There was heavy lobbying on all sides from those wanting to influence my final choice. Dimitri Levas, who worked for Bruce Weber and was helping me stage the exhibit, wanted Bruce’s photographs to be predominant. Raúl Martinez, Vogue’s art director, was an avid fan of Steven Meisel’s and wanted most to be his. At one point, James Danziger approached me, asking, “Do you think you have enough pictures for an exhibition? Do you have around fifty?” Well, I think the final count was closer to four hundred. I decided in the end that each photographer’s work should be individually framed and hung in its own space, but I reserved Bruce’s pictures for an extraordinary four-sided easel of his designed by Luis Barragán. I also ordered some running shelves to be built around the gallery walls, then overlapped more of Bruce’s photographs on these in a similar fashion to the way he displayed them at home.
The show wasn’t meant to be precious in any way. After all, these were just photographs taken for a fashion magazine. The exhibition, which afterward traveled to the Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, was called “Short Stories: Celebrating 25 Years of Vogue Fashion by Grace Coddington.” The opening was followed by a dinner at Dean & Deluca, right across the street from the gallery. Several people made speeches, because once you enter Anna’s world, there is always a speech. Bea Miller, who flew in from London, was due to speak but dropped her notes, picked them up in the wrong order, and was forced to ad-lib. Karl Lagerfeld turned up late with an entourage and wanted to be specially shown around the exhibit, thereby holding up Anna’s schedule just at the moment when everyone was expecting to sit down for dinner.
My friend Liz Tilberis had recently been appointed the editor in chief of Harper’s Bazaar. I was allowed to invite her, but only by the skin of my teeth, and she had to sit at another table together with Patrick Demarchelier, whom she had just stolen from Vogue.
The person I probably saw the most throughout my early years at American Vogue was the photographer Arthur Elgort. For years, not a month went by without our working together. We shared all my biggest trips, and I could count on him to capture the marriage of fashion and place with unparalleled charm. Whereas someone like Bruce brings his own kind of “Americanism” to a picture wherever he goes, because that’s what he is drawn to, and Mario Testino subsumes his backgrounds into the hedonistic party atmosphere going on between himself and his sitters, Arthur takes you there. Bring on the bagpipes! The girls are always pretty and lighthearted. You get to see the clothes and the beautiful locations, and he’s up for anything. He likes to eat well, drink a very good glass of wine, and practice playing his trumpet in his hotel room late at night. He loves ballet and photographing anything connected with cowboys, jazz, and travel. He may never stop talking, but he’s good with people and can hold a discussion on the many subjects he is knowledgeable about without faking it—even if he does reminisce so much that he sometimes forgets to take the picture! His photographs are utterly beguiling and never dark, unlike those of, say, Annie Leibovitz, whose images demand a strong measure of shadow to maintain their brooding, mythic quality.
Working with Arthur during the early American Vogue years took us to so many places, it was as though we were employed by some upscale travel magazine: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Wyoming, Texas, California, the Hamptons, Russia, China, Morocco, and other parts of Africa were just a few of the locations where we (sometimes literally) pitched our tent. In India we arranged a shoot with a hand-painted elephant garlanded in fresh flowers, along with a pair of grand young maharajas to escort our model, Maggie Rizer. But by the time we had everything set up, the elephant had swallowed every last petal of its garland. Little mishaps never fazed Arthur. He merely smiled and took another philosophical puff on his pipe.
For all our far-flung travels, I think some of the most memorable pictures Arthur and I have worked on together were taken on a huge salt lake in California that is somewhat like a giant outdoor studio, with its crusty white surface reflecting a magical light. Here we shot Mad Max, with hundreds of children clad in ragged chamois, and a Wild West story with Stella Tennant and Arthur’s two sons, Ansel and Warren, whom I’ve cast in many of my stories.
Mario Testino is another of those few photographers still willing to go on trips. He’s always traveling anyway, so we usually have to work to fit into his timetable. He is essentially at his best going to places he is very familiar with, like Madrid, Rio, or Berlin—cities where he can call on his many friends and put them in the pictures, because he’s so great at creating a genuine social dynamic.
I think we first worked together on a collections shoot in New York’s Meatpacking District. Then we went to Brazil with Amber Valletta. And then to Naples. Or maybe Naples was first. There we used some strong Brazilian girls—Gisele Bündchen, Fernanda Tavares—and the American Frankie Rayder, and did a very cool picture of them with a bunch of local guys on scooters. Mario is largely responsible for introducing the Brazilian models to our pages.
He is certainly fun to work with (although I personally prefer it when he doesn’t make the pictures too sexy). The girl always looks pretty, he can fit a lot of people comfortably into the frame, and there is a certain modernity in his work that everyone responds to. It’s never threatening, and everyone is always having a good time. And his photographs are hugely collectable in the art world.
Chamois Clothes, Chosen by me and shot by Arthur. It’s not mad - it’s mad max.
In 2002, the same year Karl Lagerfeld published a hefty coffee table book on my work, I was nominated for the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. As was Karl. And when it came to the final round of voting, it was neck and neck between us. I found out later how close it was because Anna was on the panel for each stage of the vote. Oscar de la Renta voted for me. Calvin voted for me. Also on the panel, fighting for Karl, was Glenda Bailey, editor of Harper’s Bazaar. “Absolutely not Grace,” she is reported to have said.
In the end it was a tie, so both Karl and I received an award. However, there was still the little matter of the speech. The dinner and presentation ceremony were at the New York Public Library. Anna warned me that I had to be there to accept because, she said, “You can’t turn it down.” She also suggested that Calvin should present me the award because he was so instrumental in it coming my way.
Karl & Oscar dancing the tango at my “Group” book party
I arrived on the night in my specially made Calvin suit, but Didier was no longer my escort due to a last-minute job, and I wasn’t allowed a substitute. That would be against protocol because Anna had invited Hillary Clinton to join our table. Seeing as I had such a terrible fear of public speaking and this was my first time doing it, I had devised a cunning let-out. The caricature of me by Michael Roberts from the cover of the Lagerfeld book was animated to speak my words and end with a wink. Which was all very charming, but I still had to stand up to accept the award and stammer out a personal thank-you.
Seven years later I would experience far more of a nightmare at the British Fashion Awards of 2009, held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London’s Fleet Street, a building as cold and sterile as an abandoned church. The tables were squashed so close together that you could get neither in nor out. The dimly lit stage faded to black with some strange holographic effects hovering about. I sat at the British Vogue table, where there were about ten of us. At the appointed moment, the model Karen Elson, whom I had asked to introduce me, graciously went up onstage, took a step forward, and disappeared head over heels into the orchestra pit. During the ensuing pandemonium, I was asked to say a few words, which is difficult if your friend has just plunged into darkness and is cradling a cracked rib. She did, however, manage to get up and hand me my award—a hefty crystal shaped like a diamond that looked as though it had come from a giant’s engagement ring. Today the CFDA statuette, which is a metallic figure a little like an Oscar, holds some of my costume jewelry at home in the bathroom. The British version keeps open the French doors on my
balcony so the cats can get in and out and makes a marvelous doorstop.
XIV
ON
ANNA
In which
magazines go
faster, Vogue
goes global, photo
shoots get bigger,
celebrities rule,
and Anna receives
an unexpected
Christmas present.
I am often heard grumbling about Anna. For instance, whenever I come out of the Vogue art room having discovered my photos reduced by a spread or two. Or at the end of a fashion meeting in which one of my most cherished ideas is arbitrarily dropped. Or if I’m required to shoot a difficult celebrity I’m not especially fond of. Or if I’m disallowed from shooting a model I am justifiably fond of. These are all circumstances calculated to make my blood boil, and so woe to anyone—even Anna—who stands in my way as I clomp back along the corridors to the sanctuary of my office.
If Anna doesn’t like a set of fashion photographs, they’re gone. They disappear off the board where the layouts for the current issue of the magazine first appear. She doesn’t offer up any explanation. No reshoots. You have to come up with another idea. She doesn’t like pictures that look too retro, that contain too much black, or that appear too mannered in that arty Italian Vogue way. She likes to be involved in a photo session, is pleased to be made aware of the process, and is very happy when the photographer keeps her informed about what he has in mind, although most of them are far too scared to call her.
Even ex-President Sarkozy looks up to Anna as she accepts the Legion d’Honneur
Funnily enough, I had no idea how cantankerous and argumentative I can seem until I saw myself in The September Issue. Small surprise that in the past, Anna has said I am the only person in fashion who can actually grind her down. As the nuns who wrote my school report when I was fourteen put it, “Grace has a very nice way of getting her own will.” The truth is, although we do have an occasional fundamental disagreement about fashion, I have enormous respect for Anna both as a person and as an editor. And while I am often approached in the street as a kind of heroine of the film about Vogue, to my mind the point of it was to show the creative push and pull of the way Anna and I work together.
I remember Anna from way, way back in the early 1970s, when she was a junior fashion editor at Harpers & Queen in London. We didn’t communicate much, if ever. She wore layer upon layer of oversize baggy knitwear by the Scottish designer Bill Gibb and many other layered knitwear pieces by the fashionable Italian label Missoni. I don’t remember her face so well because she seemed to be constantly hiding it behind layers of hair, too.
After she moved to America in 1976, I would run into her over the years, and she was always very nice to me, although still with that shy little habit of ducking down behind her fringe. Then one day in New York, I received a call from the child psychiatrist Dr. David Shaffer, an old London friend who had relocated to Greenwich Village with his family but had recently separated from his wife, Serena. He said to me, “I’d really like you to meet my new girlfriend.” I joined him at the Algonquin to find him with Anna, who by then was working as an editor at New York magazine and seemed far less shy.
“Liberman likes her very much and wants to give her this job with a new title—creative director of Vogue,” David said. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s great,” I said, because it seemed to me at this point in the early eighties that American Vogue had become, in contrast to British Vogue, very bland. They were a beige and boring crowd, and I thought Anna could really help.
As time went on, I began seeing Anna running around New York with her team of tastemakers, including the high-tech architect Alan Buchsbaum and the discerning interior design expert Jacques Dehornois. And that, I think, was exactly what Liberman wanted from her. She was out and about far more than he was and could supply the magazine with up-to-the-minute information about the latest photographers, cutting-edge design talent, and all that was percolating in the fast-moving worlds of art and fashion.
The photographer Arthur Elgort has another theory. He says, “Alex was always completely overwhelmed by her legs.” (Anna is a very flirty, girly person. Whenever she speaks to women, she does so with great assertiveness, but with men she’s very seductive, even if they’re one hundred percent gay.)
David once said to me, “The great thing about Anna is she doesn’t care whether people like her or not.” I’m not so sure if this is true, but she never seems to falter when criticized. I care whether anyone—from the mailman to the dry cleaner—likes me. Maybe that is my weakness. But not Anna’s.
She does, however, care very, very much about her children. If one of them comes on the phone, I’ve watched her melt, which is not something you very often see with Anna.
A protégee of the higher-ups at Condé Nast, Anna criss-crossed the Atlantic for a while, taking over as the editor of British Vogue, then being brought in to run House & Garden in a sort of holding pattern until she took the helm at American Vogue. There, her first cover was very different. It was everything Vogue hadn’t been until then. Shot by Peter Lindbergh, it showed the Israeli model Michaela Bercu, a big blond outdoorsy girl, roaring with laughter in front of a Parisian café wearing a hugely expensive couture jacket by Christian Lacroix and a distressed pair of low-slung blue jeans. (Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele was the fashion editor here.) The cover endorsed a democratic new high/low attitude to dressing, added some youthful but sophisticated raciness, and garnished it with a dash of confident energy and drive that implied getting somewhere fast. It was quintessential Anna. And the remarkable thing is that it ran. At the time, Richard Avedon had a hefty contract with Vogue and he was really pissed. “Oh, I can do that. It’s absolutely easy,” he said when he saw the picture. Yet this type of cover was the complete opposite of his subjective, tightly controlled photographs, and all his attempts to produce something looser and more spontaneous were doomed to failure.
Avedon and Anna never got along. In the beginning, he wanted to come in to be creative director. When that didn’t happen, he approached Harper’s Bazaar with the same proposition. I heard he even knew in which corner of the office his desk should be situated. But that didn’t happen either. From then on he never missed an opportunity to say something snide about Anna and her Vogue.
Circumstances were completely different around the photographer Irving Penn, who for decades had been the magazine’s most treasured possession. Anna respected him unequivocally and treated him unlike any other photographer used by Vogue; he was afforded a kind of freedom no one else got. Three days to do one picture? Fine. Mr. Penn didn’t want to shoot that dress? Fine, too. He was given carte blanche. Mr. Penn didn’t like the girl-next-door look? Mr. Penn thought it was terrible. And he found wearable clothes tacky. He was used to couture and to producing iconic fashion pictures.
A reticent, ascetic-looking man who liked to flesh out ideas for his photos in beautifully rendered abstract sketches, Penn always found reasons, when approached with a new project, not to do it. Only Mr. Liberman, and, after a time, Anna, could persuade him to take a photograph, but even then you still got the feeling that it was against his better judgment. Later, Phyllis Posnick, American Vogue’s executive editor, went on to become his editor of choice, working with him for nearly ten years. It was an amazing collaboration that led to some of Vogue’s most extraordinary images. Their professional relationship became like that of an old married couple.
When I first joined American Vogue, I did a substantial number of sessions with Penn because Anna had decided that I was the best person to look after him. I had just worked with him on his powerful photographs against a simple white background of the last collection at Calvin’s. In his little studio, the atmosphere was hushed, and everyone kept well back and totally still. Absolutely no music was allowed, nor could anyone—even in those days when everyone smoked—light up. Only the celebrity makeup artist Kevyn Aucoin seemed
able to get away with making a sound, standing camply at Penn’s shoulder and murmuring approving little noises like “Mmmm,” until Penn would say, “Do shut up, Kevyn,” and continue to calibrate his lighting. Otherwise we all remained perfectly quiet. It was a wonderful experience, but the rapid pace set by Anna at the magazine meant that there were many other sessions for me to oversee and many trips to prepare. In the end I had to stop working with Penn because my long and involved picture stories were not his style, nor were the available clothes ever exceptional enough to suit him—although not many in modern times could come up to his exacting standards.
More and more over the years, especially in public after Anna became American Vogue’s editor in chief, I’ve come to see her as the possessor of an almost Margaret Thatcher–like, straight-faced control. One spring on her way into a Paris fashion show, for example, after being pelted with some gooey substance by the animal rights people who are always lying in wait, she disappeared backstage, rearranged herself, had her makeup redone, and was still one of the earlier arrivals to take her seat. And when the outrageous Alexander McQueen unveiled his new collection in New York one year, she kept her composure despite his show’s deliberately provocative finale. At the time, the fashion world was titillated by McQueen’s design for “bumsters”—trousers that barely reached the crotch in the front and hardly covered half the arse. One particularly mischievous model, Dan Macmillan (the great-grandson of a former British prime minister), was wearing them in the show’s finale, which found him directly facing Anna in her front-row seat. McQueen stepped onto the catwalk to take his bow, and the entire cast turned to bow back at him. At which point the boy was literally mooning Anna right in the face. And she, unruffled behind her dark glasses, simply stared back.
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