A BEAUTIFUL LIFE
Fearless stylist and creative director Grace Coddington collaborated closely with Peter Lindbergh on many of his iconic shoots. Days after his passing in September, she reminisced to Hamish Bowles about her years of working with the legendary photographer
Fearless stylist and creative director Grace Coddington reminisces about working with legendary photographer Peter Lindbergh.
Istarted noticing Peter’s pictures for Italian Vogue and in campaigns for Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto in the early 80s. He had a very strong point of view: I loved the roughness and the wildness. He would do all the girls with no make-up, on the beach in Deauville, France. He took everybody there, including myself eventually, and he did not care whether it was winter or summer. It didn’t matter. In winter it was bloody freezing and he didn’t care! The girls didn’t care, either, because they all loved him. All the supermodels trusted him so much. He always made them look so real, so touchably real. He loved Kathy Ireland, and Helena, Linda, Christy, Naomi and Cindy. He loved Tatjana Patitz and Stephanie Seymour and Cecilia Chancellor. He loved Kate Moss and Kristen McMenamy. They were all brave, and smart enough to trust him.
Peter just loved women. He did not believe in retouching, which I think is great. And he used real women – womanly women. He always had a very faithful team of people: Julien d’Ys did hair for him and Stéphane Marais did make-up for years and years and years, and then Odile Gilbert later on. He liked to stay with the same people, and he liked them all to be one big family.
I thought his first American Vogue cover [November 1988] that Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele styled was brilliant – so full of life. I remember having a conversation with Anna [Wintour] about it. She said: “What do you think?” And she had Peter’s image here and the Richard Avedon one that had already been planned for the cover over there. And I said: “You know, if you want to make the point of a new Vogue and change fashion in one fell swoop, you have to change the cover. This is it, because this is everything an American Vogue cover isn’t.” And that picture did; it revolutionised everything.
I’d worked with Peter at British Vogue, but my first shoot with him at American Vogue [December 1988] was in Santorini with Carré Otis and Linda Evangelista, whose hair Julien had just cut short. I think everybody liked the freedom of that story. Peter always wanted to do his own thing. You could kill him, but you loved him, too. Afterward he’d just laugh – and laugh at himself.
He’d copy his own pictures all the time. He’d bring out his old Polaroids and say: “This is what we’re doing, and it’s going to be cropped here,” and it was all very funny. In the back of his head there were movies, too, and he was very inspired by August Sander and Paul Strand-like pictures – but he never copied anything other than himself. Except one shoot, ‘Wild at heart’ [September 1991], which was all about motorbikes. A particular shot was inspired by Cecil Beaton’s 1948 photograph of all the models dressed in Charles James ballgowns. Karl Lagerfeld had just done these motorbike jackets with ballgowns, and we used all sorts of hip-hop-style jewellery, the stuff that you found on Eighth Street, New York. We shot under the Brooklyn Bridge with a wind machine and smoke machine because Brooklyn was his place at that point. He used to love the meat market Downtown, but then it got too posh, so he started going to Brooklyn. I guess he was searching for things that looked like Paris because there were cobbled streets there.
We had a nightmare-load of girls playing silly buggers on that shoot, and we had one little bus to get them to the location. They were all supermodels who were not used to being treated like that. And trying to get them into those huge ball dresses in a tiny space! He said: “You know, we’ve only got a few frames, because it’s pouring with rain and these are couture.” Nevertheless, it was fun.