American Vogue and Steven Meisel had already broken up. “All of a sudden,” says a fashion editor, “Steven was not on the schedule.” The exact circumstances of the breach are unknown, but news of it spread through the industry and, paradoxically, raised Meisel’s profile higher because “Steven didn’t care,” says Helen Murray. “He wasn’t scared of them.”
The photographer had problems with advertising clients, too. He did his first big jobs in Europe, where designers “were more avant-garde than magazines,” says Jade Hobson. Yet Rei Kawakubo killed a campaign Meisel shot for her Comme des Garçons line after he wrapped the models’ faces in bandages and shot them on a conveyor belt. “Occasionally, I get to do what I want,” he complained to Photo District News in 1987. But just as often, he didn’t. “He was supposed to shoot an Alaïa campaign,” a Condé Nast editor says. “He put the sexiest women’s clothes in the world on boys. He’s very provocative. Very self-destructive. But Steven also has taste, and it’s hard to have taste in this business.”
Refusing to accommodate American Vogue was a considerable gamble. “He went out on a limb, but it really paid off for him,” says a stylist he’s worked with. Luckily, Meisel had a friend in Franca Sozzani. Frances Grill’s client Oliviero Toscani had been the main photographer at Lei before Sozzani took it over in 1980, and when he left the magazine on her ascendance, she found new shooters, among them Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, Herb Ritts, Max Vadukul, and Meisel.
Bruce Weber was also a Sozzani mainstay, but Meisel was clearly her favorite. He “was just beginning,” says Sozzani, “he didn’t have so many pictures, but he had a way to explain what he wanted and I was fascinated by somebody who was so full of ideas, so full of energy. He’s the only photographer I know who loves fashion. The only one. It is very unusual to see beautiful fashion with a beautiful image and beautiful girls. He searches for beauty. He finds a girl, an attitude, a dress, and puts it all together. He’s never satisfied. He’s a photographer and a stylist at the same time.” Meisel became Sozzani’s Richard Avedon. But she didn’t think him any more of a copyist than Weber. “People said Bruce was copying [Edward] Weston,” Sozzani says. “Of course you get inspiration. But if it was so easy, why somebody else didn’t do it?” Meisel’s first Lei sitting, of young brides, appeared in June 1980, and he worked for Sozzani “almost every month after,” she says. His shoots were “always completely different.” Sozzani’s photographers were fanatically loyal to her. She gave them “incredible freedom,” beautiful, almost copy-free layouts, and a regular showcase where, says Helen Murray, “a photographer could really strut his stuff.” After Sozzani moved to Vogue Italia, it became “the ultimate showcase” for fashion photography. Sozzani’s secret, says a top photographer’s rep who prefers to remain anonymous, is that “she’s a little bit lazy. She lets a photographer like Bruce or Steven do everything if they do all the arranging. She’ll send the clothes, you send the layouts. So she gets something nobody else has. If she has to, she’ll say, ‘You really have to show this.’ A brilliant editor will pick out clothes the photographer will like and they really have to show.”
The timing of her move was great for Meisel, who’d just broken up with Vogue in America. “They considered him too avant-garde,” says Sozzani. “In a country as huge as America, of course you have to be careful about the kind of women you represent. In Italy, we have so many fashion magazines” that hers could afford to showcase “the quality and the dream.” So as soon as she knew she had the new job, “I flew to New York,” she says, and offered Meisel “the cover and the main story every month.” Vogue Italia would publish pictures Americans considered peculiar and self-indulgent.
Meisel had a good relationship with Sozzani’s art director, Fabien Baron, too. “Fabien and Franca were an incredible moment,” says a top art director. “Everyone here was scrambling for focus while Europe was stretching the imagination, bringing the sexual underground overground.” Because Sozzani’s magazine sells less than a tenth the number of copies of its American sister, she could let Meisel take chances. “Nobody can understand,” she said with a chuckle. “Condé Nast has given me freedom. I give him freedom.” Jimmy Moffat, his agent, thought Meisel gave Sozzani something, too: “Steven gives her, her magazine basically. She appreciates it and lets us send layouts. There’s lots of magazines in New York where that relationship doesn’t exist and can’t exist, and we don’t work for those magazines.” Meisel’s relationship with Sozzani and Vogue Italia continues to this day, though he now only shoots every other cover for Vogue Italia.
Meisel kept working with Baron after the latter left Vogue Italia in 1988 to move to the United States and open a design studio. With Baron, too, Meisel could do things his way. “Before that, I was just pleasing each magazine and I wasn’t happy,” he said. His income quadrupled thanks to campaigns for Italian designers such as Valentino, making him even happier. He’d bring a private chef to shoots and brag that he’d made more than $30,000 a day shooting ads, “just for walking in the door.”
One door he didn’t like walking into—initially, at least—was Anna Wintour’s at American Vogue. He needed attention. Under the gun to compete with Elle, she couldn’t give it. He needed time. She didn’t have it. She didn’t like him much, either. “Steven cops attitude, he doesn’t listen, he has no respect,” said a Vogue editor.
Meisel didn’t like her, either. When Wintour suggested Meisel for sittings, he’d decline. “Anna Wintour comes in and destroys the magazine,” said Meisel’s makeup man Kevyn Aucoin. “He was appalled by her lack of style and her dictum that ugly no style is style. She had a deliberate approach to fashion. She wanted the magazine to be more accessible, to be Elle, to sell more. She sacrificed quality for that.”
By 1990, Wintour and Meisel were taking potshots at each other in the press. Only one of his stories had run the previous year, and he’d canceled his Condé Nast contract. “There’s just not much discussion with him,” Wintour told WWD. Meisel responded that although “editors scream and carry on,” he was opposed to “kissing ass” and being “taken advantage of.” Says a top rep, “He ran around saying how much he hated Anna.” Not long afterward, he did work for Condé Nast’s new beauty magazine, Allure, but that didn’t last. “Certain photographers forget they are working for a publication with a purpose,” said Liberman. “He resented, again, the art director. At a certain point, the needs of the publication have to supersede. I’m too old to pull my punches.”
Liberman no longer felt the need to cultivate talent as Alexey Brodovitch had, and he’d squelch it if need be. He hadn’t killed Meisel, but the photographer was grievously wounded. Friends worried aloud that he was “depressed like crazy,” developing an ulcer and unable to work. “It just gets so tiresome,” he complained. “What I need is freedom.”
Like Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel sometimes found freedom shooting ads. One of the most photographer-friendly advertisers was Barneys New York, which had “a rich history of advertising,” says Gene Pressman, a grandson of the namesake of what started as a discount men’s clothing store and became a premier retailer of avant-garde fashion. Since the seventies, it had hired top advertising professionals to produce clever print and television ads. Then, it hired art director Marc Balet as creative director and advertising executive Neil Kraft as the store’s chief marketing executive. “Gene said yes to just about everything,” says Kraft, so Balet hired young photographers such as David Seidner and Meisel, who was still so ill prepared, the store had to rent cameras for him. “We ended up in the business of discovering people,” says Kraft, who recalls Meisel as a tiny guy who didn’t talk much, let his agent speak for him, banned Kraft from his set, and blasted “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” by the Spencer Davis Group “over and over” at earsplitting volume as he shot hidden behind screens.
Kraft stayed at Barneys through 1991, then went to Calvin Klein, which also hired Fabien Baron to reboot CRK Advertising. In turn, Pressman hired Ronnie Cooke, the se
nior fashion editor of Details, until then America’s flagship avant-garde style magazine. The fashion media’s game of musical chairs had grown more frantic; Cooke had been Details’ senior fashion editor until Si Newhouse bought it for Condé Nast and replaced editor Annie Flanders with a former rock journalist, James Truman, who would later replace Alexander Liberman as the company’s top editorial executive.
Kraft and Balet brought the Barneys image into the fashion present; Ronnie Cooke shoved it hard into the future with “an original idea of what Barneys was that was very different from the department-store mentality,” she says. Its recalibrated image was designed “to stand up against designer brands.” Using Steven Meisel and the latest generation of supermodels was one way to do that. Cooke had him shoot Linda Evangelista kissing a monkey, and posing as Lucille Ball with male celebrities, “fun humorous images,” Cooke says. “It’s a fashion musical, the models become characters.”
But then, fashion changed and photography had to follow. “It’s a whole language that changes,” says Cooke. “I was expected to do that.” To demonstrate that the store was making a clear break with fashion’s past, Cooke hired Corinne Day, a photographer who had just emerged from the nursery of Great Britain’s ever-evolving youth and street culture. Ever since World War II, it had been a crucible in which music and fashion mixed and spawned cults that spread around the world.
Day was the child of a bank robber and a brothel madam, a former model who’d decided to pursue photography, begun testing in Milan, then returned to her native London. Her break came when she stumbled on a photo of a girl as short and waifish as Day was in what was called the “maybe” drawer at a London modeling agency, the drawer where likely rejects were tucked away. It was 1989. Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, and Tatjana Patitz were about to appear on the cover of British Vogue in a photo by Peter Lindbergh that would consecrate the so-called supermodel phenomenon. But that meant fashion would soon need something new, and Day discovered it while looking for a girl who would pose for her for free. The girl in the photo was Kate Moss. She would become Day’s muse, and several new British magazines would become the vehicles through which she and several other neophyte shooters would change the vocabulary of fashion imagery.
Two independent magazines had been launched in London in 1980 and by mid-decade gained enough traction that Alexander Liberman kept copies on his usually bare desk. The Face was created by Nick Logan, a former editor of New Musical Express, a publication for pop music fans. Terry Jones, who’d been the art director of British Vogue in the seventies, invented i-D as a new kind of fashion magazine. Both reflected the mood of London’s streets in the years just after punk rock, when style and design replaced unfocused anger as the primary vehicle of personal expression for the chaos of cults that had replaced the monolithic youth culture of the sixties. “The change was in attitude as much as anything,” says Jones, who’d fought the formal structures of fashion that ruled at Vogue. “My preference was for energy and attitude,” he says. “I pushed for an element of fun. The idea [of i-D] was to infiltrate the mainstream with a wider vision.”
“It all changed in the space of three months,” says Dylan Jones (no relation), who joined i-D in 1983 and became its editor the next year. A new generation of photographers “reached critical mass by 1985.” Day, Nigel Shafran, Nick Knight (who doubled as i-D’s photo editor), David Sims, Craig McDean, Glen Luchford, Stéphane Sednaoui, and Juergen Teller each had a distinct style. “They came from different planets,” says Dylan Jones. “Idiosyncrasy became your forte.”
The Face and i-D also championed stylists. They “had no need to reflect designer fashion,” says Phil Bicker, who joined the former as photo editor in 1987. Both magazines reflected the streets and their subjects, rather than the commercial dictates of designers and retailers. i-D filled its fashion pages with “straight-ups,” photos of people with natural style, found on the streets and shot against walls. The Face did “unheard of” things such as mixing athletic clothes, Jamaican influences, and Armani, Bicker continues. “It was very out there” but also something “we could relate to.”
Arriving at the Face, Bicker vowed to nurture new photographers: “Magazines looked to control situations and issued directives everyone would follow. Our idea was the opposite. I wanted to give them a platform.” At first, “the world didn’t get it” and other magazines “ridiculed it, like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” But then, Corinne Day and Kate Moss came along “and changed things. People stood up and noticed,” and soon enough, “they embraced it and made it fashion.”
Day came to see Bicker with a few photos of a girl on a street that he thought he recognized. Day had “grown up a couple of miles from me,” he says, “we had shared points of reference,” and the girl in the photos, Moss, “embodied them.” Best of all from Bicker’s point of view, “she wasn’t Linda, Christy, Tatjana, or Cindy. She was all the things the Face was.” Initially, Bicker hired Moss, but not Day, for a cover shoot. Then, realizing his mistake, he assigned Day to shoot the model again. Day cooked up an idea with a stylist out of clubland named Melanie Ward to shoot Moss, unadorned, unpolished, and relentlessly anti-glam, on a beach, just having fun. Day asked the sixteen-year-old to doff her top and bare her breasts. “And she remained topless for the next twenty years,” says Bicker, who put a shot from the session on the cover of the issue.
When the photos were published in a July 1990 spread, “everyone thought it wasn’t styled, it was Kate,” says Bicker. “It wasn’t. It was set up and staged and redone even though Corinne wanted to suggest it was all spontaneous and real. Really, it was clever and calculating, but the added bonus was, Kate was real, she was genuine.” And thanks to Day, Ward, and Bicker, she became the face of the nineties and its offbeat style and the last great fashion model to emerge on film.
Soon, Moss moved in with Day and her boyfriend and started seeing another young model-turned-photographer, Mario Sorrenti. Sorrenti’s posing career had faltered, as Day’s had, when he was judged too short as he aged, so he learned to use a Hasselblad. Once he was linked to Moss, his profile rose sharply.
* * *
I. One further anti-Elle gambit failed. Gilles Bensimon says Vogue tried to hire him in 1990, offering him $1 million to jump ship. He asked Alex Liberman if Anna Wintour knew about the offer, and Liberman said she didn’t. Bensimon turned down a Condé Nast contract, he says, because “she got rid of Avedon in one month. She could get rid of me in a week!”
Chapter 42
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“YOU KNOW IT’S WAR?”
London was a step ahead, but things had been changing in New York, too. The supermodel moment ran its course; Meisel emerged unscathed. “Steven was Steven before them,” says Franca Sozzani. “Now people realize. He made them personalities, not anymore models. They had something. He found it. They trusted him. They played with him and gave him the opportunity to cut their hair, take off their eyebrows. He’s never satisfied.” So, in 1989, in his most influential move yet, Meisel revived then-forty-six-year-old Lauren Hutton’s modeling career in a series of ads for Barneys New York. Before and since, he brought back other sixties and seventies faces such as Peggy Moffitt (who famously posed for her husband, William Claxton, in designer Rudi Gernreich’s scandalous monokini in 1964), Veruschka, Donna Mitchell, Wallis Franken, and Lisa Taylor. Meisel’s recognition of the beauty of older women won him tremendous—and well-deserved—acclaim.
But still, he was dissatisfied when an interviewer came calling late in 1990: “I’m not having as much fun as I would like to or that I used to. I’m sort of in a transitional period in my life because I don’t go out and do drugs and fuck all night long anymore, yet I’m not quite ready for dinner parties.” Twenty-five years later, he would still be shooting regularly, working, apparently happily, and raking in big bucks as one of the half dozen most sought-after shooters of fashion advertising. But first, he had to get past one last defining career moment, when
he finally put his bad-boy past behind him, accepted the compromises demanded by maturity, and made his peace with the commercial demands of his profession. It was set in motion by the last great upheaval in the fashion-magazine business.
In 1991, the Hearst Corporation approached Liz Tilberis of British Vogue about replacing Anthony Mazzola at the helm of Harper’s Bazaar. That June, Condé Nast (which had already bought Tilberis a house in London) gave her a substantial raise, and she promised to stay, but in the fall, the talks with Hearst resumed, and the following January she announced she was moving to New York to take over Bazaar. She’d already begun assembling the team she hoped would return it to glory, and some kind of parity with her former boss Wintour’s Vogue. Photographers would be her special forces.
Meantime, Fabien Baron had tired of the grind of constant flying back and forth from New York, where he still worked for Barneys and other clients, to Milan, where he spent about a week a month at Vogue Italia, and decided to quit and open a New York design studio with his wife, Sciascia Gambaccini. Baron’s next high-profile job was art-directing Sex, a porn-ish photo-book collaboration between Madonna and Steven Meisel. Baron was laying it out when Patrick Demarchelier called. “I think there’s a magazine,” Baron remembers him mumbling. “No magazine is interesting,” Baron replied. “The only one I can imagine doing is Harper’s Bazaar, and it needs a total redo.” Demarchelier chuckled. “It’s Bazaar,” he said. “Let’s do it. You have to meet Liz. She wants the best magazine in the world.”
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