to navigate my own way through the rest of the evening. When I got up to help myself to the buffet, I saw Fabien Baron, the art director who had been on set that day. He also designed Madonna’s Sex book and is arguably the most well-known art director in the fashion industry, even today. His assistant Patrick Li was there with him. He was my age and we’d seen each other on shoots together a few times before. We were thrilled to see each other and hung out the rest of the night. The party got wild after dinner, with drag queens showing up on the dance floor and Madonna and all her backup dancers going crazy, dancing, making out. It was a scene I’ll never forget.
At one point Patrick came over to check on me, and I told him I was ready to go back to my hotel. It had been a long day and I had an early flight in the morning. He wanted to stay longer, so he said he’d try to find me a ride. Minutes later, he returned and told me to get in the car waiting in front of the house. The driver was standing outside and ushered me into the back of a huge white stretch limo. As I crawled in, I caught sight of Gianni and Donatella Versace lounging in the back waiting for me! After the butterflies in my stomach settled down, we chatted all the way back to South Beach. Just like Gloria, they asked me all about where I was from, what I was studying in college, how the shoot went that day, and what I wanted to be when I was finished with school. We talked about Palm Beach, and they wanted to know what it was like in the seventies when I was a child growing up there.
At Madonna’s birthday party, I told Patrick Demarchelier I was a fan of Mickey Rourke in Diner, so he made me pose with him for a picture. I was so embarrassed.
Twenty years later, the fact that this evening ever happened seems completely surreal. What did stay with me, though, was that the whole night signified for me the best kind of success—it was an example of how being well-known and successful also comes with the responsibility to set a precedent of kindness and generosity for those who look up to you.
• • •
As I continued working for Patrick, I was promoted from intern to assistant. The idea that I would now be paid and continue on in this dream job seemed too good to be true. It also motivated me to work longer hours, and more often. During my summer break from Brown, I would work for a ten-week spell, and then I would go back for an additional three weeks in January during my extended winter break from college. Occasionally I would even fly over to Paris for fashion week in October during the five-day break we had for Columbus Day weekend. Patrick’s manager was very supportive about things like that—he wanted me to make the most of my extracurricular learning and was always happy to slot me in for work time when I was out of school. We worked in Paris a lot, but my favorite time to be working there was during the fashion shows—there was the couture in January and July and the ready-to-wear shows in October (I could never find time off from school to go to the February shows).
Acting as the stand-in on set in Patrick’s studio, 1994.
During the couture shows, our shooting days were insane! We’d report to work at seven A.M. to shoot, say, a Chanel Nº5 ad with former Bond Girl Carole Bouquet in the Hotel Georges V. By late morning we’d be shooting a cover portrait of, say, Nadja Auermann for Bazaar in a studio in Montparnasse. In the afternoon, Patrick would go to a few shows—Dior, Chanel, Valentino. Every now and then he would throw me a bone and get me a press pass through Bazaar, gaining me admission to the photographer’s pit. There I would stand with my simple Pentax K1000 and get elbowed and bullied by the guys actually doing this for a living while I managed to get a few shots of the girls on the runway. There was no digital film then and you wouldn’t believe the pushing and shoving that went on when these guys had to change their film at lightning speed. A photographer would bend down, having dropped his film case, and bump into someone else, who would shove back harder while swearing at the first guy in French. I would emerge from the pit sweating and shaking, but completely high from the experience. How many girls can say that the very first fashion show they ever attended was the Chanel Haute Couture show at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris? Where is there to go from that point, really? Well, I did have places I wanted to go.
One day Patrick wanted to take pictures around Versailles outside of Pari
s, and I was tasked with rowing him around in a tiny rowboat, which I was nervous was going to tip over. He took this Polaroid of me, 1995.
My workday wasn’t finished there. In the evening, after the shows, we’d be shooting, for example, the couture on Nadja for a Bazaar editorial story to go along with her cover shot. Shooting couture is mayhem. There is only one sample of each dress and everyone wants to photograph it. If you want to shoot couture hot off the presses, you have to shoot it in Paris where the fashion houses can be in control of their own samples and where the samples could be available within an hour’s notice, should a client be interested in buying a piece. You may get the dress for an afternoon or you may get it for just two hours. We’d be shooting in the Bois de Boulogne or in the Tuileries or in the middle of the Place de la Concorde or in a booth at La Coupole, and there would be men on motorbikes coming and going with a $50,000 dress every hour or so. We’d finish shooting at three A.M. I’d take the film back to my hotel, count and label it all, and prepare it to be picked up first thing in the morning by a special FedEx courier. I’d crash into my bed at four A.M. I’d then get up at seven the next morning and do it all again. I loved every single second of those weeks in Paris, despite the long hours and the grueling, often physical work. The diversity of tasks, the adrenaline, the teamwork, the exposure to a whole new world of people and ideas and talents, every single minute of it excited me. Some friends thought I was crazy to spend my school holidays working, but for me this sure beat an extra few weeks hanging around at home.
While I did and do and always will love photography, my heart had already begun to yearn for more interaction with the clothes we were shooting. On set, when I was done setting up the lights and loading the cameras, I used to help Tonne Goodman’s assistant Beau with the unpacking and steaming of the clothes. Tonne was then the fashion director of Bazaar, and they would bring trunks and trunks of the most beautiful clothes I’d ever seen along with them on shoots. I couldn’t get over the luxury of them—the beading, the fur, the embroidery, the precise tailoring. I had never seen clothes like that up close, and I was mesmerized. They were like magnets to me, attracting all my attention. I just wanted to be near them. I wanted to touch them, make outfits from them, try them on. So when I went to those few shows in the shoes of a budding young photographer, the place I really wanted to be was the front row, right up next to the clothes, choosing what I would buy, what I would shoot, what I would wear. I fantasized about the day when I had earned a place at a fashion show in my own right, with an invitation and a place card that had my name on it.
Test Polaroids I collected for my scrapbook on shoots with Patrick. Top row, from left: Christy Turlington for Harper’s Bazaar; Linda Evangelista for Marie Claire; an outtake from a Janet Jackson cover shoot. Second row: Nadja Aurmann for Harper’s Bazaar; Nadja Auermann for Harper’s Bazaar; Kate Moss for Harper’s Bazaar. Third row: Kirsty Hume for Harper’s Bazaar; Uma Thurman for Harper’s Bazaar; Nadja Auermann for Harper’s Bazaar. Bottom row: Stephanie Seymour for Harper’s Bazaar; Yasmeen Ghauri for Harper’s Bazaar; Karen Mulder for Cosmopolitan.
STYLE INFLUENCE
PALM BEACH
My mom and dad posing for the cover of Palm Beach Life, late 1960s.
WHILE I AM not inspired by Palm Beach in the typical way—I now refuse to wear Stubbs & Wootton loafers, Belgian Shoes, Jack Rogers’s Navajo sandals, or anything by Lilly Pulitzer—the Palm Beach aesthetic is still very much a part of my identity. My Palm Beach, however, is the one that I experienced while growing up there—first year-round and then in the summers—throughout the seventies and eighties. I remember my mother first and foremost in her Lilly sheaths, but also barefoot in her cutoff jean shorts, white cotton camisole, ladies’ gold Rolex, and oversize sunglasses. I remember my dad’s friend Countess Tauni de Lesseps in her cable-knit sweater from Trillion with a slim leather belt around her waist and pressed trousers, all in the same pastel shade. One day it was lavender, the next it was yellow, and then pale pink after that. I remember my mom’s friend Emilia Fanjul in designer duds from New York, impressing all of us with her perfect grooming and high-style outfits. I remember Anky Johnson in her linen caftan and matching turban—again in a different color each day. I remember Mimi Kemble in her pink-and-black polka-dotted and ruffled one-shoulder bathing suit with impossibly golden blond hair falling halfway down her back. And I remember Susie Phipps Cochran bucking all convention in her army jacket, driving around the largest privately owned property in Palm Beach in a beat-up U.S. Postal Service jeep with the doors missing. Every time I get dressed, the eccentric, highly personal style of the women I grew up around comes to mind and influences the way I see myself.
I am also influenced, albeit somewhat reluctantly, by my grandmother Tonsi’s love of matching. Not only did she take her own coordinating to extremes—say, a pink and green floral Lilly skirt with a pink fitted polo, green Ferragamo pumps, and a skinny green belt—but she also had an obsession with matching my sister, me, and my cousins all in identical outfits. Each time we came to visit her in Gulf Stream, Florida (just a half hour down the A1A from Palm Beach), she would have the outfits all laid out on the bed for us, and we would put them on, take a photo, and then go about our day. If our cousins weren’t available, she would recruit our next-door neighbor’s daughters to partake in this ritual. I don’t know what it was about a matching foursome that excited my grandmother so much, but it’s clear that she loved a strongly coordinated aesthetic statement. I myself feel a sometimes overpowering urge to match my bag to my shoes, or my handbag hardware to my belt hardware, and I know this must come from Tonsi. In my life I have worked intentionally hard on overcoming the urge to match and have succeeded to some degree. I mix my jewelry, often having white gold, yellow gold, and silver all on the same arm, and I recently bought a Céline bag with both silver and gold hardware on it. I have also gotten better about not having to match my bag and shoes, as long as those colors are balanced out somewhere else in my outfit. But these are hard-won battles, as the hereditary tendency to have a Palm Beach level of coordination is always lurking just beneath the surface.
Clockwise from top left: Kim and me in Florence Eisman with our grandmother Tonsi, 1978. Mom, far right, late 1960s. Kim, Celerie, and me, 1977. Kim and me in our Lilly bathing suits with our neighbors Hope and Katie, 1978. Kim and our cousins, Margaret and Elizabeth, all in Florence Eisman, 1974.
Clockwise from top left: Kim and me with Hope and Katie, all in Lilly Pulitzer, 1977. Kim and me having a pony ride alongside our friend Andres, 1977. Kim and me in matching dresses, 1980. My grandfather Jack in a typical all-matching Palm Beach look, 1974. Kim and me with Margaret and Elizabeth, all in Florence Eisman, 1978.
Photographer Johnny Pigozzi took this photo of me (sitting on my friend Tara’s lap) at Francesco Clemente’s post-show party in 1997.
A LONG WALK IS THE BEST WAY TO CLEAR YOUR HEAD
WORKING FOR Patrick Demarchelier was my first experience within the actual fashion industry, yet I wasn’t there as a wannabe fashion person—I was there as a wannabe photographer. When I started out, I wanted to be like Patrick. But as my summer internship stretched into three years of on-and-off work throughout college, I found myself less enamored of loading cameras and setting up lights. It was either time to strike out on my own as a photographer or try something new. I thought an obvious next step might be working as a fashion assistant at a magazine, given all the publishing people I had formed relationships with while working for Patrick. But Patrick talked me out of the idea. “No, no, no, no, no,” he insisted. “A magazine job is not interesting for you. You should work at an art gallery.” Art was Patrick’s personal passion, outside of photography. Clearly he knew a lot about the art world, and as I had been an art history major at Brown, he thought it would be a good fit for me.
If you can believe it, the way I secured my first art gallery job was eerily similar to meeting Patrick in the restauran
t, but this time it was in a shoe store. I was sitting in French Sole, a store devoted entirely to ballet flats, trying on a new pair to wear to my art gallery interviews, when I saw a gray-haired man pause to look in the window. I was the only person visible inside, as the shopgirl had gone downstairs to fetch my size. After looking in through the window for a moment, the man opened the door and said to me, “Is this store new?”
“Uh, no. It’s been here as long as I can remember.” At this point, I was pretty sure the man was Larry Gagosian, one of the gallery owners to whom I had sent my résumé just the day before.
“Do you live in the neighborhood?” he asked.
“My parents do. I just graduated from college, so I’m living with them.” Before he could say anything else I asked, “Are you Larry Gagosian?”
“Yes,” he replied, suddenly looking self-conscious and slightly tentative.
“Oh, wow. I just sent you my résumé yesterday. I’m hoping to work at your gallery.”
He invited me to go see him at his office that afternoon. You might be rolling your eyes thinking that he was obviously just trying to pick me up, and maybe he was—I did later find out that he lived on the same block as French Sole!—but I wasn’t interested in that. I wanted a job at a gallery, and Gagosian was the best. Any girl looking for a job in the art world would be an idiot to turn down the chance to meet with Larry.
So we sat in his office that afternoon and talked about art. He asked me to name all the artists whose work was displayed in his office. I aced them all—there was a Rodin sculpture and paintings by Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Damien Hirst, and Picasso. I told him about my love of photography and my interest in Sally Mann. He told me they had just signed her up to do a show at their L.A. gallery. It all seemed to click, and he offered me a job before the interview was over. The money wasn’t enough to live on without my parents’ support, so I asked if I could sleep on it. It seems insane now to think that I hedged, but I really wanted financial independence from my parents. At 7:45 the next morning, the phone rang.
Always Pack a Party Dress: And Other Lessons Learned From a (Half) Life in Fashion Page 4
