The photographer with an eye for personality
Patrick Demarchelier 1943–2022
Patrick Demarchelier could find the authenticity beneath the veneer of celebrity. The self-taught
French fashion photographer captured models and Hollywood and British royalty in quick, unstudied snaps taken before selfconscious posing could begin. “Fantastique, bootiful,” he would coo at his subjects— they often understood little else of his heavily accented English—before wrapping up quickly with that one perfect shot for the cover of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar. He became such a legend that “Did Demarchelier confirm?” was one of the first questions Meryl Streep’s fashion editor character lobbed at her clueless assistant in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. But Demarchelier preferred to keep the photo shoots themselves pressure-free. “To me everyone has an inner beauty,” he once said. “My job is to relax people to the point where the beauty and the personality shine through.”
Demarchelier was “anything but” destined for high style, said The Guardian (U.K.). When he was 8, his father left his mother and the five children, forcing them to bunk with relatives in the port city of Le Havre. Demarchelier was given “a simple Kodak” as a teen, and by his early 20s had entered fashion photography. Once he moved from Paris to New York in 1975, he “became one of the industry’s most sought-after names,” said CNN.com. He helped create the “supermodel-led aesthetic” of the 1980s and ’90s with shots of Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, and Naomi Campbell. He also caught the attention of Princess Diana, who in 1989 chose him as her personal portraitist. Demarchelier persuaded her to use lighter makeup and captured “some of the most defining images” of the princess, including an iconic 1990 black-and-white portrait of her in a strapless white gown, hugging her knees.
Demarchelier often took pictures of his models naked, said The Times (U.K.), including a “celebrated” 1993 Rolling Stone cover featuring a topless Janet Jackson. His clients considered it a nonissue until 2018, when seven women told The Boston Globe that he had made unwanted sexual advances. While Demarchelier called the allegations “ridiculous,” Vogue barred him from future shoots. He kept his studio open, though, and had been organizing an exhibition of his recent photography in a Berlin gallery just before his death— fulfilling a claim he once made in an interview: “I will die working.”