Focus

by Michael Gross

  An open secret in the business is that magazines often dole out “pages” and “credits” based on the purchase of advertising pages, and that photographers regularly shoot “musts,” garments chosen by major advertisers. But accepting these compromises has compensations. Powerful magazine editors and stylists have long functioned as de facto agents for photographers, recommending them to advertisers for high-paying jobs as a perquisite offsetting meager editorial payments and limited creative freedom.

  “I give a job to you and you work for my magazine for free,” an executive of a top Italian fashion brand explains. “It’s a little mafia. Condé Nast pays almost zero, they make the photographers pay for the stylists and the location, but they guarantee campaigns.” Top editors style those campaigns on their days off “at half price and then get twelve pages [by the same photographer] for free. Nobody’s innocent.”

  In recent years, the relationship between fashion and journalism has become an even more tangled web as powerful art directors have been allowed to simultaneously run magazines and independent agencies producing fashion advertisements, and publishing companies have let fashion editors, even editors in chief, moonlight as stylists for the same advertisers whose goods they “report” on in their magazines. Even before the Internet began blowing the most basic assumptions and definitions of media to the four winds, the distinction between fashion journalism and fashion commerce had effectively disappeared. It is no great stretch to say that fashion journalism has always been an oxymoron—and grows more oxymoronic by the day.

  The art of fashion photography has always been compromised by the marketplace. But oddly, the primary font of creativity in the field is not always in the allegedly pure waters of editorial photography. Editors have long placed limits on the wilder expressions of their camera-carrying artists. Harper’s Bazaar editor Nancy White, one of the last of the fashion ladies who always wore hat and gloves, saw objectionable sex all over the place—and fought her contributors tooth and nail to keep it from the pages of her magazine (which was known, at least until her genteel era passed, as “the” Bazaar). Ultimately more damaging than such personal preference is the commercial injunction that the manufacturer’s dress (and the income streams that flow from it) is more valuable than all but a very few photographers’ creative visions. But when that rule becomes the universal norm, as it did during the recessionary 1980s, when advertising revenues dropped sharply and publishers panicked and grew wary of giving any offense, some fashion brands took the creative lead and became the prime movers behind the art. Though they profess to be selling “image,” not garments, and thus elevate the photos they commission, ultimately it is all, always, still, about moving fashion products from factory to store to consumer.

  Addicted to visuals that grab attention, fashion constantly raises (or, some might say, lowers) the bar, pushing the limits of taste to re-create the thrill of its last fix, the higher high that comes from pushing past any taboos still standing. It signals, reflects, and sometimes even leads social and behavioral shifts, including the changing place of women in society and the workplace, and their steady progress from wives, mothers, and objects (whether domestic or aesthetic) to active participants in public life; and the social ferment of the 1960s, evolving sexual mores, the drug culture, and hedonism of the 1970s, the materialism and resurgence of tradition of the 1980s, the renaissance of decadence and the “heroin chic” of the 1990s, and the corporatization of fashion and society in recent years.

  Hadley Hudson has entered a field much diminished from the one Terry Richardson found when he started taking professional pictures twenty years ago. Some hint it’s facing extinction. “The whole thing has changed,” says Jean-Jacques Naudet, who edited Photo magazine in France and American Photo in the United States for almost four decades. “The electronic age arrived. Street photography. Now, anyone can take a photograph. Photography has changed so drastically, you can’t comprehend it.”

  Naudet offers numerical proof of his contention that only fine art photography matters at the moment—not fashion. While the value of certain vintage fashion prints is rising in the marketplace—a copy of Avedon’s Dovima with Elephants from 1955 sold at auction for a record, just under $1.152 million in 2010—“the value of a published picture is less and less,” says Naudet, who estimates that a photo that might have earned $80,000 from a publisher a decade ago will now bring in no more than $12,000. Ten years ago, he continues, top fashion photographers could make $5 million to $7 million a year. “Now? I don’t know,” Naudet says glumly. “All those photographers who had huge contracts are less flamboyant now. Fashion photographers and models were at the top; they were stars, celebrities. Not anymore.” Reality television and social media celebrities have replaced them.

  Naudet’s mournful notes are played often by fashion photography professionals and aficionados. Like other analog-age art forms, from music to books, the fashion photo does seem endangered. Odds are this is just what fashion folk call a moment, a passage to another place, not an end. But this moment does seem like a pause, if not for the whole story of fashion imagery, then at least for the golden era, when the form came to full flower, when fashion photographers were more than chroniclers of pleats, drapes, and hemlines, when they seemed to grasp the most evanescent art form ever invented, imbuing it with meaning and importance, giving permanence to passing fancy, plumbing the rich, hidden depths of superficiality.

  If a picture is truly worth a thousand words, and Dovima with Elephants more than a million dollars, then Focus hopes to fix fashion photography’s moment, frame it, and display it, so others may recall the years when light, lenses, emulsion, lissome women, and the latest looks combined with envy and ego, ambition and avarice, lucre and lust, to make magic.

  It isn’t gone. It’s just different. These were its glory days.

  Part I

  * * *

  INNOCENCE

  Aberdeen, Aberdeen, doesn’t it make you want to cry?

  —DIANA VREELAND

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  “A WITNESS”

  A chilly rain was falling on November 6, 1989, when several generations of New York’s fashion and social elite gathered in the medieval-sculpture hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a memorial celebrating Diana Vreeland, the fashion editor, curator, and quintessence of self-creation.

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, for whom Vreeland was a fashion godmother, and Lauren Bacall, who’d been discovered by her, both arrived alone. Dorinda Dixon Ryan, known as D.D., who’d worked under Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, was seated next to Carolyne Roehm, one among many fashion designers in attendance. Mica Ertegun and Chessy Rayner, the society decorators, sat with Reinaldo Herrera, holder of the Spanish title Marqués of Torre Casa, whose family estate in Venezuela, built in 1590, is said to be the oldest continuously inhabited home in the Western Hemisphere.

  One of Vreeland’s sons delivered a eulogy, as did socialite C. Z. Guest; Pierre Bergé, the business partner of Yves Saint Laurent; Oscar de la Renta, the society dressmaker; Philippe de Montebello, then the museum’s director and Vreeland’s final boss when she ran its Costume Institute; and George Plimpton, who cowrote her memoir, D.V. But the afternoon’s most telling fashion moment came in between Montebello and Plimpton, when photographer Richard Avedon, who’d worked with Vreeland from the start of his career, took the stage.

  Avedon was a giant in fashion and society, an insider and an iconoclast, a trenchant critic of the very worlds that had made him a star, arguably the most celebrated photographer of the twentieth century. Never one to mince words or spare the feelings of others (“Oh, Dick, Dick, Dick is such a dick,” a junior fashion editor once said), he used his eulogy as a gun aimed at Vreeland’s latest successor at Vogue, Anna Wintour.

  Though he never once mentioned her name, he sought to wound Wintour, who’d arrived at the memorial with her bosses, the heads of Condé Nast Publications, S. I. “Si” Newhouse Jr., the company’s
chairman, and Alexander Liberman, its editorial director. Just a year earlier, they’d let Wintour replace Avedon as the photographer of Vogue’s covers. Only a few in the audience knew that Avedon had actually shot a cover for the November 1988 issue, Wintour’s first as editor in chief of Vogue, and that no one had bothered to alert him that Wintour had replaced it with a picture by the much-younger Peter Lindbergh. Avedon only found out when the printed issue arrived at his studio.

  He never shot for Vogue again.

  A year later, Avedon served up his revenge dressed in a tribute to the woman he’d sometimes refer to as his “crazy aunt” Diana. Avedon recalled their first meeting in 1945 when he was twenty-two and fresh out of the merchant marine. Carmel Snow was about to make true his short lifetime’s dream of taking photographs for Harper’s Bazaar, the magazine she edited that he’d first encountered as the son of a Fifth Avenue fashion retailer. Newspaper and magazine stories about the Vreeland memorial would linger on in Avedon’s recollections of their first meeting, how he watched her stick a pin into both a dress and the model wearing it, “who let out a little scream,” he remembered. Vreeland turned to him for the very first time and said, “Aberdeen, Aberdeen, doesn’t it make you want to cry?”

  It did, he went on, but not because he loved the dress or appreciated the mangling of his name. He went back to Carmel Snow and said, “I can’t work with that woman.” Snow replied that he would, “and I did,” Avedon continued, “to my enormous benefit, for almost forty years.”

  But that charming opening anecdote was nothing compared to what followed. Avedon extolled Vreeland’s virtues, “the amazing gallop of her imagination,” her preternatural understanding of what women would want to wear, her “sense of humor so large, so generous, she was ever ready to make a joke of herself,” and the diligence that made her “the hardest-working person I’ve ever known. . . .

  “I am here as a witness,” Avedon concluded. “Diana lived for imagination ruled by discipline, and created a totally new profession. Vreeland invented the fashion editor. Before her, it was society ladies who put hats on other society ladies. Now, it’s promotion ladies who compete with other promotion ladies. No one has equaled her—not nearly. And the form has died with her. It’s just staggering how lost her standards are to the fashion world.”

  Sitting at the front of the audience between her two bosses, wearing a Chanel suit that mixed Vreeland’s signature color, red, with the black of mourning, the haughty Wintour, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, gave no hint that she knew Avedon was speaking to her. But even though he saw her ascendance as a sign of the fashion Apocalypse, it’s unlikely that even the prescient Avedon could have foreseen all the other, related forces then taking shape that would, in little more than a decade, fundamentally alter the role—fashion photographer—that he’d not only mastered but embodied.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  WOMEN WEARING CLOTHES ON FILM

  Richard Avedon’s métier had one thing in common with the fashion photography that preceded it: it was still about women wearing clothes on film. Most of the pioneers of the field were born during the Belle Epoque, the end of the nineteenth century, when photography and photographic reproduction were being refined.

  In the early twentieth century, fashion photography emerged, but constrained by commerce, rudimentary technology, and social norms, it was either stiff and formal or romantic and artificial, elegant but sexless, lacking both psychological depth and social or historical commentary. Its two most imposing early practitioners were a Balkan baron, Adolph de Meyer, who started shooting for Vogue in 1913 and became its first contract photographer at $100 per week, and his successor, Edward Steichen, who took over as chief photographer of Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair, in 1923.

  The company was named for its New York–born founder, Nast, a shy, unexceptional-looking little man with a pince-nez who had come to New York in 1897 to sell ads for a little magazine and earned enough money that by 1905 he started thinking of buying one of his own. Already more than a dozen in America covered fashion, among them Harper’s Bazar (the third a in the second word of its name would be added in 1929). It was founded in 1867 by the same siblings who started a book publisher, Harper & Brothers, and its aim was in its subtitle, “Repository of Fashion, Pleasure and Instruction.” Vogue was positioned as the most elite of the fashion magazines from its founding in 1892. But fashion was only one of Vogue’s concerns; it covered all the pursuits of its leisure-class backers and their families, the .01 percent of their day.

  In 1912, Harper’s Bazar was sold to William Randolph Hearst, one of the richest and most powerful Americans, who would inspire Orson Welles’s movie Citizen Kane. Briefly, Bazar outsold Vogue, but under Nast, the latter became the nation’s leading fashion magazine and, for the next two decades, a trendsetter in the use of photography.

  Meyer stayed at Vogue (which became an international brand in 1916 with the launch of a British edition) for seven years, until Hearst lured him to the Bazar in 1920 with the promise of a fifteen-year contract at a higher salary, and work in Paris. Meyer’s defection started a war between Hearst and Condé Nast that would continue into the next century. Vogue’s then editor, Edna Woolman Chase, would later write that Hearst’s modus operandi when poaching talent was to offer “money often beyond their worth and beyond what Condé was able to pay.”

  After Steichen replaced Meyer, he discovered he had an invaluable ally, Carmel Snow, Vogue’s fashion editor, who “had a policy that a photographer should have whatever he required, and no questions asked.” Snow would have a far longer and arguably larger impact on the field than the great photographer did. Steichen, who claimed authorship of “the first serious fashion photographs ever made,” would close his New York studio in 1938 when, he wrote, “fashion photography had become a routine, and routines are stifling. . . . I had lost interest [in both fashion and advertising work] because I no longer found the work challenging; it was too easy.”

  That remark prefigures a comment, attributed to the notable art director Alexey Brodovitch, that stands as a warning to all fashion photographers: “The creative life of a commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who continues to be really productive for more than eight or ten years.”

  Condé Nast also opened French, Spanish, and German editions of Vogue. The art director of the latter, a Ukrainian-born Turk named Dr. Mehemed Fehmy Agha, would soon move to New York to oversee all of Nast’s magazines and modernize them with bold typography and strong layouts that emphasized large photographs, some running off the pages in what is called full bleed or floating frameless in theretofore unprecedented amounts of white space. The redesign reflected the visual revolution set off at a 1925 exposition in Paris of modern decorative and industrial arts, the show that launched the moderne movement.

  The revamped Vogue delighted fashion editor Carmel Snow, who was also a champion of avant-garde art and design. Born in Ireland to a well-to-do family, she started her career working for her mother’s New York dressmaking salon, where she got an education in style, which Snow experienced firsthand, traveling with her mother to see the Parisian haute couture. When she shared her impressions of one season with a fashion journalist, Carmel was rewarded with an introduction to Edna Woolman Chase, the prim, dowdy Quaker who’d been at Vogue since 1895, and its editor since 1914. Chase took Snow to Nast, and in 1920 he offered her a job as an assistant editor at the magazine.

  Chase viewed the socially desirable and clearly brilliant newcomer as a threat, but Nast was smitten by her, ensuring that career-enhancing opportunities—such as working on Steichen’s first fashion shoot, conducted in Nast’s Park Avenue apartment—came her way. “Steichen and I immediately clicked,” Snow recalled. Promotions to fashion editor and, in 1929, editor of American Vogue followed (Chase still reigned as the super-editor of all four editions), so Snow was well placed to learn from Agha when he arrived,
even though she found the portly, monocled art director “as inscrutable as a cup of black coffee.”

  Despite Snow’s approval of Agha’s attempts to modernize the look of Vogue and its operations, its photographers—including Cecil Beaton, Beaton’s champion, George Hoyningen-Huené, and Huené’s protégé, Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann, who styled himself Horst P. Horst, were still stuck in studios. Fortunately for fashion photography, Carmel Snow was not stuck at Vogue. Tired of being Edna Chase’s subordinate, and of being second-guessed by her, Snow left Vogue to become fashion editor at the Bazaar in 1932 and was ever after “considered a traitor by many Vogue partisans.” Her decision to jump ship ended a brief spell of peace between the rival fashion magazines. She explained it by claiming that mid-Depression, she was sure Nast would be happy to save her salary—which Hearst had matched. Condé Nast, like many of his fellow Americans, had lost his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, was millions of dollars in debt, and had lost control of his company to Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.

  At the Bazaar, Snow began gathering a team to help her freshen up a magazine she thought “dull and monotonous . . . muddy and drab.” Among her early hires was a Hungarian news and sports photographer, Martin Munkácsi (born Márton Mermelstein), whom Steichen admired and Snow referred to as Munky. William Randolph Hearst’s mistress, the actress Marion Davies, griped that he was “just a snapshot photographer,” but Snow insisted, the first of many times she would disregard her new boss’s wishes, to the great benefit of their magazine. Snow thought Munkácsi might fill her “instinctive craving to get some fresh air in the book,” as professionals refer to magazines, and asked him to reshoot a bathing suit feature originally done in a studio. The photographer didn’t speak English, but managed to communicate that he wanted the model to run toward the camera. When the resulting photo appeared in the December 1933 Bazaar, it was, Snow would later boast, “the first action photograph made for fashion.”