Baron’s response was prescient: “You know it’s war with Condé Nast, don’t you?” Demarchelier did know; he’d been shooting Vogue’s covers, and the loss of his services would be devastating.
Tilberis and Baron met, and she told him she had a contract and was ready to sign it, but wanted the security of knowing who would be beside her. Hearst had promised her the resources to build a world-class team. “Of course, Condé Nast will play hardball,” Tilberis acknowledged. “I will, too.”
Baron brought a list of photographers to their second sit-down. “We need Meisel, Demarchelier, and Lindbergh,” he told her, as well as some younger photographers, and the stylist-editors Gambaccini, Tonne Goodman, and Paul Cavaco.I “She goes tick, tick, tick,” Baron says. They got them all, except Meisel, but he was reportedly interested and kept the fashion world guessing for months before spurning Bazaar. “We were a single hair away,” Baron thinks.
The battle for Meisel was fierce. “We really wanted Steven back,” says a Vogue editor. How did they get him when so many of his collaborators had signed up with Bazaar? Condé Nast executives made their position abundantly clear: Thanks to his unprecedented exposure in Vogue Italia, and Franca Sozzani’s abiding loyalty, he’d won advertising jobs worth millions. If he signed with Hearst, that work might melt away. “It was Italian Vogue, his relationship with Franca, that killed it,” Baron says.
“Italy is a little world,” a photo agent said at the time. “Advertisers often come to an editor and ask who they should use if they want a new look. Franca is very friendly with a lot of advertisers. She would say, ‘Steven is perfect’ and in a sense act as his agent. It’s something she believes in. But the Italians are so crazy. One minute to the next, everything changes. It’s just in their nature. Certain people would be influenced. And if Steven had gone to Bazaar, she probably wouldn’t have recommended him anymore. Condé Nast is that powerful.”
Franca Sozzani insisted that wasn’t true. “That’s not my style,” she said before Meisel made his choice. “It would be stupid to say, ‘I believed for twelve years and now he’s bad.’ ” What if he went to Bazaar? “Maybe I’d cry,” said Sozzani. “I’d fight till the end.” But her feelings were hurt. “I find Steven Meisel myself,” she railed, her voice rising. “It’s true they are trying to get Steven. It’s good to try and get the best, but I supported him when he wasn’t Steven Meisel. There are two photographers I love, Steven Meisel and Bruce Weber. I took a lot of risks with both. It’s too obvious to choose what someone else has chosen. Find some new photographers! I want to be out of this shit gossip that’s around!”
The specifics of the negotiation that followed have never been revealed. “He asked to keep Franca” and work for American Bazaar, said the head of a big Italian fashion brand. That wasn’t going to fly. A stylist close to Meisel told a reporter that it was tragic “the greatest fashion photographer has no regular American outlet.” He clearly wanted one. Condé Nast got the message and made Meisel an offer he couldn’t refuse: $2 million to stay with Sozzani and return to American Vogue. Within a few months, he was not only back in its pages, but up to his old tricks, too. “We didn’t see that film for two weeks after he shot it,” a Vogue editor confided.
Compromises were apparently made all around. “Many things are forgiven because he’s so good,” said Alex Liberman, who correctly predicted that “Complications will progressively iron themselves out through the success of what he’s doing.” Though they were never as close as he was with Sozzani, Meisel and Wintour’s collaboration would continue for more than two dozen years.
The loss of Meisel turned out not to matter much for Tilberis’s Bazaar. Her first cover, featuring Linda Evangelista photographed by Demarchelier, with a simple headline announcing a new Era of Elegance, was a strongly graphic sensation. The new Bazaar immediately won National Magazine Awards for photography and design, and in 1994, Tilberis would be named editor of the year by Advertising Age. But in a dreadful twist of fate, she’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer just a few months earlier, and though she fought the disease heroically and remained a much-admired figure, her staff would be drained by a slow but steady attrition of talent. Demarchelier and Lindbergh remained for years, but Bazaar never caught up to Wintour’s Vogue in either circulation or advertising pages. When Tilberis died at fifty-one in 1999, she left behind a magazine far stronger than the one she’d inherited, but one that would never again generate the excitement that greeted her first few issues.II
Many said the new Bazaar harkened back to the days of Alexey Brodovitch, but Fabien Baron wasn’t among them. “I didn’t know the guy,” says Baron, who’d worked for the trade’s other influential Russian, Liberman. “When I arrived, I told myself, ‘Be careful. You can’t go into the archive.’ I remembered, but I didn’t want to be influenced by looking. Because it was strong, people called it Brodovitch.” Baron places himself “smack in the middle” between Liberman, the frustrated artist consumed with commerce, and Brodovitch, who made commercial design his art.
Elizabeth Tilberis’s brief tenure at Bazaar was the last great magazine moment in the heyday of fashion photography. She and Baron gave shooters such as Lindbergh and Demarchelier a platform for some of their best work ever. For Demarchelier particularly, Steven Meisel’s decision to stay at Vogue was a life-altering event. Long a journeyman, he was propelled into the top ranks of photographers by Tilberis’s and Baron’s imprimatur. Demarchelier was remarkable because he had no recognizable style or signature of his own; what he had was extraordinary competence and the ability to deliver whatever a client, be it a magazine or an advertiser, desired. Among other things, that made him the go-to photographer for reshoots, when a first attempt at getting a picture had failed and no time was left to experiment. Though he remained a lothario—in 2007, he tried to kiss a model he was shooting at the pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel and she pushed him in, fully clothed, with cameras hanging around his neck—his reputation was as a consummate professional. “He could do everything, anything,” says model Bonnie Pfeifer. “Not anybody can do that.”
Baron had first worked with Demarchelier on a bathing suit issue at GQ, and they began a long collaboration. “He’s an amazing photographer because it doesn’t show,” says the art director. “Things fall into place. He doesn’t suffer, he doesn’t sweat it. You feel, ‘This is easy, we’ll be out of here fast.’ The minute he looks at a girl, he knows exactly where to put the light, what lens to use, what height and what angle. That’s sixty-five percent of the job.” The rest is interpersonal. “He puts his subjects in the position of feeling so confident, he gets amazing things.” How? “He does nothing. He lets things happen, he lets people be themselves, and clack-clack-clack, the picture. I’ve seen what pain other photographers go through to get a picture Patrick can do in two minutes.” Finally, Baron compares Demarchelier to a chef. “If you ensure that the environment, the idea, the casting, the clothing, the colors, are great, he’ll make the most amazing meal.” Left unsaid is what happens when not all those elements are on the counter.
Baron kept his design studio open when he went to Harper’s Bazaar; unlike journalists, many fashion photographers, editors, and art directors work for both fashion magazines and the designers whom they cover and who advertise in them. “Those days of isolation” were over, Tilberis said at the time. “You have to be out there as a business.” The synergy helped all concerned, even if it further eroded already porous ethical boundaries.
At the time, Calvin Klein was “very stuck doing things the way he always had,” says Neil Kraft, but Klein’s business troubles in the early nineties “opened his eyes. . . . Calvin was sick of the Bruce Weber thing and realized there wasn’t enough separation between him and Ralph.”III Separately, Kraft and Baron both take credit for what happened next. Kraft says he mocked up a new collection ad with an image of the French singer Vanessa Paradis, and Klein wanted her as his next contract face. But she’d just signed to model for Cha
nel and said no, so Kraft called Patrick Demarchelier because Kraft wanted to work with someone “easier” than Steven Meisel. “The rap on Patrick is he doesn’t pay attention, but he does. He looks half-asleep but he really concentrates when he’s working,” and when Kraft asked the “no-drama” photographer to suggest a new face for Calvin’s campaign, he mumbled, “Kate Moss. Fantastique. I just shot her for Bazaar.”
Baron says he was looking for a campaign to do with Demarchelier, and they “took Kate to Calvin” after they all did a shoot for the first issue of Tilberis’s Bazaar. “As we were looking at the pictures, we said, ‘What about Kate? She looks a bit birdlike like Vanessa.’ ” They brought her to Klein’s office, put her in his jeans, and asked her to sit on the floor. “Calvin is openmouthed,” Baron recalls. “ ‘Great, great, perfect,’ and he’s falling in love on the spot, and we went to the studio and took a picture.”IV Demarchelier was rewarded for his find with more Calvin Klein ads, notably shots of Christy Turlington in Klein’s underwear.
Moss had come to New York with Mario Sorrenti. “Part of my plan for Bazaar was to give younger photographers contracts to make them feel important,” says Baron. “Then on top of that, I make them discovered for advertising. Sorrenti, David Sims, and Craig McDean”—all products of the new generation in London—“I gave each a different campaign so they became blue-chip very fast. I wanted them to work with the big girls for Bazaar and with cooler people for ads. Sims said, ‘Linda [Evangelista] has nothing to do with me.’ I said, ‘Do it.’ It made the big girls look cool and the young photographers look established.”
Baron suggested Sorrenti and Moss shoot the next Calvin Klein jeans and Obsession fragrance ads together. “They’re in love,” Baron told Klein. “Send them on vacation. No hair, no makeup. Let them do what they want. That’s what it means to be obsessed.” And Baron said to Sorrenti, “Show me how obsessed you are.” Baron recalls Neil Kraft’s reaction: “You’re fucking crazy.”
Kraft insisted on monitoring the shoot after Sorrenti “hadn’t shot anything after three days,” Kraft says. “Mario said, ‘We’re chillin’.’ I was apoplectic. I spent the next three days getting them to take pictures.” Baron was unimpressed with the results: “Nothing was used, not a piece of film.” He says he encouraged Sorrenti to keep shooting. “It was Mario’s third job!” Finally, a photo resulted of Moss prone “on that cheap sofa,” Baron says, recalling, “You can feel the obsession. Calvin loved those pictures. They ran everywhere, over and over, for twelve or fifteen years.”
Some of Klein’s Moss ads (which also included topless couple shots by Herb Ritts with the model straddling Marky Mark Wahlberg) were controversial. A year later, images of Moss on New York bus shelters and phone kiosks in Calvin underwear ads were tagged by graffiti writers—presumed to have feminist leanings—with “Feed me.” Within fashion, Klein and Fabien Baron were accused of being overly inspired by the work of Corinne Day with ads that were “louche and dishabille, a cultivated concoction of glamour and grime,” wrote the author Maureen Callahan.
Not long after Klein first met Moss, Corinne Day had her big breakthrough when she was hired by Barneys New York. At the same time, the young designer Marc Jacobs showed a notorious collection for Perry Ellis based on the Generation X thrift-shop-bred fashion style propagated in preceding years by the Face, i-D, and postpunk bands from Seattle such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Dubbed grunge, the collection was greeted with contempt by most runway watchers, who were then overwhelmingly from an older generation. Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for the International Herald Tribune, even handed out hospital-green pinback badges with the slogan “Grunge is Ghastly.” Jacobs was fired from his job. But this watershed moment foretold a generational change in fashion and the embrace of a new aesthetic. The supermodels were already peaking and would soon be replaced by a pack of newcomers dubbed waifs, led by Moss. Jacobs would go on to his own label and two decades of considerable influence. Until that moment, their challenge had been issued from the fringe. But as with so many youth-bred movements of the past, it was on the cusp of mainstream assimilation.
“We were literally just getting dressed to go out and photograph each other,” says Caryn Franklin, who bought her first copy of i-D as a design student and became its fashion editor in the mideighties. She thinks of the magazine as “the Facebook of its day,” but also as “the antithesis of everything” and aimed at people “who looked and sounded different. It was all about personal identity, standing for something and communicating it by making yourself highly visible. We’d never heard the word brand.”
Franklin saw the photographers she worked with as pioneers, but watched with dismay as some quickly became “thoughtless facilitators of a brand message that was tasteless.” As their careers progressed, “I didn’t see individuality. I saw the hypersexualization and infantilization of women and gender stereotyping, and nobody could get the energy up to complain. These creatives were giving a voice to something with its own energy—work that had a diary feeling, a hard-copy Facebook—that the corporate world bought into. Calvin Klein recognized that self-disclosure and the pretense of an artisanal approach had a cool factor. You can’t decide to be cool, but you can be attracted to it. So all designers had to go to London and hang out, and they saw the photographers who we featured and realized that to revitalize their offerings, they needed our attitude because they had none. So they appropriated London.”
Ronnie Cooke followed i-D and the Face and spotted Corinne Day’s photos. Cooke found them a perfect fit with the evolving fashion image of Barneys and brought Day in for a meeting. “She came with her grandmother, not an agent,” Cooke marvels. Gene Pressman was dubious. “I said I really believed this was the future,” Cooke continues. “We needed to go antifashion.”
Cooke and Day became fast friends, talking on the phone regularly as Cooke introduced her to the gritty documentary photographers Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, “and to the idea of art photographers being relevant to fashion,” Cooke continues. “We straddled the fence between fashion and art. It’s pretentious to say, but we mirrored pop culture, we reflected New York, we were ironic, it was entertainment, it was something different. I had no one saying no, so I was interested in what hadn’t been done.” Corinne Day was that. “The work was very personal,” Cooke says. “The hard thing was, she’d only photographed things she found in vintage stores. She didn’t do credits. We had to pick clothes that worked with her voice yet represented Barneys. It took two months of talking and talking and talking—for a very minimal thing.”
Sadly, Day’s Barneys ads—collected in a booklet of images floating on matte white paper—may have been the high point of her career. Though she was bitter that Calvin Klein had booked Moss without her, the duo subsequently shot a British Vogue lingerie spread together “and it just about killed Corinne’s career,” Maureen Callahan reported. The slice-of-life photos accentuated Moss’s gaunt frame and were assailed as perverted, freakish, and squalid. Moss was advised to stay away from Day, who rationalized the loss by saying that once the model realized she was beautiful, she lost her appeal. Moss went on to have one of the longest and most resilient careers in modeling, despite regular dips in the pool of tabloid scandal. Day wasn’t so lucky.
“Corinne was made with her anger and destroyed partly by her anger,” says Ronnie Cooke.V “She shouldn’t have done campaigns. She was so difficult. She was unmanageable, out there. If you said black, she’d do white. We got along, but I’d say, ‘I’ll smash your camera on your head if you don’t start taking pictures.’ ”
In the next few years, others would imitate and exploit Day’s visual signature while she pulled away from fashion, instead pursuing a London grunge band and photographing its members and entourage. In 1996, she had a seizure while shooting them and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Upon her release from the hospital, Day began taking heroin, a habit that spread widely among the young in the fashion world in the midnineties.
&nbs
p; Ever ready to apply a label, fashion dubbed that trend Heroin Chic.
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I. Grace Coddington, who’d left Calvin Klein to join Anna Wintour’s team, turned down her old friend Tilberis’s offer of a job at Bazaar. She would go into semiretirement at age seventy-four, in 2016.
II. After Tilberis was replaced by journalist Kate Betts, most recently the fashion news director at Vogue, Fabien Baron left the magazine. He joined Paris Vogue in 2003, not long after the stylist-turned-editor Carine Roitfeld took charge of it. He then left to take over Interview. After two years at Bazaar, Betts was replaced by another British editor, Glenda Bailey, who has held the post ever since.
III. Weber’s “gay under- and overtones” weren’t “working as well by then,” Kraft says. “He takes ten thousand pictures, five thousand of guys without clothes, and the rest is editing.”
IV. In an odd parallel, Moss would soon start dating the actor Johnny Depp, but would eventually be replaced in his affections by Vanessa Paradis.
V. Cooke subsequently worked briefly for Calvin Klein, then moved to London, where she married Condé Nast International’s chairman and CEO, Jonathan Newhouse, a cousin of Si Newhouse’s, and opened a luxury-fashion advertising agency.
Chapter 43
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“TO CREATE SENSATION”
It’s generally thought that Steven Meisel rarely, if ever, took drugs, but he did take cues from the rising grunge culture, and in summer 1995 he and the rest of Calvin Klein’s creative team paid dearly for that. While using him at Barneys, and working with him regularly at Vogue Italia, Fabien Baron fell head over heels in love with Meisel’s photography. “He can do it all,” Baron raves twenty-plus years later. “He’s an encyclopedia of fashion. He knows everything and everybody. He’s an archetypal fashion photographer, the king; he knows hair, makeup, styling, clothing, better than anyone. He’s got it all down and there’s a mystique about the guy.” Baron also admired Bruce Weber, but for different reasons. “He’s a king as well, but of American culture. He owns the American lifestyle. I don’t think he’s a fashion photographer; he’s a chronicler of Americana, and he’s totally obsessed with people. He searches people’s souls. Meisel is obsessed with fashion. He is fashion. It’s very different.”
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