The 1960s were a heady time of change and youth and fantasy. This was also the case in Vogue, then led by Diana Vreeland, who brought her own taste for historicism and exoticism to its pages. “For Vreeland, everything impossible was possible,” says Franco Rubartelli, who, between 1964 and 1970, created some of the most memorable photographs ever published in the magazine. Presented in multipage spreads and taken in far-flung locales, these now-iconic images are exemplars of an elevated and romanticized hippie ethos. On a personal level, they documented one of fashion’s great love affairs.
Rubartelli, born in Florence, is a self-taught photographer who had planned to follow his father into the Italian Navy. He was pursuing his back-up plan, diplomacy, when Cupid arranged a collision that eventually steered him toward fashion. Enrolled at Cambridge to study English, Rubartelli recounts, he went to a pub to meet a blind date—who stood him up. As he rose to leave, he collided with a waitress carrying a tray of beer, which doused him. The tray bearer in question was a Swiss beauty named Françoise Schluter, earning pocket money at the pub while studying languages at the university. It was amore, and soon Rubartelli and Schluter were a couple. They married and lived in Rome with their son, Luigi. Tall, lithe, and blonde, Schluter was discovered on the streets there and started modeling. Her career transformed Rubartelli, by his own admission, into the archetypal jealous husband.
One night, after having mysteriously found a camera in their apartment, Rubartelli asked Schluter to pose for him on a beach. With no stylist, hair, or makeup—nor much knowledge of how the camera worked—he took pictures of the wife he feared he was losing, pictures that were infused with longing, youth, and freedom—qualities rarely expressed in the formal fashion photographs of the time. Having asked Schluter what the most important magazine was, Rubartelli got together some money to develop the film and secretly sent the results to Vogue.
Much to Rubartelli’s surprise, he received a positive reply from New York in the form of a telegram, signed Diana Vreeland, then Vogue’s editor in chief, that read: “Beautiful model, beautiful pictures, will get in touch with you.” Soon, the photographer and his model wife were working with Consuelo Crespi, the magazine’s editor in Rome; their first story appeared in the August 1964 issue. As Rubartelli and Schluter were racking up credits and becoming known as a couple, though, their love story was unraveling. “We spent too much time together as photographer and model, and not enough as man and woman,” Rubartelli explains via email. Their final rupture (circa 1965) left Rubartelli “without work, without my wife, without my model, without my son.”
Another no-show launched the second chapter of Rubartelli’s Vogue career. Having received a call about an advertising job, the young photographer went to meet the client at the Parco dei Principi Grand Hotel in Rome. He remembers that as he waited, and waited some more, “a tall, skinny woman in a black cloak and long knee-high boots walked past and caught my attention.” Rubartelli asked the concierge who she was and was told she was a German model, at which point he called his mother and asked her to pose as his secretary and invite this alluring Vera von Lehndorff-Steinort, aka Veruschka, to stop by his studio with her portfolio. “At this point,” Rubartelli explains, “my name was known through my work for Vogue. Veruschka stopped by in the early afternoon and we talked until the evening. I invited her to dinner at a restaurant. We spoke about Françoise, and she told me about her family. We shared our problems and stayed talking like two parrots until an innkeeper told us it was closing time. It was very late. We spent the rest of that night and every successive night together for nearly nine years. It was love at first sight.”
Theirs was a creative relationship that flourished in print and in life and took the pair around the globe. Recently Rubartelli, now living in Venezuela, has started to use Instagram as a biographical platform. Having spent endless hours poring over ’60s Vogues and becoming especially curious about Rubartelli and his models, his Instagram diary left me spellbound and eager to know more. I reached out to the ebullient Rubartelli, who openly and graciously agreed to share some personal stories with me.
“You know something?” Rubartelli recently wrote, “I think that I have never been a photographer. I was simply a man who loved the two most important women of his life through his camera. I remember how beautiful my pictures came out when I was in love with Françoise or Veruschka, and when our stories ended, when there was no more feeling between us, I could stay for hours and hours in front of them without doing one good picture.” Rubartelli does himself a disservice. The Vogue archive provides evidence that he very much has a feeling for the form.
Here, the stories behind some of his best-known Vogue assignments.
