At the same time, a handful of luxury companies such as LVMH (the initials stand for Louis Vuitton–Möet Hennessy), Richemont, and Kering began expanding, swooping up fashion, jewelry, watch, luggage, textile, and spirits brands, and flexing their muscles in the marketplace and the media in a way only a handful of supersuccessful designer firms such as Giorgio Armani and Polo Ralph Lauren had been able to do before, demanding and receiving favorable coverage from fashion magazines. The breakdown of the traditional lines between editorial and advertising pages became so extreme that at times the same photographers shot the same garments in the same settings and on the same models for both editorial and advertising pages that ran in the same magazines. Reporting the truth about image merchants had never been a high priority for fashion magazines; in this new environment, it became impossible. Naked emperors cowed trembling editors desperate to hold on to their jobs.
Carine Roitfeld left French Vogue after a decade to start her own niche magazine. “Ten years, it was a hell of a lot of fun, but toward the end, it unfortunately got less and less fun,” Roitfeld said. “It’s all about money, results, and big business. . . . Today’s fashions don’t let people dream as much as they used to. . . . If you look at advertisements these days, all you see are handbags.”
Creative directors held on to their jobs by becoming ever more conservative. “You have to use Lindbergh or Demarchelier, a known quantity,” says Neil Kraft, “because the clients have so much money riding on a shoot, it’s unkillable. It’s a function of working for companies rather than individuals of vision.” Magazines had problems of their own, unrelated to fashion. The rapid rise of the Internet in the midnineties; increased paper, printing, and mailing costs; and shrinking advertising revenue squeezed the life out of them and caused editors to turn their attention away from journalism and toward brand management. The failure of grunge to capture the imagination of traditional fashion consumers meant that the pretty waifs and wan, unmemorable blondes who followed the supermodels onto fashion runways and in photo studios would have a particularly short moment in the sun. Since they no longer sold magazines in sufficient numbers to satisfy the bean counters, by the end of the decade they’d mostly been replaced by celebrity faces. Oprah Winfrey became a newsstand sensation. InStyle, a celebrity-fashion hybrid, was the “hot book” of the moment. The red carpets at entertainment industry events became (and remain) more important than runways as venues for the promotion of fashion products. Fashion shows became celebrity petting zoos.
The merger of fashion and entertainment was sealed in the late nineties, says former model and journalist Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, when Bernard Arnault, the CEO, chairman, and owner of LVMH, installed young designers atop many of his labels: Alexander McQueen at Givenchy, John Galliano at Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, Michael Kors at Céline, and Narcisco Rodriguez at Loewe. “Their mandate was not to make clothing, but to make noise,” Thomas says. By dressing celebrities and putting them in ads, in magazines, and in the front rows of their shows, the brands would “sell high-profit items—bags, perfume, sunglasses, scarves—many of them covered in logos. During the dot-com boom, the middle-market consumer emerged. They had money and spent it on themselves—not couture or prêt-à-porter, but Gucci shoes, Chanel sunglasses, Dior handbags, Hermès scarves. Those items were cash cows.”
Problem was, the arrival of celebrity diminished creativity in fashion photography. “Models don’t outshine the products,” says Thomas. Celebrities were products themselves and came complete with “reams of people, contracts and riders. They’re really high-maintenance and it became really tricky. They want to appeal to the middle-market consumer as well. Photographers’ hands were tied. Their pictures had to jibe with the celebrity’s image. There was major retouching. It was embarrassing. It wasn’t photography anymore. It was computer-generated imagery. Everything got homogenized and sanitized and it sucked the soul out of fashion photography.”
Fashion’s morph into entertainment had other repercussions. Trends, too, became commoditized. True luxury goods were cheapened both literally and figuratively; prices rose and quality fell; aspirational goods spread far and wide; less expensive diffusion lines and secondary labels gained in popularity, diluting designer exclusivity; and “fast fashion” brands from Abercrombie & Fitch to Zara grew in importance, attracting consumers by offering dozens of wear-it-twice fashion items for the price of a single luxe-label investment piece.
The dot-com crash early in the twenty-first century made fashion’s image-mongers tighten their belts even more. As income disparity rose in the years that followed, fashion consumers became ever more stratified. That opened up opportunities for niche magazines, but forced those with large circulations to think even harder about “packaging” their editorial “content” to both pander to lowest-common-denominator readers and reflect the values and serve the needs of advertisers. “Intensely image-conscious companies, public or otherwise, are so intent on controlling how they’re perceived, advertising has simply become too safe,” Lisa Lockwood wrote in WWD. “And safe equates with boring.”
Aside from the three superstar survivors, Demarchelier, Weber, and Meisel, a few photographers prospered in the new environment, none more so than Carine Roitfeld’s favored lensman, Mario Testino. SuperMario, as he is sometimes called, started his career—after several years of hard partying in his hometown of Lima, Peru—by moving to London, studying photography, and becoming an assistant. A chance encounter with a British Vogue stylist led to his first fashion assignment. Grounded both by a conventional Catholic upbringing and a long-term relationship with his Brazilian business and life partner, Jan Olesen, Testino became a master of the politics of fashion (clicking the portraits link on mariotestino.com brings up a shot of him photographing the all-powerful Anna Wintour, the only person besides the late Princess of Wales with a dedicated page of portraits on the site). “He yes’ed everyone and gave them what they wanted,” says the owner of a top modeling agency. Testino also embraced the role of court photographer of the new fashionable society, the royals, actors and musicians, designers, artists, and business folk—performers all—who make up today’s commerce-driven simulacrum of A-list society.
Testino is represented by his brother Giovanni, whose firm, Art Partner, has become a force in fashion photography, representing, among others, Terry Richardson, Mario Sorrenti, Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot, Cedric Buchet, Steven Klein, and Glen Luchford, as well as some of fashion’s top stylists. “Fashion photography became portraiture, and the person who put [sic] that is Mario, my brother,” Giovanni says. “You can’t see fashion today without seeing a celebrity—who did that? I don’t know if he did, but we were there. We started to be bored of models and started to shoot incredible people.” It all made Mario Testino as much a celebrity as his subjects. “You can’t be a fashion photographer today without being comfortable in the spotlight,” his brother concludes. And they can’t just be photographers anymore; they have to manage their own brands and social media empires, just like the very latest crop of celebrity models, Internet-savvy beauties like Kendall Jenner, Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, and Cara Delavigne.
Not all photographers could adapt. By the late nineties, Corinne Day was deeply involved with her druggy musical set, which she was chronicling for a Nan Goldin–ish book, Diary, published late in 2000. But it hit after its style and subject matter had fallen out of fashion—which ironically sent the ailing Day, who’d had cancer surgery that slowed but didn’t stop the disease, back to the fashion world seeking assignments few wanted to give her. As Day’s illness accelerated, Kate Moss reappeared to support her first champion and raise funds for her care. Day also changed her style in jobs for British Vogue, Hermès, and Cacharel. “Almost overnight, rawness was replaced with refinement,” the Independent commented in her obituary. “It was a natural evolution.” But her last-minute pivot couldn’t halt the inevitable or alter the legacy based in her groundbre
aking photos of the nineties.
Corinne Day died at forty-eight in summer 2010. Kate Moss, by then a multimillionaire, attended the funeral, held in the backyard of Day’s rented cottage in Denham, Buckinghamshire. “What I found interesting was to capture people’s most intimate moments,” Day once said. “And sometimes intimacy is sad.” Day’s unrelenting honesty could be seen as the antithesis of fashion—which lies for a living. But fashion’s capacity to adapt to, and even celebrate, a vision such as hers was a clear demonstration of its plasticity and an unexpected underlying generosity.
Epilogue
* * *
RETURN TO TERRYTOWN
Terry is my revenge.
—BOB RICHARDSON
Rockville Centre isn’t a fashionable place. A landlocked suburban village situated just above the south shore of Long Island in the heart of Nassau County, it is a forty-five-minute commute by train to New York City, but a world away from the vibrant metropolis. It is also the site of the sixth-largest Roman Catholic archdiocese in the United States, supported by a large, vital Irish Catholic population.
Terry Richardson’s photographer father, Bob, was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the son of an Abercrombie & Fitch executive, but he, his parents, and five siblings moved to Rockville Centre, where Bob attended the St. Agnes Cathedral School, which he recalled as a Lord of the Flies–like breeding ground for menacing bullies. An older brother was an athlete, while Bob favored artistic pursuits after his parents gave him a painting set and easel one Christmas. Bob was also bisexual; he discovered that at age thirteen, when he got his first blow job from a man and never went to confession again.
Richardson transferred to South Side, a public high school, in ninth grade, stopped painting, and decided he’d become a designer of everything from cars to clothing. Richardson was scorned by his classmates when he started taking drawing classes at Manhattan’s Art Students League, but he’d seen that escape from suburbia was an option. “Being an outsider—a maverick—a rebel—became my life,” he wrote years later in a series of autobiographical sketches. He recalled losing his virginity at seventeen in a “fast and furious” gang bang.
As World War II was ending, Richardson enrolled in—and flunked out of—the Parsons School of Design, then switched to a graphic design program at the Pratt Institute. He earned spare cash designing fabrics and spent it wooing his sweetheart. In 1950, he was drafted and sent to Korea, then won a discharge, claiming to be gay. Back at home, he married his girlfriend and childhood sweetheart at St. Agnes Cathedral (“two young adults making a serious mistake”), moved to Greenwich Village, and worked as a textile designer (“the worst designer in the world”), an illustrator, and a Bloomingdale’s window dresser. He developed mental health problems, tried suicide (the first of four attempts), and was committed to Bellevue Hospital.
At various times, Richardson said several of his siblings had serious mental issues, that he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in 1950 and again in the late sixties, and that he suffered memory lapses, blaming them on electroshock treatments. He also claimed that he discovered his wife had a drinking problem and divorced her while she was pregnant with their daughter.
In the midfifties, Richardson went to California, where “a friend gave me a Rolleiflex,” he recalled. “He told me I had no patience but I could paint with the camera and get done in five one-hundredths of a second” what might take a painter days to accomplish. When Richardson saw his first picture—of a café table with a bottle of red wine and a burning cigarette in an ashtray—“I knew he was right,” Richardson said.
He returned to New York, where he got a job assisting photographer Richard Heimann, husband of the model Carmen Dell’Orefice, and learned darkroom and lighting techniques. He said both that he got fired and that he quit (“I told him to go fuck himself,” he wrote. “I had learned all I needed to know”). He’d decided to become a fashion photographer himself, even though “I hated fashion,” because “I liked photographing women.” He wasn’t in it for conquest, though; he wanted to be an artist.
He met a stage actress, dancer, and amateur photographer, Norma Kessler, who was working in the chorus at the Copacabana and dating jazz musician Gerry Mulligan; she’d become Richardson’s second wife and regular stylist. “When he got an assignment, they would discuss it all night,” their son, Terry, recalled years later. “He would bounce everything off her. They’d just drink wine and smoke a joint and he would be, like, ‘How do I do this story?’ ” Norma took Bob to museums, foreign films, and downtown parties. She reinvented him visually, too, swapping button-down shirts and loafers for cowboy hats and scarves.
If anything got him going, it was Harper’s Bazaar. “It was the greatest magazine in the world,” and through it, he thought, he could “create my own style.” Marvin Israel had just become the magazine’s art director, and “I decided I had to seduce him,” Richardson remembered. He’d met models through Heimann, among them Mary Jane Russell, Dovima, and China Machado, who posed for him in bed with a boyfriend. Richardson showed Israel that photo, and “he threw it across the room and said, ‘Why do I need you?’ He asked me to photograph my own life.”
“That really clicked for my dad,” Terry Richardson said. “It’s basically making every image you do a self-portrait. . . . That’s why I think so many of my dad’s pictures are so emotionally intense. The mood is so heavy you can feel it. . . . It’s about my father’s true feelings.”
Bob returned with a photo of another model “lying on a couch in tears, talking to a psychiatrist,” he said. Israel approved and, quite unexpectedly, offered him an assignment for a special section conceived to attract children’s fashion ads. Richardson took two kids to Coney Island and shot them sitting on rocks, smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes in the rain, which won him his first location trip with “an editor as crazy as you are,” Israel told him. The ill-fated trip to Spain with Deborah Turbeville was designed to yield six pages. “I ended up with fourteen,” Richardson boasted, as well as a scandal. “We battled our way across Spain,” he recalled with pleasure. Bazaar “didn’t get any ads,” he adds, “because the pictures were so weird.” But Israel kept giving him assignments.
Richardson was sure Richard Avedon was watching: “When I started at Bazaar, Avedon almost had a nervous breakdown. I knew the only way I could succeed was to give him one. He was out to eliminate me if he could. He’d see my prints, and the next day he’d do the same picture.” One day, the buzzer went off at the Richardsons’ apartment-studio on West Fifty-Eighth Street and “upstairs come China and Dick, both drunk as skunks. I knew he had to get bombed to confront me. He said he wanted to see the studio where all these wonderful pictures were taken.”
Judgmental, ambitious, competitive, and hypercritical, Richardson wasn’t easy to deal with. “I never did anything more than try to take beautiful pictures, but it was my way or no way,” he said. “I’d ask art directors, ‘Why did you hire me?’ ‘I love your work.’ ‘Then sit down and be quiet.’ I was way ahead of them and I knew they’d never catch up. It was not my job to educate them.”
Of his penchant for shooting out the open doors of helicopters while an assistant held his belt from behind, he said, “Danger fascinated me.” That applied to professional relationships, too. He proudly recalled ruining clothes by shooting them underwater off Acapulco, and throwing fashion editors off sets, giving them nervous breakdowns. “I’m told you’re a genius, but I don’t see it,” Charles Revson, owner of Revlon, told him. “Get your eyes examined,” Richardson snapped.
In 1965, he met his muse, model Donna Mitchell, and formed a personal and professional partnership; they were both committed to pushing the limits of the acceptable. “We caused one scandal after another,” Richardson said proudly, “all planned and rehearsed. I could have told her to jump off a building and fly and she would have done it, but there was only going to be one take. We had more pictures killed than any photographer in the history of photography.” Rich
ardson blamed the sex in his images: “There was no sex before the early sixties. There were models who looked like they had zippers on their pussies, rigid girls with long necks, beautiful posture and no cunts.” He vowed “to break that down.”
Like Bert Stern’s, Richardson’s ambition sent him reeling into drug addiction. A year before he met Mitchell, a model introduced him to amphetamine-laced vitamin injections. “We’d get stoned and she’d give me a shot,” he said. She took him to see the Dr. Feelgood Max Jacobson—“We called him Jake”—and Richardson became “one of his star patients,” Richardson boasted. “I never thought about what I was doing. I only had time for ideas,” and Dr. Jake’s shots “forced my mind to go faster. He taught me to mainline and gave me the works”—prescriptions for hypodermic syringes.
After each injection, Richardson would stay awake two or three days. For three years, Jacobson steadily increased the doses. “I was black-and-blue from my knuckles to my shoulders,” said Richardson, who also got shots in the back of his neck, between his ribs, and in his spine. He wasn’t thinking about his career. “I never had a career,” he claimed. “I never wanted a career. My trouble was, I wanted to be great, a legend, not famous. Anyone can become famous. I worked myself into a state where, without speed, I wouldn’t have been able to work.”
Drugs also infiltrated his pictures—and he was convinced no one knew: “I’d photograph models smoking joints for Paris Vogue and Bazaar and they’d think it was cigarettes. They didn’t understand the look, the scene. I was at least ten years ahead, feeling isolated and not understanding why people were so slow to realize that something was happening on the planet—not in the stupid little fashion business, but in the whole world.” More than once, he jumped on a runway “and made a hasty exit” from a fashion show, he remembered. “It was so stupid and boring.”
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