It’s the bling thing - all together in Chanel Jackets.
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.
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 liked 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.
In those days he always appeared to carry lists with him of desperately important and urgent things he felt should go into the magazine. He would either tell Anna personally or, if he was away, fire off numerous dramatic faxes to her from wherever he was, all written in the hugest capital letters and punctuated with enormous exclamation marks.
Back then Anna hardly went anywhere without André. He was closer to her than any husband, and their relationship has lasted a lot longer than most marriages (especially mine!). It was he who, in a fashion meeting one day, came up with the idea of “red-carpet dressing,” a notion I heard for the first time right there, which grew into such an intense mass-media reality that we seemed to be permanently rushing along that red carpet, chasing down celebrities. He was even the one called on to escort some of those celebrities—Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bernhard, and Renée Zellweger, to name just three—around the Paris collections.
In 1995, I inherited André’s title. (He was by then living in Paris and later came back to Vogue as editor at large.) The biggest difference between his time as creative director and mine was that I spoke directly to all the other editors, discussed their ideas from a fashion standpoint, and took them back to Anna. I was very much the go-between, listening to my colleagues’ points of view and in some cases pacifying them. André didn’t exactly come and talk to us about our sittings. He talked directly to Anna, and she would pass on his directions to all the relevant editors. They would also draw up the guest lists together for the parties Karl threw for her in Paris; then André took them round to Karl, whom he was extremely close to, for approval.
Sometimes both André and Anna made stopover trips in London to catch up on the latest Brit-art finds or to meet with fashion’s new young talents like Alexander McQueen, introduced to them by Isabella Blow, Anna’s onetime assistant at American Vogue and by then a major personality on the British fashion scene as well as McQueen’s muse.
Anna adored André. I remember her fiftieth-birthday present arriving at his party in the restaurant Chez Georges in Paris, an American Vogue favorite. It was a huge, distinctive orange box fastened with brown ribbons, and it contained an Hermès bicycle. I don’t think it was ever removed from the wrapping. Later it was packed up and shipped back to André’s place in New York, where it sat in its box like a trophy for the longest time.
André’s move to Paris coincided with his being given a substantial advance for writing what was widely expected to be the definitive biography of Yves Saint Laurent. Unfortunately, the designer was not at his best and had begun collecting some dire reviews. Some critics were outspoken enough to suggest he had entered a creative cul-de-sac. Suzy Menkes, in the International Herald Tribune, compared one collection to “a downmarket travel brochure.” At the same time, Anna, who had never been the hugest fan, started sidelining his clothes from Vogue’s collection reports.
For a legend of Paris fashion such as Yves, a standing ovation at the finale of his collection was a given, no matter how good or bad the show. But Anna now made a regular point of not stirring from her seat, and because she did not budge, neither did we. This line-up of obdurate American editors sitting in an ocean of standing celebrants scandalized the French press and infuriated Saint Laurent company president Pierre Bergé. American Vogue was banned from YSL for a while, leaving André to straddle a sharp fence. In the end the Saint Laurent book never reached completion, possibly because so much had been written about him already, or maybe the access simply dried up. In any case, people soon forgot about this feud, especially when the gossip moved on to Giorgio Armani and his displeasure with all of Condé Nast for not paying enough attention to his clothes, either.
Back at the magazine, boards of Polaroids were made up to show what clothes you would be photographing next, all approved by Anna. I once asked Gabé, “Why can’t I just tell Anna what I want to shoot?” before realizing the answer. With everything documented, you couldn’t smuggle something into a photo session without her knowing. Unless you were Carlyne. She handed in boards of Polaroids that had nothing whatsoever to do with what she was actually shooting. Or she would bypass the process altogether and have all the clothes she wanted delivered directly to the studio where she was working.
It was pointless complaining to Anna, saying things like “She stole my dress,” because the reply would simply be “This is not a girls’ boarding school. Deal with it yourself.” However, despite outsiders’ elevated view of Vogue as a temple of cool and sophistication, a girls’ boarding school—with its sulky outbursts, tears, and schoolgirlish tantrums—was exactly what it occasionally resembled.
To mark the end of a season’s shows, you would be summoned to a fashion ideas meeting. It was like a final exam, and we all dreaded it. Sometimes it would be in the evening, and there would be a dinner attached, especially during the Paris collections, and this would take place in the Salon d’Été, one of those grand and gilded private dining rooms at the back of the Ritz. Very nice food and wine were set out on a large oval table, and everything was elegantly arranged in customary fashion by Fiona DaRin, the eternally unflappable head of Vogue’s Paris bureau, who worked hard to placate our demands each season when we descended on her city. You had to stand up, sing for your supper, and offer your ideas—although you didn’t really want to reveal your ideas for fear everyone else would poach them. Worse was when people had written down suggestions in advance, and you could see Anna with sheafs of paper in front of her with words like “stripes” or “spots” on them. With a pitying look, she would say, “I’ve read your ideas, and you all want to do the same thing: spots and stripes,” before turning with relief to the more verbal people of the fashion features department to help her out.
Every other night there was a party. We were all expected to be wildly social and work hard at the same time. Anna threw numerous events in New York to promote the magazine at some much anticipated new restaurant—usually the latest venture of the fashionable restaurateur Brian McNally, because in those days it was all about English Brian and his chic French wife, Anne, one of Anna’s closest friends.
Anna looked to England for many of her staff, too, including James Truman, who, like me, was already ensconced in New York but had worked for The Face in London. He went on to be editor of Details magazine before moving up to become editorial director of Condé Nast when Mr. Liberman retired. Anna imported Hamish Bowles and Camilla Nickerson from Harpers & Queen, and Plum Sykes from British Vogue, giving the magazine a reputation for a certain kind of English snob appeal.
In 1989 I began working with Bruce Weber again, doing two stories with him that year. The first shoot was a fairly straightforward one featuring resort clothes in Miami on Talisa Soto, one of our favorite models, who had recently made the leap into cinema with a lead role in the latest James Bond film. Bruce cast her opposite Rickson Gracie, a Brazilian martial arts champion, to provide the necessary chemistry. The second, more complicated assignment was photographing the boxer Mike Tyson and Naomi Campbell, who were in the middle of a tempestuous on-again, off-again affair.
Bruce had been very supportive of my move to America. We had worked well together on the advertising at Calvin Klein, and we still saw each other a lot. Didier was working with him steadily, too. As we planned our story together, Bruce and I would have an ongoing conversation about the job. Which in this instance was not shaping up so well.
Naomi and Mike Tyson’s dating began in Paris, where the French press was intrigued by his public wooing of her. But friends kept warning her that he could be trouble—dangerous, even. So it seemed to be blowing hot and cold.
During a dinner at the Brasserie Balzar in Saint-Michel with Linda Evangelista and the photographer Peter Lindbergh, Linda’s cell phone rang, and a distraught Naomi came on the line, babbling about Tyson. “Come over here immediately,” insisted Linda, forever the supermodels’ head troubleshooter. Naomi dutifully arrived trussed up in a tight little Azzedine Alaïa dress, her hair totally disheveled, her tights shredded. She had apparently been with Tyson when he had spun alarmingly out of control. “So I ’ad to ’it ’im over the ’ead with me ’andbag,” she memorably said (the bag in question was a fairly large, sturdily constructed model). And so it was off again. But not for long.
Back in New York, Bruce really wanted to photograph the boxer, who was at the height of his fame and in training for a championship fight with Evander Holyfield in Atlantic City. Didier was also dying to meet him, being a longtime fight fan. When he first arrived in New York, Didier became a member of Gleason’s Gym, where many famous fighters, including Roberto Duran, did their training, and he would box there regularly. So Vogue tried organizing a photo session with Tyson and Naomi. But Tyson said no. Now Naomi stepped in to persuade him otherwise, and succeeded.
We arrived in Atlantic City to be told that Tyson was unavailable because he was having his head shaved. Bold shapes, like lightning bolts, were being meticulously clipped, street-style, into his hair by his personal hairdresser. We waited. And waited. Finally, he emerged, and I managed to talk him into wearing one of the outfits for the shoot made especially for him by Gianni Versace. Then out onto the public boardwalk we went, taking reportage pictures of the happy couple in the open air—and, of course, with literally thousands of rubberneckers pressing in on us. After a photo or two, Tyson suddenly walked off and disappeared. For a couple of hours. In the meantime Naomi had spotted his adversary, Holyfield, out on a training run and gone swanning over to say hello. “I hope Mike doesn’t find out I did that,” she said, giggling slyly, “because it’s like talking to the enemy.”
Eventually, Tyson returned for more photographs, having packed in a few meetings about tactics and training along the way, and at a certain point he whispered something to Naomi, who came over to us, giggling again. “Mike wants to do a nude with me,” she said. “What? Where?” I asked, my jaw dropping. “Here.” She indicated the boardwalk, which had been overrun by even more onlookers. Bruce was completely up for it, so in the next second, Naomi had brazenly whipped her top off, Tyson had peeled off his shirt, and she was lying facedown on the mountain range of muscle that was his chest, while Tyson’s manager, Don King, held back the leering, hooting, goggle-eyed crowd. Afterward I flung around Naomi’s shoulders the cashmere blanket I always take with me on a shoot to provide comfort and protection for the models. Bruce snapped away as they walked back to the location van. Tyson was gently holding her hand. Naomi looks young, fresh, and vulnerably pretty. It’s my favorite picture in the story.
Nineteen ninety-two. It was the high point of bling. Colors were citric. Skirts were ridiculously short and figure-hugging, and makeup was unsubtle and harsh. South Beach in Miami, Florida, was the place to be for magazines photographing their lead fashion stories because it guaranteed appropriately loud, neon-lit backgrounds and remained seasonably fair, apart from the odd hurricane. It was possibly my least favorite place on earth.
Bruce Weber kept a house there, as did Gianni Versace and his sister, Donatella (the unbelievably garish, over-the-top Casa Casuarina on Ocean Drive, in front of which Versace would be shot dead five years later). Production and model agencies sprang up. Hair was big. The Miami-based hairstylist Oribe, always dressed in a half-unbuttoned Versace shirt and white jeans, was the master of this style. Accessories were larger-than-life, too. As were the girls.
The original supermodels were Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Tatjana Patitz, Estelle Hallyday, Karen Mulder, Nadège, Bridget Hall, and Carla Bruni. They were considered a “must” in photographs and on the catwalk. Versace is generally credited with being the first to pay a fortune to put high-fashion photographic models on the runway—although way back when I started in the sixties, Mary Quant used photo models, too, as did Kenzo and Thierry Mugler in their shows in the seventies and eighties.
But by the nineties, fashion people definitely didn’t want to just look at a clotheshorse anymore. It was all about charisma. And these girls showed more attitude and paraded their outsize personalities (as well as their outsize fees), whether it was on the catwalk, in a magazine, or in personal appearances. And they lasted—ten years or more. Then their replacements arrived, all saying they would never become as spoiled as the originals. But guess what? They were. They wouldn’t do “doubles” (two girls in one shot), and they would never do group shots, either, except for Steven Meisel.
Steven is a major fashion photographer of our time. No one can dispute it. He has a very broad range and a very deep interest in fashion, not to mention the fact that he is technically brilliant. I first met him in the eighties, while I was still at British Vogue. He came into the office at a point when he hadn’t been taking photographs for long. But from the moment he picked up a camera, he never looked back. Previously, he had worked as a professional illustrator for publications such as Women’s Wear Daily, and he arrived—a skinny, black-clad figure wearing tons and tons of eye makeup—in the company of Vogue senior fashion editor Anna Harvey. I gave her such a look!
Steven and I eventually worked with each other on one of Anna Wintour’s first British Vogue issues, which was all about dance and shape, and I soon discovered how exciting it is to work with someone who is much more knowledgeable about fashion than oneself, and Steven certainly is. Almost every evening these days he watches reality shows or goes online to look at gossip and fashion sites, and that is his pleasure: to find out who is making fashion, who has done the hair and makeup, and who the newest girls are. He still has endless incredible ideas for fashion stories. He’s also interested in the style of older women. Steven’s mother grew up in Hollywood and was very elegant. Give him an iconic figure like the sixties model Veruschka, or someone of that stature, and he is fascinated because they come from a time before he entered the fashion fray. But his paramount interest is in developing new models. If you drew a family tree, you would see that almost every top girl has started with him. Besides making Linda Evangelista into something exceptional, he established Christy Turlington, Kristen McMenamy, Karen Elson, and later, Daria Werbowy, Coco Rocha, and many others—all those girls with whom he has done remarkable defining stories in Italian Vogue. Whenever he falls in love with them, their careers are made.
“Supermodel.” Such an ugly term. Back in the bling years, it gave many of them a reason for behaving bratty and spoiled. But it is important to remember that this was a moment when everything changed. So much was demanded of them: crisscrossing the Atlantic every few days to get off a plane and go straight to a studio without the time to take a shower, to look bright and fresh, to work, and to get back on a plane; going from campaign to catwalk to personal appearance with no chance to relax, and all-night fittings to attend. Is it any wonder that out came the champagne and drugs?
On the other hand, the old guard like Yves Saint Laurent still preferred regular models with catwalk training for their shows. But whereas in the seventies and eighties many of these cabine models were beautiful, professional black girls like Mounia, Amalia, and Katoucha, in the nineties he might field an occasional crowd-pleasing celebrity like Laetitia Casta, the French model turned film actress whose figure, more Renoir than Modigliani, always seemed to be bursting out of her outfits. Then there were “special bookings” girls like Carré Otis, who was never a favorite of mine, and Tyra Banks, who was a bit of a flash in the pan but became famous after Karl decided to put her in a Chanel show. With her big tits and incredibly thin ankles, she was never really cut out to be a high-fashion model, and you could see she would go on to do something else. She did, of course, host a television show about modeling and enjoyed huge popular success.
From the beginning of his time at Chanel, Karl was in love with the idea of taking a certain girl and making her the star of the season. At first it was women like Inès de la Fressange, who embodied a new kind of social gamine. Later, he was in favor of that girl being of a type not at all associated with Chanel’s somewhat bourgeois chic, like Claudia Schiffer or Stella Tennant, the rebellious granddaughter of the Duchess of Devonshire who, in the early days, wore a punk ring through her nose.
Ah, the early nineties. Not very me. We always seemed to be shooting in Florida with slick photographers like Tiziano Magni and Sante D’Orazio. But I went with the flow—until my time came.
