Postcards from the edge of the catwalk

IAIN R WEBB

9 781851 496471

54500

£24.95 / $45.00Iain R Webb’s POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE OF THE CATWALK is a personal photographic portfolio spanning three decades that documents the glittering brouhaha surrounding the ready-to-wear and haute couture fashion collections in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

——A designer roll call including John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Anna Sui, Valentino, Donatella Versace, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen.

——Supermodels and style icons including Linda Evangelista, Catherine Deneuve, Isabella Blow, Naomi Campbell, Natalia Vodianova, Erin O’Connor, Kate Moss, Anna Piaggi, Anna Wintour, Shalom Harlow and Björk.

——Celebrity front row faces including Gwyneth Paltrow, Grace Jones, George Michael, Kate Winslet, Sean Combs, Liz Hurley, Tilda Swinton, Paris Hilton, Bernadette Peters, Nick Cave, Ivana Trump, Roman Polanski and RuPaul.

——

at every fashion event there is the invitedaudience, and then there are the Privileged few,whose access transcends the velvet roPes and viProoms. for longer than i can remember, iain r webbwas one of the few who was invited everywhereand had the Presence of mind to take Pictures ofwhat was haPPening.there is no better guide tofashion’s inner sanctum.this book is the nextbest thing to actually being there. —— Paula Reed, style director, Grazia

iain r webb’s book is an incredibly natural visionof the imPossibly unnatural world of fashion.a truly imPortant vision from the inside of themost creative of industries. it certainly is anamazing testament to some of the most imPortantfashion moments from the last 25 years. —— Nick Knight, photographer

coNteNts

A note from Anna Piaggi —— 006Notes by Iain R Webb —— 008Postcards —— 018 Index —— 244Thank You —— 270Iain R Webb: Then & Now —— 271

Postcards from the edge of the catwalk

My trusty camera has remained a constant.

Over the last three decades, wherever I have worked as fashion editor, from the edgy style magazine Blitz to the thoroughly orthodox Times newspaper, whenever I have been leaving the office with my suitcase packed to cover the latest round of international fashion shows, the chorus of goodbyes has always been the same: “Off on holiday again?” Although the four-cities-in-four-weeks trip is akin to being sent away to summer camp by your parents – every six months your editor packs you off to New York, London, Milan and Paris to report back to your readers on what’s new on that season’s catwalks – the schedule is gruelling, the air-kissing exhausting. As anyone with even a rudimentary schooling in maths can work out, over the years that adds up to a lot of shows. Hundreds of designers presenting thousands of dresses, each hoping their particular, sometimes peculiar, personal style statement will stir even the most hemline-weary front row editor. Each season my front row survival kit has invariably been the same. Along with the bottle of water, packets of sweets (for that late-in-the-day low sugar moment), painkillers, file of the day’s schedule and invitations (organised with the precision of a military campaign by a trusty executive editor and team of assistants) I have always juggled my notebook alongside a camera. This has been a straightforward point-and-shoot compact Olympus, upgraded over the years as new, brighter shinier models appeared on the market. Just like the fashion world they documented. The idea for the title and layout of this book came early on, primarily prompted by my preferred format of the prints. These holiday snap-style photographs are more or less postcard sized, which has over the years proved extremely useful when editing; instead of scouring contact sheets with a magnifying glass or eye loop I have always been able to spread the prints out in front of me to make my selection. Although much of this portfolio was processed and printed at Metro Photographic laboratory (one of the first stops for any budding photographer), many of the prints were actually the product of the high street chain, Snappy Snaps. It is important to me that they have not been laboured over too much. The overarching mood of the images is all about fashion on the move. I am particularly fond of the photographs where models are either moving in or out of the frame. So often I feel the pictures that now emerge from the catwalk shows, taken from the same vantage point directly dead centre at the end of the runway, present a remarkably similar outcome – a pretty generic image of models resembling little more than cut-out, dress-up dolls made flesh. Scan through any magazine coverage of the catwalk shows or style websites and it is rare to see anything other than this kind of straight-up-and-down, head-on, head-to-toe photograph cataloguing the look. And how seldom do you see a back shot, even though this may be the area of interest for that particular season? What a blow for the designer who has spent hours if not days conceiving the design in the round, scrutinising it from all angles in his or her studio. This was not always the way. When I first started going to fashion shows the catwalk was outlined with photographers sometimes two or three deep around its edge. There they would perch precariously on their cameras cases, elbows and equipment resting on the raised runway. Throughout the show they would spin this way and that, snapping away while contorting themselves into all manner of yoga-style shapes to ensure they got their picture. And it was very much their own one-of-its-kind picture taken from their unique position. This led to an exciting mixed bag of images. Of course, it also had its downside. For the photographers it was a serious battle of wills to grab what they deemed to be the best spot to get the best photograph for their publication, and very often an impromptu scrap would break out. The front row editors also suffered as the more enthusiastic photographers would frequently block the sight of a Chanel shoe or obscure the exact length of a Gaultier skirt. More often than not the taking of notes was interrupted with the need to prod the offending photographer in the back and remind the culprit to “GET DOWN!” For even the very best photographer there was no such thing as a sure-fire clear view and so pictures of Pat Cleveland, Jerry Hall and Jenny Howarth or Nick and Barry Kamen often shared the frame with other photographers, the tip of a flash gun or the flare of spotlights from the other side of the runway. Funnily enough these are the things I now find most enchanting. In one of my favourite photographs from this book you cannot see the model’s face at all. It is that now-elusive back shot (page 47), taken at an Yves Saint Laurent

With Mouchette Bell (left) & Caryn Franklin. Photo: Unknown —— London, 1987

show at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris; always a fabulously exciting occasion in itself. I clicked my shutter just as the model left the runway. I have to say that it is a savvy designer who can not only create an entrance-making gown but also one that demands a dramatic exit. The memory of that model in her revealing cut-out back dress, the arch of her spine and elegant neck accentuated by the ostrich feather sprouting a foot or more on top of her head, provided my own special fashion moment. I can only imagine that anyone lucky enough to wear such a dress, seemingly demure, modest even from the front, would be certain to draw gasps of admiration whatever world she might choose to wander through. This was a stylistic trick card of Saint Laurent, who could always be relied upon to subvert seemingly conservative silhouettes. Yet viewing this dress on the web today one might be none the wiser. When I first started attending shows, sneaking in on the Claude Montana for Complice coat-tails of a benevolent grande dame or convincing a PR that I really did work for Ritz newspaper, few people other than the official photographers carried a camera. Before the advent of the digital camera/phone there were notable front row exceptions: Gilles Bensimon, creative director of Elle USA and Angelica Blechschmidt, the iconic former editor of German Vogue and, of course, supersnapper Mario Testino, with whom I was fortunate to collaborate back in the day when we were both young and hopeful fashion freaks. Today every junior assistant of the assistant of the junior editor holds their digital device aloft to record the looks on show. On occasion a celebrity photographer will take a front row seat. Who could forget Roseanne Barr and Sandra Bernhard mugging for the camera crews as they snapped, flash bulbs blazing at Isaac Mizrahi’s A/W 1994 show in NYC, in direct contrast to Bryan Adams quietly clicking his Rolleiflex front row at Yohji Yamamoto in Paris. The list of inspiring professionals whose showtime pictures I have pored over on the pages of Vogue and the like is endless, and includes Michel Arnaud, Fabrizio Ferri, Gilles Tapie, Stanley Papich, Rose Hartman, Nathalie Lamoral, Eddie Monsoon and Roxanne Lowit. Some I have been lucky enough to work with and learn from, like Denis Jones, Charlotte Macpherson, Robert Fairer, Matt Lever, Anthea Simms, Niall McInerney (whose archive would make any fashion fan’s heart beat faster) and the illustrious Chris Moore, with whom I worked closely to choose pictures for my show reports for The Times. I have many fond memories of running between shows and the lab Chris used in Paris, or back and forth to his hotel room searching through endless boxes of transparencies to locate that one perfect shot that would best illustrate my story. The problem with Chris was that there was always more than one. Also while I was fashion editor at The Times, I remember a youthful Gavin Bond came to show me his portfolio. He had just left college and was looking for that all-important break into the business. I was immediately excited by the fresh, reportage style of his images, especially a story documenting the showgirls taken in the dressing rooms of The Lido in Paris. I organised him a commission to go backstage at a Vivienne Westwood show in Paris. The photographs he took turned out to be fabulous. One showed Kate Moss in a romantic tartan ball gown while another featured a slinky knitted number that was all décolletage and derrière. There was also an evocative still life of one of Vivienne’s grandest crinoline skirts on a tailor’s dummy waiting to be brought to life by a supermodel. Vivienne’s enthusiastic response to the story delighted us both. A while later when I was working as fashion director at Elle magazine I convinced my editor that we should run these types of backstage photographs as main fashion stories. Although these pictures are now a mainstay in magazines, at the time this was a new way to photograph and present fashion. Instead of a studied studio look reinterpreted by a stylist, I liked the idea that this was an opportunity to get the designer’s total look first-hand onto the page. This was how we convinced the designers’ PRs into giving Gavin access, although his place backstage was always precarious. A New York collections story almost came crashing around our ears when, despite Gavin’s protestations, an overzealous security team at Marc Jacobs ejected him after he had shot just three or four frames. But we only needed one picture – and needless to say Gavin had got that picture! I especially like this element of chance when taking a photograph although it can be a tad scary, never quite being sure what moments you have been lucky enough to capture in the camera. Of course this is not a very business-like approach. Editors, and more importantly

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Postcards from the edge of the catwalk

IAIN R WEBB

9 781851 496471

54500

£24.95 / $45.00Iain R Webb’s POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE OF THE CATWALK is a personal photographic portfolio spanning three decades that documents the glittering brouhaha surrounding the ready-to-wear and haute couture fashion collections in New York, London, Milan and Paris.

——A designer roll call including John Galliano, Marc Jacobs, Ralph Lauren, Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, Anna Sui, Valentino, Donatella Versace, Oscar de la Renta, Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen.

——Supermodels and style icons including Linda Evangelista, Catherine Deneuve, Isabella Blow, Naomi Campbell, Natalia Vodianova, Erin O’Connor, Kate Moss, Anna Piaggi, Anna Wintour, Shalom Harlow and Björk.

——Celebrity front row faces including Gwyneth Paltrow, Grace Jones, George Michael, Kate Winslet, Sean Combs, Liz Hurley, Tilda Swinton, Paris Hilton, Bernadette Peters, Nick Cave, Ivana Trump, Roman Polanski and RuPaul.

——

at every fashion event there is the invitedaudience, and then there are the Privileged few,whose access transcends the velvet roPes and viProoms. for longer than i can remember, iain r webbwas one of the few who was invited everywhereand had the Presence of mind to take Pictures ofwhat was haPPening.there is no better guide tofashion’s inner sanctum.this book is the nextbest thing to actually being there. —— Paula Reed, style director, Grazia

iain r webb’s book is an incredibly natural visionof the imPossibly unnatural world of fashion.a truly imPortant vision from the inside of themost creative of industries. it certainly is anamazing testament to some of the most imPortantfashion moments from the last 25 years. —— Nick Knight, photographer