Grace

by Grace Coddington

  In the beginning, the drawings were rough. But as time went by, they became more refined. Karl Lagerfeld saw them, and although he was neither a cat nor a dog person back then, he thought them charming, and we agreed that I should make them into a book that he would publish.

  The Catwalk Cats was launched in the autumn of 2006, with a signing at Marc Jacobs’s shop in Greenwich Village. Marc was amused by the book; he, too, is a great animal lover. (He owns two dogs, Alfred and Daisy; whenever we meet for dinner, we always talk about our pets, rarely fashion.) He also had T-shirts manufactured to celebrate the book’s publication, to be sold in his stores both at home and overseas, the proceeds of which went to an animal charity of my choice: City Critters, a small organization that I felt would feel the most impact from the money. For the Paris shop, the T-shirts carried my drawing of Bart holding a baguette; for Tokyo, Bart was dressed as a samurai warrior; and for New York City, there was a bulky, padded, all-star quarterback Bart. The night of the signing, Marc must have been feeling a little combative himself, because he turned up in a T-shirt with “If it ain’t stiff, it ain’t worth a fuck” printed on it. He proceeded to put his arms around me and Anna, to be photographed by the world’s press.

  Cats led me to my ultimate television moment—on the air with Martha Stewart.

  Vogue’s annual Age Issue traditionally spans the decades with features on women at different stages of their lives. For 2008 an idea came up to have each fashion editor dress a model in a way appropriate to the editor’s own age. However, both I and my colleague, Tonne Goodman, who is much younger than I, misinterpreted this to mean we should turn the models into literal look-alikes of ourselves. So while Tonne was busily transforming her girl, Tanya D, into the epitome of thin blond minimalism that she is, I re-created my model, Karen Elson, as my doppelgänger—same shock of frizzy red hair, same pale face, same clothes, all black. I decided to take the idea even further and put my cats in the picture, too. However, after realizing how stressed they would get under the studio lights, I asked Pumpkin’s breeder, Pam, if we could use the cats from her company, Top Shelf Persians, because they are all so well trained.

  When Martha Stewart saw the issue, she fell head over heels in love with the cats captured in Steven Meisel’s photographs, crawling charmingly through Karen’s hair and flying through the air. She rang, asking me to put her in touch with the breeder, and subsequently bought two kittens, which, I heard, she often allowed to accompany her into the bath.

  Anna, Marc Jacobs & me at my “Catwalk Cats” book signing

  Karl with his new Kilten Choupette he too finally has become a cat person.

  Later, Martha called me again, saying she was about to do a program dedicated to cats and wanted to invite me to take part. Of course I accepted. The entire studio audience for the show consisted of cat lovers. All had been asked to bring their cats along (I didn’t bring mine; they would have been too freaked out) and arrived with them on leashes. The studio doors were firmly locked, and they held their pets up as soon as they were given the cue “Everyone put your cats in the air.”

  To be surrounded by all those felines was awesome. I thought it was ambitious of Martha to invite so many that didn’t know one another to be in such close proximity, and I never thought she’d get away with it. But the thing about cats, if you take them to a strange place, is that they tend to become quite subdued. Martha mentioned my book, and I was proud to see Pam up onstage with all the cats that had appeared in my pictures with Karen Elson, which was how it all started for Martha and her new Persians, Princess Peony and Empress Tang. Having always been reluctant to go on TV, I was in cat heaven this time and hardly noticed the cameras when they were turned on me.

  After the show, which I thought went really well, Martha asked if I could dress her for her future programs. In the end I steered clear of that. I was perfectly aware that she had strong ideas about how she wanted to look, and so, to avoid any conflict, I declined. We have remained friendly, though. There’s always a certain friendship between cat people, a pronouncedly personal understanding.

  XIX

  ON

  THEN AND NOW

  In which the

  past becomes

  the present,

  the present flies

  past, and our

  heroine goes

  digital and makes

  peace with

  computers at last.

  Before I arrived at American Vogue in 1988, while I was still at Calvin Klein, Didier and I went in search of a weekend getaway outside New York. Like so many other foreign professionals living and working in Manhattan, we were well acquainted by now with the sheer awfulness of summer in the city: The air outside becomes so hot it scorches your lungs, and to be confined to an office all day means to virtually risk frostbite from the full-throttle air-conditioning. So many of our friends would return refreshed and renewed from weekends spent at their bolt-holes upstate or their rentals in the Hamptons that we decided to try it, too.

  It took some searching—we didn’t want anything that was too lengthy a car trip from town, or too expensive, as we didn’t live the lifestyle of many other people in fashion—until eventually, we found the perfect place in the Hamptons, not too far from the sea, because Didier loves to sail. He’s more passionate about it than even I was when I was young.

  “Eureka! I just opened my first email”

  The house was brand-new, in the little town of Wainscott, hidden away at the end of a cul-de-sac with a small garden backing onto woods. The building was unremarkable, to say the least; to be truthful, I had always hoped for something much more charming, like one of those old, beautiful clapboard houses you see in the movies. But many of these are a fortune nowadays and can be found only by the side of busy, noisy highways—which put them way off-limits for me, Didier, and our cat family.

  Over the years our country house, which we initially saw as a stopgap on the way to something better, has become an essential part of our extremely private life (we hardly ever socialize), a treat for the cats, and when it comes to the garden, which is landscaped in a freewheeling, rambling manner, very much my way of keeping hold of a little piece of England and its glorious greenery. Early on we planted a few bamboo shoots at the back, which now, when I happen to look out of my kitchen window, seem to have grown into a thick forest surrounding the two small wooden, ivy-covered cabins we built at the end of the garden, one for occasional summer dining and the other for stopover guests.

  Inside the main house, which I try to keep under control despite Didier’s propensity for buying books, my one major indulgence has been to entirely cover the walls with rows of shelves supporting layers of original framed photographs—mostly in black and white—by my favorite photographers past and present. Because these pictures have taken up every square inch available, a few years back I started storing them, packed in their bubble wrap, in our spare room. Then I had an entire row of cupboards built along one wall. Gradually, as their numbers grew even larger, to be joined by several big oil paintings, some Native American rugs, my antique dressmaker’s dummy, and my sewing machine, I suddenly found myself with a space almost exactly like the junk room that had so embarrassed me as a child back at our family home in Wales.

  I tried recently to tackle the confusion in that room again, with its stacks of photographs so tightly wedged together that I cannot prise them apart, along with random items like an obsolete fax machine and a giant book on Muhammad Ali bought by me as a birthday present for Didier and still in its box, and an even bigger one, Sumo, by Helmut Newton, which came with its own table to sit on. I wondered if I would ever fulfill my dream of building something, not unlike a little barn, on the small piece of land we bought across the road, in which to curate and store in an orderly fashion all the beautiful images and objects that it has been my good fortune to collect over the years. But then, as always happens, my zeal for tidying became waylaid by the lure of reminiscence as each photograph drew
me back down Memory Lane and made me stop what I was doing.…

  Fashion has changed so much in my lifetime. Today I find myself at the collections, asking, “Who are all these people?” They appear to come from anywhere and everywhere, and ninety percent seem to be uninvited hangers-on. Sometimes I think I’m the last remaining person who goes to the shows for the pleasure of seeing the clothes, rather than desperately wanting to be there for the social side—which is the part of things I have always had to be dragged to, kicking and screaming. And everyone has an opinion! Before the television interviewers and film cameras came along, people kept themselves to themselves. But now, when they turn up to fashion shows, all they want to do is talk and talk. Or be filmed answering inane questions.

  Everyone has a cell phone or camera, including all the models getting ready behind the scenes, so everyone knows exactly what’s happening in real time. There are no secrets anymore—everything has been texted, tweeted, or e-mailed all over the world way before the show has even begun.

  During the time I worked at Calvin Klein, Carrie Donovan, formerly of Harper’s Bazaar but by then elevated to the powerful position of fashion editor of The New York Times, attempted to send her photographer backstage at one of our fashion shows. I threw him out. Then Calvin came running over, demanding to know why I had done it. I said I thought that seeing what we were doing ahead of time would ruin the surprise, and besides, the guy was in the way. “No, no,” he said. “It’s for Carrie Donovan. You’ve got to allow it.” That was the beginning of the end. Now it is complete mayhem back there, with probably more pictures taken behind the scenes than of the models on the runway.

  I used to see every show in the New York collections, but these days I’m much more selective, partly because the experience has become so trying. Giveaway gossip papers like The Daily are constantly being pushed in your face, and cheap champagne is handed out at nine o’clock in the morning—with the English fashionistas being the first to gulp it down. As you dodge the movie cameras on your way in, there is usually some starlet of the moment surrounded by photographers and planted in the middle of the runway, hindering everyone else from getting to their seats. I can’t stand it, so I usually put the blinkers on and rush straight through. Before the show, there is that intensely irritating moment when the photographers yell out, “Uncross your legs!” What I usually think is “Screw you!” because if my legs were really in the way, I would know it.

  Each ready-to-wear season, I usually fill one sketchbook per city—Paris, Milan, New York—plus one for each season’s couture, resort, and cruise. So that makes twelve sketchbooks a year, and they can all get pretty full. My system at the shows is to draw, sketch, put down everything—every single outfit—and worry later whether I liked it or not. Occasionally, I will put a star next to a favorite. Because I don’t write about fashion, I don’t take notes. I find it faster and easier to draw a dolman sleeve, for example, than to describe it. It was simpler in the old days, when there weren’t so many collections and most people showed a maximum of thirty outfits.

  I do become terribly intense when I’m drawing anything complicated or intellectually challenging, such as the Prada or Balenciaga collection, and I get extremely irritated if I’m in the middle of it and people talk to me, disturbing my concentration. Most other people these days don’t take notes, because they look at the Internet, with its bloggers and instant information, and most freelance stylists don’t even bother coming to the shows. But I have to see them. They’re easier for me to absorb if I’m there. On a flat screen, things look flat. I don’t think I could recognize a great collection if I just saw it on a screen or in a look book.

  I’m not exactly a technophobe—even though I learned how to text only recently and still have a problem writing e-mails—but I’ve never been that fascinated by the computer age. I got my first cell phone in 2006, and it was pure peer pressure. That and not being able to find Jean-Louis, my driver, whenever I was in Paris for the collections. Cell phones and texting are a curse and a blessing at the same time. How ridiculous is it that I have to text people to ask them to turn on their phones because I wish to call and have a conversation with them? I text as little as I can. For me, it’s far slower than a conversation, and so impersonal. I liked it before, when you could snuggle down with the telephone and feel like the other person was in the same room. You could carry on whole relationships through the receiver. Before I began using a cell phone, I needed to make all my arrangements prior to leaving the house, adhering strictly to a timetable. There was no texting, no tweeting. No nonsense.

  It’s hard for me to define what is modern, because I am not. At work I have a computer because I must. Am I glued to it all day? Never. For several years it sat there on my desk at Vogue before I opened it up and turned it on. By which time, unbeknownst to me, I had accumulated millions and millions of e-mails, which remained unanswered. Now all my messages are picked up and printed out by my ever-patient assistant, Stella, who is young and cute and gets rid of the reams and reams of spam that appear every morning. She has tried to teach me how it all works, to no avail—I just don’t seem to have the knack.

  I think that I am probably the last surviving fashion editor who actually dresses the girl rather than leaving it to an assistant. It is so important to me. The dressing room is the only place you have left to communicate with the model and get your opinion across as to how she should stand and what mood should be conveyed, without interfering with the job of the photographer. I’m told other stylists sit down and direct from behind the camera, preferring to have their assistants tug the clothes straight, turn up the collar and push up the sleeves.

  I guess I’m pretty critical of fashion and always concerned about whether something is well made. The first thing I do in the showroom when I go back to look at a collection is to turn whatever I’m looking at inside out. Designers like Peter Copping at Nina Ricci, Marco Zanini at Rochas, and particularly Marc Jacobs always think about the inside of a garment, which is something I rarely found working in England, where the finishing was dreadful and most designers seemed content with any old lining. However, I was fascinated to read—in the Metropolitan Museum catalog of his show, perhaps—that Alexander McQueen liked having things sewn inside his clothing to give it a backstory in much the same way a nineteenth-century gentleman would have a lock of a prostitute’s hair sewn into his jacket as a memento or trophy.

  To me, fashion falls into one of two categories. It can be instantly appealing and you would like to wear it; or it is something you wouldn’t necessarily wear but it is driving fashion forward. For that reason, I like Comme des Garçons. Whatever the designer Rei Kawakubo thinks up is intriguing. You often see some creation of hers and wonder how she thought of it, how she could turn a particular political situation into that sort of dress. At other times, she makes something that is heartbreakingly beautiful, such as her “Broken Bride” collection. When I went backstage after that show, I cried: such accessible romanticism after all those years of experimentation, of seeing strange padded things that distorted the body.

  I do not have enough space to keep my collection of photographs, let alone fashion. I haven’t kept any of my old clothes. Unlike my colleague Hamish Bowles, Vogue’s international editor-at-large who, if you mention any name from Poiret to Schiaparelli, has it; he lends pieces out to museum exhibitions. He used to keep racks of rare pieces in his office until he couldn’t fit himself in there anymore. But I do appreciate vintage clothes and could kick myself for not keeping some of my amazing old Saint Laurents and Azzedines.

  The thirties and the forties are my favorite eras. Part of the fifties, too, which were romantic. I hated the exaggerated shoulders of the eighties; they were hideous. Power dressing was hideous, too. (The film Working Girl with Melanie Griffith is a reminder of one of fashion’s ugliest moments.) The original forties look was a squared-off shoulder, which is not the same thing at all, and the only person who did that properly in modern time
s—by which I mean captured the spirit of the forties—was Yves Saint Laurent. I loved what Karl did early on for Chloé and, later, at Chanel couture. I loved watching those early Japanese shows as well. They were like the most beautiful theater. I loved the craziness of the Kenzo shows in the seventies, so colorful and youthful, although he didn’t make Japanese clothes; his was a Japanese eye on European clothes. The English designer Ossie Clark made incredible things in the sixties and seventies, brilliantly cut and slightly driven by the thirties.

  I always love bias cut. It’s incredibly flattering, never looks tight, and falls perfectly when done correctly. Like Ossie, John Galliano is a master of that. Azzedine Alaia is a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly. I love Nicolas Ghesquière’s clothes. His shows for Balenciaga are very, very uncompromising, but there is always a reason behind every pleat and fold. He is a perfectionist and an inspiration. Daring to take chances, he is endlessly copied by others who lack his courage to take the first step.

  Although it says “creative director” next to my name on Vogue’s masthead, I’m not creative in any other part of it than fashion, so if you asked me for my job description, I guess I would have to say “stylist.” That term can seem a bit redundant when the mood changes, and it changes as we speak.

  Every so often I have lunch with Anna at her request. These days, though, I get worked up beforehand, usually thinking, “This is finally the time she’ll say, ‘You’re getting on a bit. You’re looking tired. I think you should take it easy,” as a prelude to gently asking me to step down. In fact, the last time we went out, I dared to say, “I thought you were going to tell me to leave.” At which point Anna laughed and said, “No, as long as I’m here, you will be, too.”