Inspiration of the Day

Probably the first time I heard about US Vogue’s fashion editor Grace Coddington was back in 2009, when watching the infamous ‘The September Issue’ – a cinematic depiction of all the drama and hardships of working under the wing of Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. It seemed to me that one of the sub-plots, which portrayed Coddington’s attempt to challenge and question Wintour’s opinions and decisions, overshadowed what many journalists agree on – that ‘The September Issue’ is as much about Grace’s boundless talent and exquisite taste as it is about the sophisticated nature of Wintour’s world.

If Mary Wollstonecraft can be called a master of romantic narrative, then Coddington is a queen of fashion narration, creating, in one of the journalist’s words, “the template for the contemporary fashion story like no one has done before”. Instead of designing conventional “pretty model wearing pretty clothes” pictures, she transports them into a radiant world, where fashion is alive and speaks to us through a magical spark generated between models, garments and the mise en scène.

Coddington brings an unprecedented sense of a clearly unfolding story into her editorials, making the reader imagine that they are flipping through pages of a period book instead of observing a photographic spread in a magazine. Her background in fashion is very broad – before taking an art director position at US Vogue, she worked as a model, wrote for the British version of the magazine and assisted at Calvin Klein’s advertising campaigns, who later admitted that Grace worked on some of the best visuals he has ever done.

This enabled her to develop a unique attitude towards fashion, regarding it not as a consumerist tool or a niche for profit, but as a world of a strict aesthetic which needs to be constantly nurtured and embellished. Among her most famous fashion spreads are ‘My Generation’ shot by Mert & Marcus, where model Natalia Vodianova is transformed into a modern Twiggy with various beach locations serving as a background for her on-page romance with Sam Riley. Others include ‘Love of a Lifetime’ shot by Annie Leibovitz with Coco Rocha and Roberto Bolle, ‘Anything Goes’ with Frida Gustavsson and Eddie Redmayne and many others.

Throughout more than 30 years and up to this day, Grace Coddington, who is now 61 years old, still remains a massive inspiration not just to me, but to numerous photographers, designers and models, forever transforming the experience of fashion.