Focus

by Michael Gross

  Baron was in awe of Meisel’s technique: “He builds a picture a piece at a time. The girl gets dressed, has hair and makeup, then he works with a pose, stops, and studies it very carefully. He’ll remove objects from the background, then put the girl back on the set. Now, change her hair. It’s too flat. Make it bigger. Lower the powder. Give it more shine. He directs to perfection. Twist the pinkie. Grab the chair more delicately. Lift the index finger. Almost ready. See that fold in the dress? We don’t want that. Put the light back on. Click. We have it. Next! Fucking thirty years of working with him and I’ve learned, when he says move this way, it’s better.”

  Though the art director says Meisel “was able to remove himself from Avedon” by the time they met, Avedon’s graphic group portraits from the late sixties and early seventies inspired one of their first collaborations for Calvin Klein, a 1994 series of ads and commercials for the ck one fragrance that included both models, among them Kate Moss, and “a bunch of people on a white background, so they are who they are,” Baron says.

  The next year, after Meisel did a shoot for L’Uomo Vogue, seemingly inspired by the aesthetic of seventies porn sets—complete with cheesy wood-paneling and toxic-colored carpets—featuring boys seemingly in their teens dressed only in underwear, Klein and Baron cooked up a similar campaign for the ck clothing line, of transit, print, and TV advertising aimed at young fashion customers.

  “At that time, I was really into David Sims, a young, reality-based photographer,” Baron says. “I wanted things to be so real it felt off the mark. I had a great sense of wanting to be in your face, and I came up with the idea of castings. Every time I did a casting, the people would come in and be so fucking awkward, and then they’d go away and you’d never see them again. The moment was so vulnerable. So I said, let’s do a casting as if it was for a sex movie, but take pictures of it. We started casting kids who looked cool. Not on a set, in a room just for them, something cheap and common—and then they realized, ‘Oh, there’s a camera.’ Of course, I was looking to create controversy. I liked the idea of putting these kids on the spot, so we made a list of questions and had a guy from a porn channel come interview them.”

  Aspirants were first gathered in a room together, then called onto Meisel’s closed set, one at a time. “They stood against a wall and a camera was rolling,” Baron continues. “They came on the plateau and, bang, took it on the face. ‘So how old are you? What do you like to do? What are you wearing? Oh, jeans? Can you lower them for us? That’s a nice T-shirt. Can you tear it for us? You’re an actress? Have you ever done sex on film? What do you do when you’re alone in a room? You march?’ ‘No, I mosh.’ ‘What’s that? Can you show us?’ We put them on the spot and we’re filming everything.” Then they were sent back to the room with the other models, ensuring “the next would be even more nervous,” says Baron. “And that was the commercial.”

  Calvin Klein was used to controversy, but even he was taken aback by the reaction. Though the team knew what they’d done was “borderline,” Baron says, they were sure “it was nothing major, but then [someone] realized one kid was seventeen.” A few television stations rejected the ads, and after they’d run for just one day, word got out and critics pounced, denouncing the ads as kiddie porn. Within two weeks, despite Klein’s feeble protest that he was being misunderstood, the campaign was killed. In September, the FBI announced it was looking into the affair; it cleared Klein two months later. “It was not fun, it was intense,” says Baron, who departed.

  A few years later, Klein’s basement porn campaign would win first place on an Adweek list of the “most offensive, most tasteless and downright dumbest ads” of the preceding decade. Nonetheless, Klein doubled down in 1999 with a campaign showing children dancing in underwear on a sofa; it, too, was quickly withdrawn. After Klein and his business partner began exploring a sale of their company the next year, he stopped pushing advertising hot buttons. Three years later, the company was sold, Klein stepped back from designing, and the career of one of fashion imagery’s great patrons came to an end.

  In years to come, Steven Meisel would do his best to take on Klein’s title of fashion’s provocateur-in-chief. His laissez-passer from Franca Sozzani and Vogue Italia let him cross the traditional boundaries of good taste and explore realms of socio-cultural expression in a way not seen since Avedon’s portraits of upper-class anomie and Andy Warhol’s Factory set.

  The fun began in 2005 with a story called “Makeover Madness,” mocking the craze for plastic surgery, Botox, and liposuction. In September 2006, a portfolio called “State of Emergency” showed a model being stopped and frisked by police, a pretty face jammed against a car windshield, a body being thrown to the street next to a spilled Starbucks coffee cup, a blonde in a bra being wanded at a TSA checkpoint, and a model on her knees in front of a cop with a billy club and another with a barking dog. Where Chris von Wangenheim’s similar photo portrayed chic menace, Meisel’s version was a slick cartoon, undermining its presumable intention: commentary on the post-9/11 police state.

  The next year, Meisel took on rehab culture with pictures of out-of-control models, one with legs splayed wide in a limousine, another shaving her head à la Britney Spears, and, presumably later, committed and strapped down to a hospital bed, engaged in talk therapy, plunged into bathtubs, throwing fruit around, doing yoga buck naked, and just looking like models, albeit under lock and key. “Girls treat rehab like a spa, which I thought was funny,” Sozzani told a reporter.

  That fall, Vogue Italia’s dynamic duo took on the occupation of Iraq in a spread called “Make Love Not War,” which showed bare-chested models cavorting with similarly exposed soldiers in desert tents, fighting them on sandy ground, arm wrestling, and lying in what appears to be precoital expectation and postcoital bliss—a typical desert-warfare maneuver. England’s liberal Guardian newspaper called them “the most nauseatingly tasteless fashion pictures ever.”

  A 2012 spread entitled “Haute Mess,” featuring models wearing brightly colored, determinedly trashy clothing, multicolored hair weaves studded with candy-bar logos, exaggerated makeup and false finger- and toenails, attracted accusations of racism, despite the fact that Meisel and Sozzani had, four years earlier, collaborated on a “Black Issue,” featuring only black women. And the Deepwater Horizon oil spill inspired a twenty-four-page 2013 spread called “Water & Oil,” which turned model Kristen McMenamy into an oiled-up and endangered loon bird on a despoiled shoreline.

  What did Meisel think he was up to? He’d answered in a rare interview in 2009: “Clothes are such shit now. We’ve become a world of H&M. . . . You have to be eye-catching because there are so many images out there. You are inundated all the time, whether it’s on TV or the Internet, buses, bus stops, taxis, or billboards. I guess the only way to get people’s attention is by trying to do something outrageous.”

  A few years earlier, in February 1997, Calvin Klein’s kiddie-porn ads were still on people’s minds when the last great controversy engendered by twentieth-century fashion photography burst into view. When Mario Sorrenti’s younger brother, Davide, who was starting his own career behind the camera, died after an apparently accidental overdose of heroin and Percocet, the fashion business was castigated for its embrace of heroin chic. Though the term actually predated its fashion moment, it came into vogue alongside Corinne Day and Kate Moss in 1994 and became a big stick hitting the garment trade in 1996 when presidential candidate Bob Dole lashed out against the fashion and entertainment industries for promoting drug use. Three months after Sorrenti’s death, the term landed on the New York Times’ front page, and a day later, President Bill Clinton—who’d previously called out Calvin Klein’s porn-chic ads—picked up the cudgel. “The glorification of heroin is not creative, it’s destructive,” Clinton said.

  Though she came from the culture that put heroin chic on the public agenda, Caryn Franklin was appalled by it. “Self-disclosure, in order to create sensation, became more and more dram
atic and personalized for shock value,” she says. “There are certain things you don’t tell people. Heroin chic was the exposure of the psyche as dark and grim as it gets, but fashion mistakenly thought it had currency” and revealed its “inability to recognize the boundaries of what is distasteful. Fashion invested it with the cool factor and that’s entirely irresponsible. At that point the fashion message was appropriated by brands and huge corporations looking to engage through shock tactics and not from a position of integrity. The photographs were no longer personal statements made for a small, niche market. Mass media widely broadcast to willing consumers who’ve agreed to follow fashion is a different matter, so fashion should care where it leads.”

  Whether fashion cared is open for debate. But it promptly turned its back on heroin chic. In a follow-up to its front-page article, the Times presciently predicted that fashion photography would return to its traditional tools: glamour, sex, and fabulous elegance. “Fashion is based on a whole series of quick about-turns, going against everything that’s there,” said Nick Knight, the photographer who briefly served as the photo editor of i-D in 1990, before starting to take pictures again for British Vogue in 1993. “There’s no point in doing anything that exists already. So the only way for me to get back into fashion was to have a mainstream vehicle for my work.” His comeback shoot was called “Glam Is Back” and plundered the work of Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin, even using Newton’s ring light. “It hit a note just at the right moment,” Knight continued. “All of a sudden makeup and hair products started selling again. It was such a pro-fashion-industry step.” Says Phil Bicker, “It was a real statement: we want to take control again.”

  Then, a moribund Italian label, Gucci, hired a new creative director, Dawn Mello, and in 1990 she brought in a new designer, Tom Ford. Four years later, he hired Mario Testino, a charming and socially smooth Peruvian photographer based in London, to shoot the revived brand’s advertising. Testino had been working with a half-French former model and stylist, Carine Roitfeld, for years, and the ads they made for Gucci, which revived and updated the expensive and hard-edged eroticism of the Studio 54 era, made fashion folk feel good about themselves again. In 1999, Calvin Klein hired them to create a campaign, and two years later, their conquest of fashion was affirmed when Roitfeld was named editor of Paris Vogue.

  Ironically, the return of glamour opened the way for another wave of down-market innovation. Just after Knight’s Vogue debut, another fringe fashion fanzine appeared in London, beginning its life in poster form. Phil Poynter moved to London in 1992 at eighteen after growing up reading the Face and i-D and spending a summer assisting a photographer from his hometown named Marcus Piggott. London’s economy was depressed at the time, creating “an open playing field for people without a place to express themselves,” Poynter says. He met Jefferson Hack and a photographer named Rankin Waddell in a West London bar late that year, and they “had the idea of starting a magazine together,” he says, after Rankin (as he is known) published one called Eat Me using the resources of a student union publication he edited. “He’d photographed London’s coolest people naked and published it without the student union knowing,” Poynter says. “We realized, we can do this.”

  “We felt quite young and like no one would ever employ us,” says Katie Grand, then a fashion student and Rankin’s girlfriend. “We were really ambitious but we had no strategy, no logic. We thought we could be the next i-D. We were the next generation.” Their magazine, Dazed & Confused, was first published sporadically, “whenever we could afford to,” Poynter says. “We ran clubs to fund it. Our aim was to give ourselves and our friends a place to produce and publish work.”

  Dazed & Confused had no plan, but it had a motivating principle based on collaboration, with its journalists, stylists, and photographers working together to realize “concepts rather than straightforward pictures,” says Grand. Adds Poynter, “It wasn’t about a girl in a dress or a fashion movement, which all those guys, Fabien, Mario, and Corinne, did brilliantly. It was about an idea that wasn’t directly related to clothing or selling a lifestyle.”

  They put Grand’s upstairs neighbors, Piggott and Mert Alas, a stylist, together and created a fashion photography team. Like Grand, they were “interested in challenging images,” she says. “It did feel like we were heavily referencing Bourdin and Newton as a reaction to David Sims, Corinne, and Craig McDean. Mert and Marcus would never let it go. We could’ve plundered Bourdin until the cows came home.”

  By the late nineties, the Dazed & Confused photographers were winning high-profile advertising assignments, just as the i-D crew had a few years earlier. Simultaneously, digital photography was moving slowly but steadily into the mainstream. Though Photoshop software for manipulating images had first been sold in 1987, the photographic team of Inez and Vinoodh began using it to manipulate fashion images only in 1994, and the first digital cameras designed for professionals were introduced in 1995. It would be eleven more years before Nikon would discontinue most of its film cameras. In the meantime, the avant-garde of fashion imagery embraced digital, and inevitably it conquered the business. By 2002, Dazed & Confused, with its focus on hyperreal, conceptual images, would find itself in the digital vanguard. “Photograph a girl and drop in a background!” says Poynter, who became a full-time photographer himself.

  Chapter 44

  * * *

  “ALL YOU SEE ARE HANDBAGS”

  The fashion-image business had split in two at the turn of the millennium. On one side were the star photographers Women’s Wear Daily had once dubbed the Supersnappers: Meisel, Weber, Demarchelier. On the other were those it memorably described as Whippersnappers—younger (and less expensive) talents such as Steven Klein, Dewey Nicks, the Sorrentis, and Corinne Day—who worked for “little magazines like Purple and Self Service” that “started as art projects and grew into an underground labor of love,” says an even younger photographer, Cedric Buchet. He started at Dazed & Confused and soon found himself shooting for Vogues and Elle, but “at the time, it was cooler to do the really cool ones and everyone gets to be creative, and you know what? The big magazines didn’t pay either.”

  The advent of digital photography encouraged the collaborative spirit championed by Dazed & Confused. Where photographers could once exclude editors or clients as they tested film and lights, send them home while film was being processed, enjoy the thrill (or suffer the agony) of discovering what they’d shot when it emerged from the lab, and then choose which images they’d share, now the shutter clicks and an image instantly appears on a screen that everyone in the studio can see, critique, accept, or reject. More crucially, perhaps, digital photography transformed the art into a new kind of computer-generated illustration. “It is generally understood that you can only photograph what you can see,” Robin Derrick, the former creative director of British Vogue, wrote in his introduction to a book of digital fashion photographs. “Digital technology means this is no longer the case. . . . Pictures can be seamlessly altered, blended and mixed together. . . . Extraordinary mind games are being played.”

  “Photography is now a huge industry,” says Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. “You have eighteen to twenty people on a set, the photo team, the digital team, the behind-the-scenes video team, the in-house retouchers before the proper retouchers, and you’re doing it all at the same time. It’s a different kind of creativity. But it’s no less creative.”

  To many, the advent of digital photography marked the end of an era in fashion photography. “It’s perfectly beautiful if you call that beautiful, which I don’t,” sniffs Denis Piel, a Vogue shooter from the nineties. “It’s not sexy. It’s plastic. It’s not appealing.” Melvin Sokolsky considers digital “hugely important,” but don’t take that as a compliment: “Every schmuck on the street with an iPhone is taking pictures of themselves, and it can’t come out bad because there are apps to fix everything. The tools have become more important than the idea.” Sokolsky says he cares about “a perso
n’s vision, not the mechanics of photography. Photoshop can make you proficient; it can’t make you see.” Digital “is a fantastic fucking tool, but it’s being used wrong.” Fashion magazines are “laughable,” he concludes. “The girls are so retouched it’s not a photo, it’s an illustration.”

  Many photographers, such as Steven Meisel, accepted the inevitable and changed with the times. “He mastered it early and never made his work look digital,” says Ronnie Cooke Newhouse. Bruce Weber, on the other hand, never bothered: “I don’t use digital; I still shoot film. It’s the way I started. It’s what I’m most comfortable with. I like film. I like the way it feels when you load it. I buy my friends old cameras like Rolleiflexes and Leicas.”

  The advent of digital coincided with a turning point in fashion. “Stores were merging, discounters were rising, magazines were growing troubled, there were fewer places for new photographers to work,” says Joey Grill. “Where you used to get five days to shoot a story, you got three. The bean counters at all levels were getting more power than the creatives. The business affairs offices of magazines were clamping down on creative excesses, and certain photographers were able to deliver campaigns and images that sold merchandise. They understood how to sell.”