The photographer who turned a princess into a star
Patrick Demarchelier, who died last week, wrought a royal transformation, recalls Lisa Armstrong
‘W‘He makes attractive women look beautiful, and beautiful women seem real’
as Patrick easy? Absolutely not,” says British Vogue’s former editor-at-large Fiona Golfar, recalling the time she worked with Demarchelier on a series of portraits of Wendi Deng for the magazine in 2011, just after the latter had punched a man who’d thrown a pie in the face of her then husband, Rupert Murdoch. “I had strict instructions from my editor, Alexandra Shulman, to shoot Wendi full-length, in a couple of different dresses. Patrick’s response? ‘Non.’ He was horrible to me that day – but then he was used to working with the fashion A-list, and I was from the features department.”
The key take-away- from this story is that everyone ended up happily ever after. Deng was thrilled with the pictures, and so, Shulman tells me, was she. Ergo, so was Golfar. “You always got something beautiful with Patrick,” says Shulman. “He was so urbane and self-confident, you could send him to shoot any celebrity. He invariably created a good atmosphere in the studio, which isn’t necessarily the case with less experienced or more neurotic photographers.”
Demarchelier, who died last week aged 78, was equally at home shooting celebrity portraits (from Beyoncé to Madonna) as he was fashion stories. The last four years of his five-decade career were clouded by allegations of sexual harassment from multiple female models, all of which he strenuously denied. He was on a story for Australian Vogue in 2018 when he got the call from Condé Nast saying they could no longer work with him. Unclear whether that meant he should walk off the job there and then, he decided to finish the shoot.
In the golden years – and they lasted a long time – he was a canny choice to portray a rebooted Princess Diana for her first British Vogue cover in 1991. After all, his fabulously flattering photography had helped create the phenomenon of the supermodels.
It was the Princess’s idea to call him for her Vogue cover. She’d seen his fashion pictures in the magazine, including one of Claudia Schiffer cupping her chin in her hands – and told her friend Liz Tilberis, then editor of British Vogue and a long-time collaborator and friend of Demarchelier’s, that she wanted some of that wattage. The results, in black and white, were indeed electrifying, not so much for any pyrotechnics, but rather the reverse: the way the pictures stripped back the royal trappings to reveal a woman who wasn’t just gorgeous, but sexy.
The first stunner was the cover, showing the Princess not in one of her fussy necklines, but wearing a simple black polo-neck, the height of fashion at that time – this was peak minimalism and American Vogue would feature a line-up of supermodels in Gap white shirts a year later. Inside was a sensational portrait of her in a white strapless dress and tiara.
With hair de-helmeted by Sam McKnight, make-up given the fashioneditorial treatment by Mary Greenwell (no more heavy blue kohl eyeliner) and a beguilingly mischievous twinkle in her eyes (perhaps Demarchelier had cracked one of his risqué jokes, or maybe she knew that, in the tiara shots, she looked as though she was naked, wrapped in a sheet), she’s a million light years from the suffocating regal stiffness of all the other portraits she’d sat for.
For the first time in nine years, she looked her age, rather than much older – a modern, fashionable beauty. This was Diana not as a princess, but a star in her own right. Mission accomplished. How right she’d been to go with Demarchelier. As Anna Wintour put it: “Patrick takes simple photographs perfectly, which of course is immensely difficult. Working without ornate settings, often in black and white, he makes attractive women look beautiful, and beautiful women seem real.”
Contrast this set of photographs with portraits taken of Diana over the previous decade, and you immediately see what a profound transformation Demarchelier wrought not just on her image, but on the entire Royal family’s.
Pre-Demarchelier, Diana’s portraits were generally formal, slightly staid affairs, even when they were straining for something slightly more spontaneous, like the ones of her and Prince Charles taken with their two young sons – shot against majesticlooking tapestries and wallpapers, or that 80s favourite, the mottled background. Diana, with her media antennae working overtime, sensed that the era of the supermodel required something altogether more polished and glamorous.
They didn’t come more polished and glam than Demarchelier, as I witnessed first hand in 1990 when I sat in on one of his shoots in New York.
I was writing a story for Vogue on Christy Turlington, and Tilberis called me in the afternoon to say she and Patrick would be in the studio shooting Christy for the December 1990 cover. It all had to be hush-hush because Turlington would be wearing a beaded catsuit Gianni Versace had made which had copies of Vogue covers all over it. Wintour wanted the same outfit for her cover. The race was on.
Demarchelier – tall, burly, bushy eyebrows draped like festoon blinds and wearing one of his habitual black polo-necks (wonder where Diana got the idea) – loved the subterfuge. I remember his total focus, but also lots of jokes and anecdotes about his recent trip to his beloved St Barts. Not that anyone ever really understood what he was saying; his French accent was so thick, he made Inspector Clouseau sound like Richard Attenborough. The finished portrait of Turlington – in a sideways kneel, bathed in a chiaroscuro light – is an outstanding exemplar of his art, which made his female subjects look approachable yet glossy and indomitable.
The overwhelmingly positive response to Demarchelier’s pictures of Diana did not go unremarked upon by the rest of the Royal family, who subsequently began sitting for a handful of trusted celebrity and fashion photographers, culminating in the portraits Annie Leibowitz took of the Queen in 2007.
Mario Testino became a Diana favourite after he shot the Princess at another turning point in her life – post-divorce and posing for Vanity Fair, Hollywood’s most favoured platform. Charles and Diana would both sit for Testino subsequently, as did William and Kate when it was time for their official engagement portraits in 2010.
“What’s so outstanding about Patrick’s pictures of the Princess is how timeless they are,” says Justine Picardie, writer and former editor of British Harper’s Bazaar. “In 2017, when I needed a commemorative picture of Diana, I was struck by the fact that most of Patrick’s portraits of her hadn’t dated at all. There’s a classic quality about them that somehow isn’t distancing. It’s exceptional.”
Chambers says Demarchelier wouldn’t have been remotely bothered by the fact that Testino more or less replaced him as de facto royal photographer: “He wasn’t jealous of anyone. He just wanted to do good work. His happy place was St Barts and his farmhouse in Toulouse. He’d motorcycle there from Paris, a cigarette in his mouth, totally content.”
“He was very versatile but never veered from his own style,” says Shulman. “Even when grunge looked as though it might eclipse him, he never panicked. He just carried on doing beautiful pictures.”