The fashion editor as history maker

What makes a great fashion image?” a review praising the new Vogue tome asked. “The Editor’s Eye celebrates the work of Vogue’s boundary-pushing fashion editors.”

That review came from Vogue, home of the same boundary-pushing fashion editors.

If they seem a little overconfident, that’s because they have every right to be.

Even detractors of Vogue, who note that its celebrity pandering has made it less fashion bible and more US Weekly, can’t help but admit that the canon of imagery it offers in this book far outstrips that of any of its competitors.

Editor’s cut: Tonne Goodman autographs a copy of The Editor’s Eye at a Vogue book signing.

Its history-shaping editorials made forward-thinking silhouettes conventional.

Anna Wintour credits the magazine’s shift in acknowledging the people making it happen behind the scenes.

“When I came to Vogue in 1988, one of the first changes I made was to credit the editors responsible for styling the sittings,” Wintour notes in the book’s foreword. “These days, it’s hard to imagine that those so crucial to bringing a story to life would go unrecognized; cast your eyes over the credits in Vogue today, and you will see that manicurists, set designers, and, should they be required, animal handlers are all given their due for the contributions they’ve made.”

“Back then,” she recalls, “naming the editor who conceptualized the story, chose the clothes, model and location, and conjured up images that simultaneously belonged in and expanded the universe of Vogue universe… was something of a radical act. Instead they were figures worthy of L. Frank Baum, wizards who wielded their magic from behind their version of the curtain — the magazine page.”

Today, of course, the reality has far outstripped the past.

The fashion editor, along with the stylist, looms large in the collective mind. In The September Issue, Grace Coddington stole the show. Rachel Zoe’s reality show has propelled her from stylist to front-row, red-carpet-treading celeb to full-fledged designer. Even her former assistant Brad Goreski, who left Zoe’s office after a less than amicable parting, finagled his own Bravo series. Her other ex-assistant Taylor Jacobson, another alumnus of the Rachel Zoe reality star factory, will soon appear in Hollywood Unzipped: Stylist Wars.

But before there was a reality show “star,” there was the well-dressed editor, more concerned with the outcome of a photo than the final edits on a Bravo episode.

“When it came to marking this particular milestone in our history, it was obvious to me that those who had decisively formed Vogue’s visual landscape, and and had been responsible for its legacy to the culture, should be celebrated,” Wintour reveals. “I have always strongly believed that the caliber of our editors — Grace Coddington, Tonne Goodman, Phyllis Posnick, and Camilla Nickerson now; Babs Simpson, Polly Mellen, Jade Hobson, and Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele then — sets us apart from everyone else.”

Babs Simpson, fashion editor 1947-1972

“I’ve always been interested in the way people look,” Simpson said, “long before I knew there was such a thing as fashion.” Born to a well-do-to banker and debutante, Simpson came to Vogue after a stint at Bazaar, and soon worked with Irving Penn almost exclusively. “Penn once said he spent more time with me than anybody in his life, and he didn’t say it with joy, either,” Simpsons says wryly.

She was sittings editor for Marilyn Monroe’s last shoot, which came out in Vogue a month after her death. In a story on Ernest Hemingway, Simpson and crew flew to Havana with no way to get in touch with him. “Nobody gave me telephone numbers or anything.” She discovered him though the hotel bar where he regularly drank and finagled her way into his home. Hemingway was photographed shirtless, sprawled next to model Jean Patchett on his couch. “Isn’t he revolting?” Simpson, now 99, muses. “(He) wanted us to go and see the pelota or something or other with them afterward. They wanted to spend their lives with us. So we got the first plane we could out of there.”

Jade Hobson, fashion editor 1971-1988

They say every editorial looks like its fashion editor. In the case of Hobson, a slender classical dresser, it was the truth. “She did a long Modigliani kind of look, thin and narrow, with an élan she brought not just to the visual work but as a person into the studio,” says Vera Wang, then an editor at Vogue.

Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, fashion director/editor at large 1985-1995

De Dudzeele was — is — famous for Wintour’s inaugural cover. “For years, the covers were the same — cropped,” she narrates. “When Anna arrived, she wanted to change it, to show more of the girl, to make it happy, alive — life!”

The editor famed for first pairing a Chanel jacket with a pair of jeans, de Dudzeele was known for never putting together a head-to-toe designer look and for pioneering the high-low aesthetic. “I always do my own salade. Cheap and expensive, I don’t care. Chic is not because you have money. You are dressed entirely in I-don’t-know-what and that means you are chic? Non! For personal chic you need to mix your own shit in and make it happen. I love to do gold with shit, you know? It’s my thing. Gold with shit.”

Polly Allen Mellen, fashion editor 1966-1991

The arrival of Mellen, a WASP with the throaty staccato of Katharine Hepburn, heralded Vogue’s recognition of the sexual revolution. “I simply wanted to express a truth about women’s desire,” she says. “If you look at the nudes of Balthus and Schiele, which were also called ‘pornographic’; or at Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers; or the orgy scene from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut — a great meditation on letting go — you find a quality of unrepressed sensuality that may be threatening to certain people, but that’s what I was after.”

It was Mellen who brought a snake into the Nastassja Kinski portrait by Avedon, and she was the editor behind the famed series of Helmut Newton editorials, including the infamous image of model Lisa Taylor wantonly gazing at a shirtless man, her legs wide apart.

Grace Coddington, fashion director 1988-1995/creative director 1995-Present

Annie Leibovitz calls her “the best fashion editor in the world.” Of her vision, Anna Wintour notes that  “Grace has an eye. An instinct for knowing the look that will inspire.” A nun at her school noted in 14-year-old Coddington’s report card, “She has a very sweet way of getting her will.” In The Editor’s Eye, Coddington’s colleagues paint a portrait of the editor as imaginative, creative, kind and clever, while, at the same time, easily displeased if a photo from her shoot gets chopped from the page.

Coddington famously augured the grunge trend, in a shoot with Steven Meisel that many consider the tipping point of what would become a global phenom. Though she merely nixed country Wellingtons for a pair of work boots and found inspiration in Kurt Cobain and the Seattle plaid scene, largely in part due to Meisel’s boyfriend, who was a fan of the music.

Coddington is known for her epic editorials, which often involved dramatic settings, large-scale tents erected in vast deserts. Michael Roberts, who profiles her in the book, describes the “Coddington oeuvre” as “English gardens, flowers, trees, topiary, groups, Paris couture, chateaux, even bigger groups, wagon trains, tepees, summer-camp frolics, innocence, crazy hair, long skirts, historical tableaux, happy families, buckets of nostalgia and lovely horizons.”

Tonne Goodman, fashion director 1999-Present

Largely known for her minimalist, almost aggressively clean editorials, Goodman earned her stripes working for Calvin Klein during his heyday in the ’80s. “Who says you can’t be completely devoid of ornamentation?” she asks. “Simplicity and modernity and minimalism are the most difficult things to achieve well.” Her work often evokes a forceful musculature: models in streamlined, well-cut garb, not a hair out of place, or a bold, clean body framed by light. The cover of Christy Turlington doing yoga on Vogue’s cover? Goodman’s work. Rooney Mara in Alexander Wang? Also Goodman. (Also on the cover of this book.) Gaga in a pink Mod bob and berry lips? Signature Goodman.

Phyllis Posnick, executive fashion editor 1987-Present

“I have one shot at getting the reader to stop flipping through the magazine, so it has to be provocative or shocking, beautiful or unusual, or nobody’s going to pay attention,” Posnick declares.

Posnick, one of the editors who transitioned from fashion to beauty (and then back), drew from her experience at Glamour when Wintour put her in charge of the Vogue beauty sittings. With Irving Penn, who would photograph the stunning images, Posnick would share a fraught relationship. “Penn and I used to fight from time to time,” Posnick recalls. “It made me strong.”

Camilla Nickerson, contributing editor 1992-2005, 2010-Present

Camilla Nickerson, Nickerson is the queen of understatement.

“I’m just a nanny to designers and photographers,” she says. “How can I be quiet enough so the photographers can speak?”

That’s hardly true. In 2004, The New York Times noted that Nickerson’s editorial in the October issue of Vogue sparked a mood among designers, particularly Narciso Rodriguez, Derek Lam and the Proenza Schouler duo, who pinned images from her 16-page spread, shot by Steven Meisel, to the walls of their studios.

Camilla is a great inspiration for fashion now,’’Narciso Rodriguez told the NY Times. ‘’Her influence is her eclecticism.’’

I remember an exhibit on Kate Moss at La Gallerie de L’Instant in Paris. On display was the Ellen von Unwerth portrait in black and white. Moss, lounging on a chair, gazed directly at the camera, garbed in a coat. It was the ’90s in a single photograph.