These 1993 Steven Meisel Photographs Will Transport You Back To An Unforgettable Year In Fashion
It’s a balmy August evening when I meet Steven Meisel on the dockside in A Coruña, a port city in the Galicia region of northwest Spain. In November, a rare exhibition of his work, Steven Meisel 1993 A Year in Photographs, will open at the beautiful space that Elsa Urquijo designed for the MOP Foundation; chair of Inditex Marta Ortega Pérez’s initiative to bring cutting-edge exhibitions to A Coruña. Steven has agreed to walk me through the show.
Except, of course, this is all in my imagination and we do no such thing. Steven, one of the world’s most prominent photographers and, as such, impossible to pin down, is some 4,000 miles away in his studio in New York City, and I’m in France. Yet, thanks to a clever synthesis of technology, we spend an hour together, back in 1993. Bill Clinton is in the White House, Nirvana are blazing across the US, Prince has become a symbol, and Steven Meisel – fresh from his completion of Sex, his brilliant collaboration with Madonna – is set to embark on a blitz of creativity. Over the next 12 months, he will shoot 28 Vogue covers together with more than a hundred editorial stories, including the iconic “Anglo-Saxon Attitude” in the December issue of British Vogue.
He seems genuinely surprised by the scale of all this. “I don’t sit and look back at my work unless I’m forced to. I was shocked when my agent showed me just how much I had done that year. I remember him saying, ‘OK, do this job and do that job,’ and I just went to work. The work just comes, instinctively, organically, you know, I’ve been seeing all these visions since I was a little kid.”
The exhibition comprises a sequence of portraits, adds Steven: “This cast of amazing characters who I found really inspiring, really beautiful, really cool,” he says. “I think I’m good with picking people, discovering people, whatever the word might be, whether or not they are a model. I see things in them that they might not see.” His image of Marlon, Keith Richards’s son, is a good example. In front of Steven’s lens, Marlon seems to have been transported to a perfect rock star parallel universe. He isn’t alone. The show features more than a hundred portraits of women and men from the worlds of fashion and film. And as we pass them by, we circle back to this idea of transformation several times; to the notion that these extraordinary images are the summation of everything that Steven has learnt. As he says, “What you really see in these portraits is me.”
This moment in the early 1990s seems to have been a perfect time for him, and perhaps that goes some way to explaining his prodigious work rate. “I need to be inspired by great clothes and back then there were so many great designers. It was fashion, fashion, fashion…” We move on to a group of images made at Yves Saint Laurent’s atelier on Avenue Marceau in Paris. We find Loulou de la Falaise reclining in the lounge where the great couturier’s clients would await their moment. “I believe we were there for two days,” he recalls. “One day we shot in the studio, where we took portraits of Catherine Deneuve. Then we went to the salon, where we shot Yves, Loulou and Paloma. It was very exciting for me to go to the original salon for the first time.”
Steven’s obsession with beautiful people, his encyclopaedic knowledge of all aspects of fashion, particularly his mental inventory of models and designers, reaches back to his schooldays. As we move from Saint Laurent to Twiggy – artfully arranged on a staircase – a little history creeps in. The 1993 shoot was one of the very few times they worked together professionally, though it was not, apparently, the first time he had taken her photograph. “I was a Twiggy fan. I was 12 or 13 years old and on a quest to meet her. So, I cut school and went to Melvin Sokolsky’s studio because I knew that’s where she’d be. I knocked on the door and the stylist – Ali MacGraw! – said no, but the cinematographer let us in. So, I got the photograph and an autograph! She was 17 or maybe 18 and it was her first trip to New York, I believe. I think she was caught up in the whole whirlwind of being Twiggy. She was so shocked when I told her this story all those years later.”
This habit of cutting school to track down models seems to have been an important part of his education. “I used to do that a lot. I went to school on 57th Street. I don’t know why, but I would always have an Instamatic with me. New York seemed small and back then you just saw models all over the place. They were hard to miss. So yes, it started when I was really young. I think maybe it began even before I started to take the pictures, I just liked fashion.”
The exhibition opens with a small group of street photographs of passing women taken when Steven was in the sixth grade. Seen here for the first time, they are like mini-Garry Winogrands, and seem to hint at things to come. Steven is not so sure. “I think that obviously looking at those pictures from a 12-year-old’s perspective, I might have been dreaming of possible futures but no, I never thought that I would have a job as a photographer. Well, when you are that young you aren’t thinking about jobs at all.”
Maybe not, but these early obsessions with modelling, style and beauty enabled his ascent to the pinnacle of the profession. His understanding of all aspects of fashion is unparalleled and his influence has nurtured numerous careers, particularly those of the models featured in this exhibition. Perhaps no-one more so than Linda Evangelista, who appears here more often than anyone.
“Linda was over here yesterday, and I was trying to understand what it was about her. I don’t know. What is it about Linda, or what was it from the minute I met her? The first thing we did together was US Vogue. Linda gives blood, literally. She’ll stand on her head; she’ll do this or do that. Besides the fact that she’s a beauty. I mean, there are a lot of beautiful women that don’t photograph and aren’t photogenic and aren’t willing to create with you and do the process. Linda was always willing to do everything – and happily so.”