Apart from the flirtations, I was always struck by Didier’s beautiful manners, but it wasn’t until we moved in together that I came up against how deep-seated his old-fashioned reticence and sense of decorum really are. One day soon after I had moved to New York, he called me from a work trip in Japan and asked me to pick him up at the airport upon his return. I had not seen him in several months, and this was the first time he had been to my new residence. “Are you coming upstairs?” I asked as we arrived at my apartment. “Maybe. We’ll see,” he replied. And then, sometime later, “Will you be staying for dinner?” “Maybe. We’ll see.” “Are you staying the night?” “Maybe. We’ll see.” And then the next morning at breakfast, “Will I be seeing you later?” “Maybe. We’ll see,” he said once more.
This went on for several weeks in its considerably noncommittal, delicate way. It was only when hundreds of extra bags turned up containing can after can of aerosol hair lacquer, wigs, brushes, combs, tongs, and hair dryers that I knew our situation was permanent, and I settled into a life which, during its finest moments, balances home and work with a gentle equilibrium.
XI
ON
CALVINISM
In which
our heroine
goes minimal,
makes a heap
of money,
and misses
magazines.
When I went to work for Calvin Klein, I felt like the new girl at school, hiding at my desk behind my welcoming four hundred vases of flowers. I was in the design room on New York’s Thirty-ninth Street, in the heart of the Garment District. Though my title was design director, I wasn’t exactly sure how that should be interpreted or what the parameters were. No one had told me beforehand, although I assumed I was there to direct the design team. But in a very real sense, I had the feeling the team hated me simply because I wasn’t Calvin. From the start, Kelly (Klein), Calvin’s new wife, couldn’t quite figure out why I was there, either, and practically everyone was annoyed by my title. I was on a huge salary for one and a half years (which soared even more when I was offered a job by Ralph Lauren). I always assumed it didn’t matter who was the boss as long as you got the job done, but I guess that is easy to say if you are—sort of—the boss.
“Now where did I put my collections ideas?”
Anyway, I never thought of becoming a designer. It never even crossed my mind. So it wasn’t as if I was trying to steal anyone’s job.
After I had been in the position a few months, on an “inspiration” trip to Spain for the fall/winter ’86 season, my colleague Steven Slowik, the head designer in my department, was prompted to create a stole in heavy duchesse satin decorated with motifs taken from the ceiling of the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The stole was then beaded in Paris by Lesage, the celebrated couture embroiderer who had worked with every grand fashion house from Yves Saint Laurent and Dior to Schiaparelli and Chanel. As you can imagine, it turned out to be probably the most expensive stole in the world, and if I had been more objective, I would have seen that it was not a suitable item to include in the collection of what, after all, is a sportswear company. Another time it was our idea to make everything in pale, pretty prints inspired by the flowers in an English country garden. I then asked my favorite English hat designer, Patricia Underwood, to make charming little straw boaters for the show—another big mistake, as it turned out. America’s fashion bible, Women’s Wear Daily, published a terrible write-up, strongly criticizing the collection for abandoning Calvin’s modern identity. I was accused of trying to recast an American icon as an English one.
Well, in the end I have to agree that they were right. My ideas about clothes, which are inseparable from the aesthetics involved with presenting them in magazines, had proved completely wrongheaded and far too grandiose for Calvin’s minimalist aesthetic. My efforts showed that I was not good at leading a design team, and certainly not one that worked on the basis of designing from the ground up. Eventually, I might even have led the company into deep trouble. Calvin, unfortunately, was in rehab at the time, but when he came out, he was furious. He fired Steven and hauled me over the coals. “This can never be allowed to happen again,” he yelled. My million-dollar mortgage flashed before my eyes. “He’s going to fire me too,” I thought. But he didn’t.
Calvin, you see, has always been concerned with image, the advertising image and the all-encompassing lifestyle it promotes. To him it was the most important thing, and at least this was something I was qualified to help with. I was immediately set to work on the first ever print advertisements for his new breakthrough fragrance, Eternity.
The location was Martha’s Vineyard, the photographer Bruce Weber, the models Christy Turlington and a conventionally handsome French actor named Lambert Wilson. The bottle was, I think, a replica of an old one discovered by Kelly, and the perfume’s name was inspired by the exquisite eternity ring Calvin gave her when they were first wed, purchased at auction from the estate of the late Duchess of Windsor.
Because Calvin built his enormous success on the back of overtly sexy advertising, and because his high-profile social life had not, up to this point, been that much associated with upholding family values, the Eternity campaign, with its sweet images of romantic love and the circle of life, came as a huge surprise. People observed the more than passing resemblance that Calvin bore to Lambert, and the certain similarity Kelly had to Christy, not to mention the idyllic family atmosphere complete with model children conjured by the ads, and wondered what was going on. My feeling is that it was Calvin’s way of distancing himself from his wild past and the debauchery of the Studio 54 era, and of making a stand against the spread of AIDS. As always, his timing was perfect, the campaign succeeded, and his perfume sales went through the roof.
If I’d skipped Calvin Klein and headed straight to American Vogue, I never would have understood how American fashion works. The approach is very different here from how it is in England; it’s very real and much more to do with business. Businesslike interactions extend to other aspects of everyday life. For instance, my assistant Carol at Calvin told me how to open a bank account and showed me how to use a bank card. In England we didn’t have those. I banked at Coutts, the royal bankers, where everything was courtly, gracious, and “olde worlde,” and the uniformed doorman would say “Good day, sir” or “Good day, madam.” Suddenly, I was here in Citibank, New York, where everything was highly automated and there was barely a human being to be seen.
After a while, I must confess, I did begin thinking about a return to magazines. Working at Calvin, by this time, had become a little uncomfortable. My great friend Zack Carr, who had been head of design several years earlier before leaving the company to pursue other interests, had lately returned to replace Steven Slowik. Our once easygoing and very friendly relationship was under strain. Zack was extraordinarily talented. He had helped create the whole Calvin design aesthetic from day one. But mine was officially the higher position, which obviously irked him. So when conflicting instructions were issued a couple of times to the workrooms, it caused tension.
I adored Zack, who had played a major part in my love of American fashion when I first began to visit New York. He, on the other hand, loved talking about iconic European designers such as Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Before I joined Calvin, we spent long evenings together discussing them into the wee small hours of the morning. I had taken my holidays at Bruce Weber’s house on Shelter Island with Zack, and had traveled to Morocco with him and his boyfriend, John Calcagno. I had treasured our friendship and didn’t want it to end in bad feeling. So, since my first love was magazines, I decided a move would be no bad thing.
When it was announced that Anna Wintour had been appointed the new editor in chief of American Vogue, I immediately rang her office from my desk at Calvin Klein to offer my congratulations. I then found myself asking her assistant, Gabé Doppelt, whom I knew from London when we worked together at British Vogue, “Do you think she would have me
back?” “Wait a minute,” said Gabé, disappearing into muffled silence for a brief moment. Anna came on the line and said, “Meet me at Da Silvano at six.” So I did, and that evening at the table, without missing a beat, she said, “I’m starting on Monday. Would you like to start with me?” I vaguely recollect her asking if I would like to have some dinner, but by then I was in a bit of a daze.
This was a Friday night, and I had somehow to reach Calvin before he read anything about it in Women’s Wear Daily on Monday morning. Finally, I tracked him down, and he couldn’t have been nicer. I love him for that. I think it was best for both of us, because I really wasn’t suited for life on Seventh Avenue.
XII
ON
AMERICAN VOGUE
In which
Grace learns
the ropes,
taking care to
avoid the
knotty problem
of bling.
On what was to be my first day as a fashion director at American Vogue, I called Anna’s assistant, Gabé, and suggested that I go in with her because I was too nervous to arrive at the magazine’s offices alone. Dressed in Calvin Klein’s black pants and white shirt, with a fuchsia Calvin Klein Resort double-ply cashmere cardigan tied around my waist (I thought it would make me look less fat), I entered 350 Madison Avenue, Condé Nast’s address before the company’s headquarters uprooted to the showier monolith of 4 Times Square. I also thought I was doing a “power look,” one we in England associated with American Vogue, while we were all walking around in our drab but arty black.
Anna called everybody, and I do mean everybody, into a conference room that same day to discuss where she intended to take her brave new Vogue. She explained that she wanted it to be younger and more approachable and to have more energy. And then she had various staff members take the stand. Many questions were asked about the new regime, such as whether we would be photographing entire designer looks, and whether the basic structure of the magazine would change.
It’s the bling thing - all together in Chanel Jackets.
We were a mixed bunch. Some editors had been there for years, others were freshly arrived, but we all had one thing in common: We each considered ourselves the top of the class and had a strong personality to accompany it.
Unlike the almost Dickensian working conditions I had experienced at British Vogue, pleasant amounts of office space—with their own closets in which to store the clothes they were shooting—were allocated to the American Vogue fashion editors, or sittings editors, as they were then called. These were me; Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, the French former fashion editor of Elle and by far Anna’s new favorite; Polly Mellen, whose tenure dated back as far as the great days of the former Vogue chief, Diana Vreeland; and Jenny Capitain, who was German and had modeled for several of Helmut Newton’s naughtier photographs (one of which had her wearing little more than a neck brace). There was a huge accessories room, ruled with an iron hand by the new accessories editor, Candy Pratts. Candy had previously designed the windows at Bloomingdale’s, which, under the inspired leadership of Kal Ruttenstein, promoted the younger designers. Phyllis Posnick was executive fashion editor, coordinating the fashion room so that things ran smoothly for the rest of us. She was not involved in photo shoots back then, but later she worked on beauty photographs and any special features requiring a telling image or two.
A girl called Laurie Schechter, whom Anna brought over from New York magazine, was responsible for the various shoots in the “front of the book,” those newsy opening pages of the magazine. That was an idea Anna totally owned, and one she worked on extremely hard to make busily interesting with more reportage, backstage photographs, and exclusive pictures that no one else managed to get of pretty girls who dressed well and attended every party. Through Vogue, Anna was creating her own modern-day socialites, contemporary “it” girls.
My debut at American Vogue was a sitting featuring white shirts. I had only one and a half days to put it together instead of the usual month it might have taken me in England. “What are you going to do for your first story?” Anna had asked. Panicking a little, I said, “Erm, I’ll do white shirts.” (I hadn’t seen any fashion up close other than Calvin’s for over a year and a half.) In no time at all, the fashion department gathered together racks and racks of white shirts all looking pretty much the same. I accessorized them with hundreds of little crosses, very delicate and very me—something that, in these days of political correctness, would not be allowed, as all forms of religious symbolism are now strictly against the rules of Vogue.
Before each shoot, there would be a meeting in the planning room. You arrived with still-life snapshots or Polaroids of all your clothes, laid them out like unworthy offerings in front of Anna; the magazine supremo, Mr. Liberman; art director Derek Ungless; and sometimes the assigned photographer, before whom you made the case for what you proposed to do. In this instance I wanted to photograph my white shirts outdoors in the Hamptons using natural light, close to the house of the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, who would be taking the pictures. But Mr. Liberman had other ideas. He said, “I think you should do the photographs with six girls running in the studio. Then the lighting quality will be good.” I was completely thrown. I couldn’t think of any way to do the story other than my original idea. But afterward Anna said, “Just go and do it how you want. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry. We only needed to get Alex’s opinion.” So we photographed the story my way, and Anna absolutely loved it. As did Mr. Liberman.
I seemed to be busily shooting, shooting, shooting every day. Organizing my one story a month for British Vogue didn’t, in retrospect, seem like such a busy scene. Then there were the run-throughs and the endless market editors. This was fascinating to me because I had never worked or consulted with a market editor—a person whose job was to know all the clothes in the collections and call them in for the editors, making sure to spread the credits as widely as possible. As the clothing industry in America is so huge, they were an essential element to getting the job done.
There was a great deal of pushing and pulling between me and my colleagues over clothes for our sittings. Transparencies of the latest international collections shot from the catwalks would circulate around the offices, and we had to put our initials against the outfits we wanted to shoot. When we were abroad, traveling from one set of shows to another, we would often stay up all night, Polaroiding selected looks from the shows or choosing them from contact sheets with the aid of a strong magnifying glass.
But wherever we were, Carlyne always got her choice in first. Every single time. Manolo Blahnik, for instance, would send over sample pairs of shoes from his latest collection for all the editors to use. They usually ended up squirreled away in Carlyne’s closet. When we were at the collections, she would play tricks. Polly Mellen used to look across at everyone’s notes, so Carlyne would make a big show of following something ugly on the catwalk, ostentatiously taking note of anything especially hideous, like a floral bathing cap. And Polly had to have it.
Polly had ruled the roost under Grace Mirabella, Anna’s predecessor, and had begun her American Vogue career even earlier. She was responsible in the sixties and seventies for many of the magazine’s most memorable and influential sittings with the photographer Richard Avedon. Now Carlyne was in favor, and poor Polly had a tough time as she struggled to assert her relevance, trying to be supermodern and accessorizing her models with about nineteen watches, as Carlyne famously did in a sporty style she created early in her career at French Elle. And as I now did, too, in a very Carlyne-style shoot featuring Naomi Campbell looking sexy in a car with some Dalmatians—because I thought it was the way to get on. Gilles Dufour at Chanel kept giving me brightly colored little Chanel jackets, like those championed by Anna and Carlyne, and I must confess I wore these as well, even though they were far too brash for me—because, like everyone else, I sought Anna’s approval and wanted to fit in.
Meanwhile, Jenny Capitain lik
ed to be first. She was all about doing everything before anyone else. Carlyne, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about being first; she just had to have it. If Azzedine’s collection arrived from Paris, it promptly vanished straight into her closet. Carlyne was very close—or not, depending on the day—to André Leon Talley, whom Anna appointed creative director.
André is very tall, grand, and overwhelming, a black man of such immense presence and style that you can’t possibly imagine him waking up, looking rough, and having a bad day. After working for Andy Warhol at Interview magazine, he made his name at Women’s Wear Daily in their Paris bureau, and as the personal assistant to Diana Vreeland when she was in charge of the Metropolitan Museum’s costume exhibits, before settling at Vogue. He would visit Vreeland’s apartment in her later years and read to her.
Equally strong-willed and opinionated, André and Carlyne were always either in cahoots and inseparable, or dramatically feuding, running in and out of each other’s offices talking secretively and theatrically shutting the doors: slam, slam, slam. They were often arguing or sulking or not speaking to each other at fashion shows. If you happened to be seated between them, it was dreadfully uncomfortable, like having a big dark cloud above your head.
André took his ambassadorial role at Vogue seriously. He dressed extravagantly and traveled imperially, often redecorating his room at the Paris Ritz when he arrived for the collections with personal items stored in the hotel’s basement. As for shoots, André didn’t do many, but they were usually the important ones featuring personalities. I remember him directing sessions with people like Madonna, and there was a cover for which he valiantly tried to turn Ivana Trump into Brigitte Bardot. He was always toweringly present at the collections in the power hierarchy of who was sitting next to Anna. (If you were badly placed, it meant you were a nobody.) I would often feed him ideas I liked and felt strongly about, and he would feed them to Anna. He, on the other hand, would determine how we dressed for special Vogue events or parties, and he didn’t like the fact that I wore flat shoes all the time.
Grace Page 15
