The provocateur left British Vogue in 1987, moving to New York at the behest of Calvin Klein, who hired her as his design director and would later describe her as the first European fashion editor to fully appreciate American design. Although she “adored Calvin” and “loved his clothes,” she struggled to find her footing at the company. “I don’t have a very good head for business, and I didn’t really know what my role was there,” she explains, “which is why when Anna Wintour got the job at American Vogue, I was the first person to call her and ask if I could come and work with her.” Appointed fashion director of the magazine in 1988 and creative director in 1995, Coddington quickly became as peerless a presence in fashion as her fellow British expat editor in chief. “I was for many years somewhat of a go-between for Anna and the other editors at Vogue,” she explains. “I brought their ideas to Anna and fought for them and their pictures.” This unique working dynamic was well documented in the 2009 box office hit The September Issue, a project that turned Coddington into a reluctant star. The director of the documentary, R. J. Cutler, had to work hard to convince a stubborn Coddington to appear on-screen, but after a year of trying to get her attention, he eventually got close enough to conclude, “She is charming, delightful, passionate and so committed to celebrating beauty and her revolutionary notion that clothes, models and photographers could tell stories and not just be objects.” He says, “Every billboard, every fashion magazine spread, every advertisement we see today has been influenced by Grace.”
Such lavish praise is echoed by everyone who knows her, save the editor herself. Stereotypically British in her self-deprecation, she is quick to pay tribute to the numerous figures from her illustrious past who have guided her epic journey. “I’ve had lots of mentors, starting with my old editor at British Vogue, Beatrix Miller. She taught me so much—she was amazing,” Coddington remembers. “Then after that, Anna obviously. But there have also been photographers who have taught me a lot—one was Norman Parkinson and the other was Bruce Weber; they both played a large part in my life.” While she doesn’t necessarily have muses, she says, there are a few models that she loves working with. “I’ve got a thing for redheads, I’m afraid,” laughs Coddington, who names Karen Elson and Natalie Westling as two of her favorites. “Of course, I adore Natalia [Vodianova], too. I figured out she was in three-quarters of the pictures I did for a book, not just because of how she looks but because she’s also amazing to work with,” she says.
Coddington believes that surrounding herself with inspiring people is important. “I can’t do anything on my own; it has to be collaborative,” she explains. People who aren’t willing to cooperate on a project are deemed “a real pain in the arse” because if it’s not working for them, “it’s not working for me,” she says. Coddington’s approach on set is to treat everyone the same. “From one’s assistant, to the hairdresser, to the photographer”—their input is equally important, she says. “I learn so much from the younger generation,” she adds. “Surrounding yourself with young people keeps one motivated.”
Inspired by the everyday, Coddington says that all of her ideas are “a heightened version of reality,” and while she cites the cinema as one of her most enduring inspirations—in particular “the old English movies from the 1960s and the French ones from the 1950s”—she is equally entranced by the diverse characters crammed into the New York City subway. “I love the subway, particularly these days when everybody’s not so rich, which means everyone’s on it,” she laughs. Although she is never short of bright ideas, Coddington does admit that finding new and interesting ways to tell a fashion story can be a challenge—but one that also keeps her going. “A creative image should stand out and should last regardless of the season,” she says. “What makes it special is different every time.” *
I’ve got a thing for redheads, I’m afraid.
A noted cat lover, Coddington and her partner Didier Malige published Catwalk Cats in 2006. The book features Coddington’s illustrations and Malige’s photographs, chronicling the partners’ work and home lives through the eyes of their feline companions.
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Durand says he never visits the destination featured in the magazine before he starts an issue. “I like to sublimate the idea of a place,” he told Mr. Porter.
FRANCK DURAND
Atelier Franck Durand
Holiday
Franck Durand, the founder and creative director of his namesake Parisian design studio, radiates a mix of boyishness and poise. He looks unassuming in a light blue turtleneck, slim white jeans frayed at the ankles and argyle socks. His brown boots are the same style he’s been wearing since age 13—ditto his watch and perfume. He doesn’t change what works. Although he pauses often when speaking, he doesn’t lack any certainty in his stance regarding classic style, beautiful craftsmanship and metropolitan progress.
His namesake atelier is located on rue Chabanais, a quiet side street in Paris’ second arrondissement. His office features a marble-topped round table and a curated pile of books on a vintage chair (Viviane Sassen’s Pikin Slee, Henri Matisse’s Cut-outs). A vintage Holiday magazine cover (dedicated to Texas, featuring a cowboy) is propped against the wall. There’s expansive white shelving, only partially filled with rows of slender red binders. His desk is a tidy arrangement of pens, a vase, glass paperweights and assorted skincare products. Everything is crisp and elegant, the surfaces nearly bare.
Durand grew up in a bourgeois family and went to a religious boarding school in Touraine. His first thrilling sense of the outside world was when a friend returned from London with the magazines The Face and i-D. “There were incredible and very different things happening elsewhere,” he remembers thinking at the time. He wanted to participate.
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Durand’s Paris studio shares its home in the second arrondissement with a burgeoning assortment of eateries and parks sloping down to the Musée du Louvre. In 2016, Durand opened Holiday Café in the well-appointed 16th. The coffee spot is a collaboration with the designer, architect and fellow Parisian Franklin Azzi.
At the age of 20, he began working for influential French art director Marc Ascoli. “There were a thousand paths that appealed to me; everything was potentially beautiful,” he says. He wanted to try his hand at ceramics, work in forests, ameliorate the environment by “putting trees where there were none.” He spent the latter half of his 20s working for a landscaper. “I was digging holes all day,” he laughs, “but I liked it.” When he became a father, he decided to set up his own design practice. The endeavor has, since its beginning in 2004, been underpinned by one main goal: “I want to put a form of beauty in everything,” he says.
This approach to beauty—le beau—is something he has applied to many fashion campaigns, from Armani to Balmain, Chloé to Isabel Marant. “I am obsessed with what is not trendy,” Durand declares. “I like the patina of things, the wear, transgenerational existence. Luxury is not profusion, or the accumulation of expensive things. It is a question of quality.” Casual timelessness is not always in line with more ostentatious contemporary tastes, and he admits that “for a person who wants to be super fashion, super flashy, there will be no resonance in what we do.” Instead, he expounds: “I’m not nostalgic at all, but I enjoy a classic; it’s a form of sex appeal that I like.”
Durand has worked with the likes of Hermès, Chanel and Armani to bring his brand of timeless elegance to big-name fashion houses. His own relaxed yet sophisticated style reflects a sensitivity to quality as well as personal identity.
PRINCE CHARLES
While shaping the Holiday Paris fashion line, Durand stumbled across a somewhat unexpected sartorial icon: Prince Charles. Durand aims to create products—from jackets to sneakers and totes—of impeccable quality that stand the test of time; as he told Vogue, it’s “the idea that you have a pair of shoes from forever and you’re still wearing them; I remember reading that Prince Charles
has been wearing a pair of shoes he’s had since something like 1962.” In another anecdote, he revealed that an image of the young prince made a chance appearance in both a vintage edition of Holiday and one of Durand’s first relaunch issues. “Someone opened one of the old copies in the office the other day, an issue from 1953, and there was a Beaton picture of Prince Charles when he was five years old. We actually used the same image, unknowingly, in our Scottish issue, from 2014. I’d been upset that when we’d used it, we didn’t know whom to credit for the picture, and it turned out to be Beaton!”
This even-keeled take defies the whiplash of designer turnover. “There is the maison, and there is fashion,” he says. “Fashion is fragile. It is important that the maison remains very solid, hard to shake.” The latter provides the cornerstone for Durand’s commercial vision. While Durand has been entrusted with envisaging the look of many labels, he has also been overseeing his own project. He revived Holiday magazine—with his accent, he pronounces it “oh-lee-deh”—a periodical originally published in America between 1946 and 1977 and presided over by a hedonistic masthead. It featured work by the greats: visuals by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Cecil Beaton, bylines by Ernest Hemingway and Colette. Durand’s Frenchified update is a more self-consciously studied biannual travelogue; it is wholly lifestyle focused and abstains from politics and topical news. Jamie Hawkesworth and Inez and Vinoodh are among the contemporary contributors, and each issue spotlights a single destination (California, Denmark, South Korea, Scotland, Argentina). While the magazine sweeps the world, it has spawned a wave of extremely Parisian projects in the westerly 16th arrondissement. It’s where Durand lives with his wife, Emmanuelle Alt (the editor in chief of Vogue Paris), and their two children. This neighborhood, dubbed Village Boileau, is “very specific and charming”—it has houses with gardens—yet Durand notes that “it almost feels abandoned.” The area has no obvious draw. “It’s a no-man’s-land, it’s the Wild West. But I like this place because it just looks like nothing else in Paris. Nothing was ‘done’ to it, nothing has budged.”
Durand decided to opened a café in this “arid” sector of the metropolis in 2016. “The people who live here did not have the quality of life that went with these villas,” he notes. He was strongly advised against setting up a business here by many, including his accounting team. But Durand’s conviction won out. Holiday Café is housed in a building from the 1940s; it has a stark white exterior and small terrasse. The menu changes daily and serves traditional French fare. (As Irwin Shaw once said, “Everything in Paris starts at a café table.”)
“I always thought that Holiday could be more than a magazine; it could be a house, a lifestyle,” he muses. “Whatever we do in print would simply become an extension of that. I wanted to do a café because it would be a physical, three-dimensional experience.” He notes how anything from an image to a video to a magazine is a statement on life. “For me a magazine is a reality; there is a kind of tribe that goes with it,” he says. “And that’s why it’s good to make it exist in real life. It is the Holiday panoply.”
Durand relaunched Holiday magazine with the Spring/Summer 2014 issue, which included a look into Inez & Vinoodh’s New York loft and a special on Ibiza. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Durand cites his inaugural issue as a favorite.
I’m not nostalgic at all, but I enjoy a classic; it’s a form of sex appeal that I like.
That’s also the case with the launch of a Holiday clothing line that Durand has developed. There are collegiate sweatshirts with “Holiday” written across the chest, tweed blazers and Shetland pullovers. Durand believes in “being really well dressed, but with no affect.” He feels “inspired by older people, especially those living in the 16th arrondissement—how they mix something in a floral pattern with a Monoprix bag.”
Not surprisingly, Durand continues to expand the Holiday universe. An exhibition–boutique space, housed in a building from the 1960s, joins the magazine, café and clothing label. Like the café, the space was “almost a rehabilitation project,” he says: whatever was not original was removed, so attractive structural elements, like the vitrine and facade, could be highlighted. (Durand deems the approach a “theater of decor.”) “The venues are like the magazine, in a way. We wanted to preserve the essence of what once was,” he says. It’s also a mission he will broaden throughout the neighborhood by honoring the architecture and decor of several nearby shops. He aims to “create an ecosystem,” spanning a boulangerie, an épicerie, a hotel and an association of commerçants du quartier.
“These are propositions we can make, which are convictions. It’s not an aesthetic,” he insists. “It’s more of an attitude.” Durand wishes he could do this “for a thousand other things,” including urbanism; he even dreams about advising Paris city hall. Durand’s project is not about citywide expansion, however, but about making the local better, the day-to-day more luxurious. “I want to shine a light on a neighborhood of forgotten Paris,” he says.*
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Ditting works with fashion brands, artists and art institutions and says an early collaboration with Dutch artist Barbara Visser on The Complete Incomplete Series was a seminal project.
VERONICA DITTING
Studio Veronica Ditting
the gentlewoman
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“It’s stimulating to not only think about the outcome of a printed piece but to apply the same approach to other media,” Ditting reflects. She cites projects like a blanket for Paul Smith and a T-shirt for Sunspel, both in collaboration with The Gentlewoman, as enjoyable departures from her print-based work.
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In 2015, Ditting developed a visual identity for accessories brand Pramma. She designed everything from their website down to their packaging and stationery
Argentinean-born, German-raised Veronica Ditting begins every morning in her London office by making a mate, a tea-like drink native to South America. “A lot of people find the metal cup and straw it comes with slightly suspicious looking,” she laughs.
Ditting is perhaps most well known for her role as art director of The Gentlewoman, but her work extends far beyond the biannual women’s magazine. In 2006, she founded her creative direction and design studio; her client list ranges from Hermès to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
“There’s not much difference in how we approach editorial and corporate work,” she explains. “Every project starts with a similar set of questions—how do we achieve the content we want? And what does the content need in each given scenario?” Regardless of the client, she says, the two things she always hopes to achieve are authenticity and clarity.
Perhaps, then, it makes sense that Ditting pays little attention to design trends. “Of course it’s impossible to completely avoid what’s going on, but as much as possible, I try not to look at the most obvious resources.”
There’s not much difference in how we approach editorial and corporate work.
Growing up, Ditting had limited access to much outside of the “usual consumer magazines—think German ELLE, Vogue and so on,” she says. “I did spend pocket money on some of them once in a while, but I’m afraid to say they weren’t formative.” Instead, she turned to flea markets in search of vintage magazines, pictures and books.
“My grandmother had a single copy of Die Neue Linie,” she remembers. She studied the Bauhaus-era lifestyle magazine “obsessively,” and it served as a major reference when designing The Gentlewoman. She still has a number of these early inspirations, and she continues to collect. Over the years, she has compiled what she calls “inspiration boxes” filled with “anything from a tear sheet of a magazine or book, a funny napkin, a piece of fabric, a sample print or even maps and old aircraft safety cards,” she explains. “They’re not categorized at all. I actually like the fact that they’re super messy and tactile. My work has quite a strict sense to it, but I use references in a much looser way.”
Outside of editorial design, Ditting appreciates “anything from architecture to furniture design, art and pottery.” She studied industrial design before moving on to graphic design. and attributes her success to a wide range of interests and experiences. More important, however, are the people she surrounds herself with. “Without a good team or trust,” she says, “it’s impossible to achieve an exceptional outcome.” *
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Born in South America and raised in the Far East before his cigarette salesman father settled in England, Hack was named after the California psychedelic rock outfit Jefferson Airplane.
JEFFERSON HACK
Dazed Media
Nowness
“When we started Dazed & Confused, we wanted a purpose, not a magazine,” says Jefferson Hack. In fact, the inaugural issue of Dazed, which Hack founded with photographer Rankin, stated “This is not a magazine” on its cover, laying out its provocative intentions from the outset.
“There were no rules. We didn’t want to be prescriptive about the new generation that was coming through, which we were part of,” Hack explains. “It was about admitting to not being perfect, about saying: ‘I’m dazed and confused, and I don’t give a fuck that I haven’t got everything worked out.’” He says that was exactly what you could expect from other magazines—“that if you didn’t have your shit together, you couldn’t be part of their exclusive club,” he says.
Interview, National Geographic and Colors are among his list of key inspirations, and in the case of Colors, its editor and noted graphic designer Tibor Kalman also became a mentor. “He gave me confidence,” Hack remembers. “He was political and socially conscious and he was a magazine person—it felt really good to get validation from someone who was involved in putting together stories for print.” Hack also describes the English impresario Malcolm McLaren as his “first manager,” encouraging him to work the system and fund early issues with a record deal. “I signed with a label, and didn’t deliver any music,” he explains of the unfulfilled Dazed label. “We spent the money on the next issue instead, and then got dropped, but we didn’t have to pay it back.” Hack cites Björk as another major inspiration, and the archetypal Dazed icon. “Björk is the ultimate collaborator,” he says. “I’ve learned from her that ‘we’ is stronger than ‘I,’ and that in that dynamic you can maintain a really strong sense of who you are.”
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