It was a look much inspired by his boyfriend, Benjamin, who was a devoted fan of Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and the whole slacker look of the Seattle scene. Steven had used this style for a recent set of photographs in the Italian men’s magazine Per Lui, styled by my good friend Joe McKenna, who is very au courant about the street thing. At Steven’s suggestion and not seeing the harm in it, I rang Joe’s assistant for the addresses of the stores where I could find those same shapeless sweaters with holes. I succeeded only in upsetting Joe a great deal for not asking him personally if it was okay, though we did eventually make up.
Shooting a Prada special with Steven Meisel.
Many of the girls’ clothes came from the designer Anna Sui, who, throughout the years, stayed doggedly faithful to that same grungy look. There were no clothes from Marc Jacobs, because this was shot just before he staged his famously controversial “Grunge” fashion show—literally a matter of days earlier—and he doesn’t give previews. I didn’t use his collection simply because I hadn’t seen it yet. This kind of coincidence happens all the time in fashion, and it’s often impossible to unravel where ideas have come from.
In its time, grunge, which emerged from the underground music scene to become a hugely popular youth look, was a major turning point for fashion. It made the flood of bright colors, high heels, and big shiny bracelets look old and out of date, cleansed the palate, and paved the way for the romantic minimalism of designers like Helmut Lang and Jil Sander, and even for the floaty, bias-cut beginnings of John Galliano. It also turned the tide for me. This was one designer movement Carlyne couldn’t champion—because she didn’t like it.
Not to say that would stop her.
Shortly afterward we were at a Jean Paul Gaultier show in Paris, the one inspired by the traditional dress of Hasidic Jews. The collection was extremely polarizing; people either loved it or loathed it. Some were even deeply offended by it, feeling that it caricatured and made fun of a serious religion. But once you deconstructed the “look,” it was undeniably beautiful, with jet embroideries and caviar beading on black silks and gray satins. Afterward, Anna asked all of us what we thought. Carlyne expressed herself in her typical forceful fashion. “Je déteste ça. C’est tous-ce que je déteste,” she snarled. I had already mentioned how beautiful I thought it was and how much I loved it. So Anna turned around and announced that the show should be given to me to photograph for the magazine, “because Grace loves it.” Up until then Carlyne had reserved the exclusive right to photograph anything considered important enough to be called a “designer story,” whether she liked it or not. So she exploded. Anna expressed surprise at Carlyne’s desire to photograph a collection she “detested” so much. With that, Carlyne completely vanished for four days in the middle of the collections. When she returned, she met with Anna and, by mutual agreement, went freelance.
The pendulum swung further my way with the ascendance of the designer John Galliano, who had a great sense of whimsy and held his romantic shows in Paris after he decided to base himself there. John’s earlier collections in London didn’t appear on our pages in any significant way because, when he was new to the scene in the mid-eighties, Anna had swept into British Vogue, where she was more inclined to devote space to purposeful power suits than to anything nostalgic, wistful, or covered in mud. And John’s first big London show—the one after he graduated from Central Saint Martins school of fashion and which upstaged all the more seasoned names of London’s fashion week—was as anti–power dressing as you could possibly get. The clothes included long pale cotton nightshirts in striped winceyette worn under huge sweaters riddled with holes, accessorized with dusty, dirty men’s work boots, a couple of old broken alarm clocks worn as brooches, and top hats smothered in twigs. For reasons best known to John and his muse, Amanda Harlech (whose admitted inspirations were images of hunting, shooting, and fishing), toward the end of the show one model came out brandishing a large dead fish—a fresh mackerel—which was then tossed into the front row, where it landed unceremoniously in the lap of Mrs. Burstein, the owner of Browns. As the poor woman had recently filled her exclusive shopwindow in London’s West End with the designer’s entire graduate collection as a major salute to his emerging talent, it seemed a tad ungrateful.
These and other extravagances, like John’s designs inspired by eighteenth-century French fops known as Les Incroyables, echoed a new enthusiasm among British club kids for dressing up in period costumes. They were called the New Romantics. At the same time, Vivienne Westwood was producing her own brand of piratical men’s fashion that I photographed for British Vogue on the tail end of a shoot in America with Bruce Weber. Vivienne had insisted on flying someone over with the clothes to show us how to put them on. Bruce then took pictures of them on a group of amazingly hunky male models, some of whom were high school wrestlers. I was so embarrassed asking them to dress up in such feminine looks—I really felt I was humiliating them.
John was a designer whose clothes always formed a narrative, and that, of course, was close to my heart. One imaginative show in a Paris warehouse based on C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had the audience entering through the back of a huge wooden armoire to find themselves standing on a set resembling wintry London rooftops, complete with artificial snow falling on their heads. It was particularly magical—and not simply because Johnny Depp was sitting across from us in the audience waiting to see his then-girlfriend Kate Moss model the clothes.
Then there was the show staged while John was once again on the brink of collapse in 1994, after being abandoned by yet another of his financial backers. With only a few bolts of material, mostly black, out of which to produce a collection, he presented one of the most unforgettable fashion shows ever. It was at the shuttered and emptied Left Bank mansion of André Leon Talley’s friend, the millionairess philanthropist São Schlumberger, who had recently moved on to even greater splendor in the Champs de Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The invitation, received by a select group, came in the guise of a weathered old key. Others knew of it only by word of mouth. Few had any idea what to expect—although we at Vogue knew more than most because André and Anna had a hand in it, and Vogue had exclusive rights to photograph it first.
On entering the abandoned house, we set off to find our seats, sprinkled throughout a series of dusty salons hung with shredded drapes and theatrical cobwebs, and decorated with dried flowers and the occasional glass chandelier that had been dashed to the floor. We came across a rickety cluster of seats in various states of disintegration, which could have come from a Walt Disney castle. Vogue’s seats faced the main hall and the grand staircase, so we could see the first of John’s black-clad apparitions as she teetered down the stairs on spindly black Manolo Blahnik heels. Because they loved him, all the supermodels of the time had offered their services free of charge. Each was given a single outfit: Christy Turlington tiptoed through the rooms wearing something black and vaguely geisha, tied together with a giant obi; Nadja Auermann’s black outfit topped by a cloche looked like it had come straight out of an alternative version of Cabaret; Linda, Shalom, and the rest followed like phantoms haunting a ghostly film set, while we sat transfixed. Afterward we poured out into the sunlit Parisian courtyard, and people were heard pronouncing it the best show they had ever seen.
I had been carried away the year before by another of John’s collections shown in Paris, in which the theme was bootleggers or buccaneers or some such, and the tale in John’s head concerned shipwrecks and booty and young girls kidnapped, held to ransom, and then fleeing, dressed in whatever they managed to grab from the pirates’ treasure chests. Which, for the purposes of this show, included lacy lingerie, naughty bodices, and crinoline dresses over huge hooped skirts, the tops of which always seemed in imminent danger of falling down. Some were decorated with rusty pins he had kept for several weeks in a bowl of water in his studio. I found the staging memorable as the girls kept rushing around and then melodramatically pre
tending to faint, whether from fear or consumption, I can’t be sure.
I was happy to take four of John’s enormous crinolines on a trip to Jamaica soon after, together with the photographer Ellen von Unwerth, for a shoot inspired by Jane Campion’s film The Piano, which had recently played to great award-winning success. I took other clothes, too, from designers like Vivienne Westwood, but only John’s each needed its own trunk and were so complicated to pack that I was terrified they might arrive mangled and ruined. John wasn’t worried at all. He told me that the more destroyed they became, the more he loved them.
We stayed on top of a hill in Falmouth at a Great House called Good Hope. The first stop on our location hunt was the nearby Time N’ Place Beach, where we met a couple who owned a little shacklike bar. Tony, the guy, had built the place out of bamboo and assorted flotsam (a skill that came in useful when I subsequently returned to Jamaica for a shoot with Naomi Campbell and the photographer Herb Ritts, and needed someone to build a “castaway” hut).
Tony told us there was a completely deserted beach practically around the corner. So, armed with machetes and with him as our guide, we hacked our way through the undergrowth until we arrived at a perfect horseshoe-shaped bay of turquoise water and white sand, completely empty save for the most extraordinary formations of bleached driftwood washed up by the tide. Soon we were transporting the huge crinolines—it took two people to carry each one—along our makeshift little path to the shoot, which turned out to be an enchantingly easy and simple affair in a way that really doesn’t happen anymore.
Ellen is very low-key. She doesn’t need an enormous team of assistants, and she uses available light—available everything, in fact. We conscripted an old wooden sailboat found right there, and in the pictures, Ellen’s young daughter, Rebecca, played the child of our model, Debbie Deitering. Over the years, I seem to have shot in that same tropical cove with a number of different photographers, including Herb Ritts, Arthur Elgort, Peter Lindbergh, and David Sims. For David’s session, Tony was asked to build a raft and make a beautiful bow and arrow. By far the most complicated shoot was with Herb, who insisted on hiring generators, lighting equipment, wind machines, and a load of extra technical paraphernalia all piled high on two enormous trucks, which then attempted to drive down our well-beaten track to the beach. Needless to say, only one made it, while the other became completely embedded in the sand.
It was with images of his crinolines dancing in my head that I recently arrived for lunch with John Galliano, the first time I had seen him since his firing from Dior for making anti-Semitic comments in a bar, an incident regrettable on so many levels. We went to what I thought was a quiet, out-of-the-way restaurant in Manhattan close to the Vogue offices and we were both dressed down—which in John’s case meant he was wearing a woolly hat and shorts. The next second there was a picture of us on the Internet, probably taken by some spying diner with a cell phone. Modern life! It was so sad, because I hardly ever saw John without an entourage and security, despite having loved his clothes for years and pushed them into the magazine at every opportunity. In the past we rarely spent time together because Anna was the one to take him firmly under her wing, always running backstage before his shows and then whispering to me, “You’re going to love it” as she took her seat.
Not being a fashionista, I don’t hang out with many designers these days, though I do see Nicolas Ghesquière for dinner quite a lot, and Marc Jacobs, although not as much as I used to when we met regularly at the Brasserie Balzar in Paris during fashion week. Then his Vuitton show was moved to a more inconvenient time on the schedule, so we stopped being able to meet so easily. I have been friends with Karl Lagerfeld since the seventies and always attended those wonderful soirees he threw for Anna at his Left Bank house throughout the nineties. And Helmut Lang I am very close to. We clicked from the moment we first met. Helmut is a very real person with a great sense of humor and, even if it sounds like an oxymoron for an Austrian, he’s a lot of fun. It helps, if you are friendly with a designer, to love his or her clothes, and I really loved Helmut’s. They were intriguing and unexpected, minimal, but not what the young kids nowadays think of as minimal because they were also brilliantly complicated.… Until he gave it all up and became a sculptor instead.
In 1990 I returned to Russia, this time with the photographer Arthur Elgort. Christy Turlington was the model. The difference between this trip and my visit in the seventies was considerable. With the big thaw of glasnost and their newfound affluence, the Russians were more flashy, “designery,” and opulent. McDonald’s had recently opened, and there were queues around the block. We were accompanied by Vogue’s travel writer, Richard Alleman, and I noticed how much less surveillance there was, sparing us that sneaking feeling of being constantly watched.
On this occasion our photos were to include young ballet dancers, skaters, artists, fashion designers, and TV personalities—all representative of the culturally assured new Russia. To this end we were placed in the hands of Vlad, a contact of Condé Nast’s Alex Liberman, who was to help coordinate anyone we needed to photograph. But Vlad was really bad. Each day he would greet us with the dreaded words “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” This was inevitably followed by something like “The good news is that lunch will be served at one o’clock.” (Pause.) “The bad news is the ballet company has said no to any photos.” Variations on this theme continued with the skaters and several others. Thankfully, the artists survived. They lived in a kind of commune-cum-squat. As we didn’t have a location van, Christy was obliged to use the bathroom as her changing room. While she was getting dressed, she couldn’t help but notice she was sharing it with an extra-large transvestite busily transforming himself into Marilyn Monroe.
The other big difference was that, although I was looking forward to drowning in caviar, there was hardly a teaspoon of it to be had for our entire stay. A shortage meant that anything you would call a decent quantity could be found only on the black market. We were directed to a dubious little square, where we purchased a fair amount to carry back home.
When it was time to fly out, however, the airport customs officials became extremely heated about the impressive haul in our baggage, saying it was not for export and we needed to provide invoices, and adamantly refusing to let us leave with it. At this point I asked if there was any problem with us eating it on the spot. There wasn’t. So we sat there, right up to the moment the flight boarded, scooping out caviar from our tins as fast as we could on the blade of Arthur’s Swiss Army penknife.
In April 1991 I turned fifty, and Anna and Gabé organized a special birthday party for me. Usually my “surprise” birthday parties are taken care of by Didier, and involve the help of my current assistant and the booking of a very nice restaurant for us and a few close friends.
For my fiftieth, Anna booked the restaurant Indochine, which was the hot and happening spot of the moment. All the people I worked with came. Steven Meisel, who was out and about much more in those days, sat at the head of his own table—rather like Jesus at the Last Supper—flanked by modeling greats Linda, Christy, Naomi, Nadège, Helena Christensen, Susan Holmes, Yasmeen Ghauri, and Veronica Webb. Elizabeth Saltzman, the “it” girl at Vogue back then and responsible for the new young designers, turned up wearing twelve-inch heels, a padded bra, and a white-blond wig, which proved so effective a disguise that even her parents had no idea who she was. Bruce Weber and Calvin Klein were there. Two models came in carrying a birthday cake the size of a small table that had my face on it drawn in icing. But Anna wasn’t happy with the way the portrait turned out, so she took off her sunglasses and jammed them into the cake, making it appear as if I was wearing them. A salsa band played. Arthur Elgort, who is such a good dancer, twirled me out onto the dance floor. Everybody wiggled away underneath a limbo pole. Anna danced wildly.
Later that year I went on another trip, this time to Marrakech, with Ellen von Unwerth, Oribe, and the Valkyrie Nadja Auermann. Originally,
we were supposed to head off to Berlin for this photo session: After the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, it was suddenly the “in” place to shoot despite the ugly building sites on practically every street corner and a skyline bristling with cranes. But Ellen changed her mind, having recently gone to Morocco on a trip for someone else and fallen in love with its exotic romanticism. Our new inspiration was to be Josef von Sternberg’s 1930s black-and-white film Morocco, starring Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, a fortunate choice because the blond Nadja was perfect to play Dietrich. The series of pictures was remarkable in that not only were the clothes mostly black, but to my amazement, Anna actually accepted having the whole story photographed in black and white, which, as it was held to be so uncommercial, was normally forbidden. We used Oribe’s agent, Omar, for our Gary Cooper figure, dressed up in the look of the French Foreign Legion, and found our extras among the local population.
Another extraordinary thing about shooting with Ellen is her luck in casting. We can be just about anywhere in the world, looking for a person to play a specific part in her pictures, when the perfect match will materialize. On this occasion she even discovered a man in a white crumpled suit, the very image of the suave character played in the film by Adolphe Menjou.
In 1993 Anna came up with the idea that I should have a show of my work, which turned into an exhibition of fashion pictures curated by me for the Danziger Gallery in SoHo, a selection of personal favorites taken by the many great photographers I have worked with. As I had been working at American Vogue for only four or five years, Anna felt I should include as much material as I wished from British Vogue, which was very generous of her—although I was soon shooting everything under the sun to boost the American quotient.
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