Fashion guru steps down from US Vogue
AN Anglesey girl who became one of the fashion world’s most powerful figures is stepping down from her role at American Vogue.
Grace Coddington has been the magazine’s creative director for 28 years, and is said to be one of the few people able to stand up to its notorious editor Anna Wintour.
The 74-year-old former model grew up on Anglesey and has written about its “beauty and bleakness”.
She wrote in her memoirs: “I was pale, freckly, and allergic to any significant amount of sunshine.
“Luckily, whatever sun we had during my youth in Wales was filtered through heavy grey clouds.
“I was 15 then, my head filled with romantic fantasies, some fuelled by the mystic spirit of Anglesey, the thinly populated island off the fogbound northern coast of Wales where I was born and raised; some by the dilapidated cinema I visited each Saturday afternoon in the underwhelming coastal town of Holyhead, a threepenny bus ride away, where the boats took off across the Irish Sea for Dublin and the Irish passengers seemed never short of a drink. Or two. Or three or four.”
Her mother decorated the selfcontained part of the Trearddur Bay Hotel where they lived with self-made paintings and tapestries.
There was no television but Ms Coddington was entranced by the photographs in Vogue.
“Throughout my teens I made most of my own wardrobe – even suits and coats – on our Singer sewing machine, which you worked with foot pedals,” she said.
“I would use Vogue patterns and fabrics from Polykoff’s, a big old department store in Holyhead.”
Ms Coddington will become Vogue’s “creative editor at large”, producing several editorials a year for the magazine and working on other projects.
She told Business of Fashion: “I’m not running away from Vogue, because it has opened so many doors.
“It will be nice to collaborate and nice to go out and give talks to people. It’s just another approach.
“I’m certainly not going into retirement. I don’t want to sit around.”