Thing of Beauty (18 page)

A bearded, thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker whose real passion had always been shooting the ballet, Elgort was clearly the fashion photographer of his moment. Both his Woody-Allenish demeanor and his informal, unpretentious, “real-life” fashion pictures were exactly what editorial and advertising clients thought of when they wanted a “modern” look. No fashion photographer had been more generously rewarded than Elgort by the recent changes at American
Vogue
, which was trying to bolster its stable of “old master” photographers—like Avedon, Hiro and Penn—with some guys who didn’t take it all so seriously and understood the new corporate visual motto: less art, more fun.

Arthur Elgort specialized in street fashion pictures and studio shots with a lot of action. He often used a hand-held 35mm camera with a motor drive, and snapped personal pictures with a Minox between takes. Because his work required freezing action, he often used “fast film,” which required shorter exposure times to produce a focused image but did so with a noticeable “grain,” the fuzzy imprecision that had once separated “professional” photographs from those taken by everyone else.

Breaking in at
McCall’s
and
Mademoiselle
in the late sixties, Elgort then made a splash in Europe at the British and Italian editions of
Vogue
—which were owned by Condé Nast but had independent editorial and art staffs—and became a fixture at American
Vogue
in 1974. Some considered his ascension to be the creative unshackling of fashion photography. Others saw it as the complete “amateurization” of an art form, or at least a bastardization of a highly specialized craft. But whatever it meant to commercial art historians, Elgort’s style—or
Vogue’s
acceptance of Elgort’s style-revolutionized fashion photography.

His success with American
Vogue
, however, did not mean he had carte blanche there. His most unconventional shots—the blurriest ones, the most candid ones, the ones where the breasts were too visible or the clothes not visible enough-were still only seen in the European fashion magazines, which were more willing to take chances. And when Elgort
did a shooting for American
Vogue
, the art directors often didn’t pick the pictures he liked best. Although photographers were allowed to edit their pictures and make suggestions,
Vogue
had the right to choose any shot taken during its session and paid a straight editorial rate of $300 per page, which was among the highest in the lowest-paying part of the industry. Elgort set the tone for the seventies by approaching magazine work as a job and rarely arguing with the boss. As he told a photography magazine, “You didn’t have to be a genius to see that the seventies would be the Decade of the Client.”

This new approach to photography—which Elgort certainly didn’t invent, but came to personify—had given birth to a new kind of model. Because Elgort disdained conventional “posing,” his style forced models to be more involved and inventive, more like actresses than mannequins. Traditional studio photography rewarded models who sat still well. Elgort’s camera loved girls who could move and dance and lose themselves in a relatively controlled and totally contrived environment. He played loud music during shootings, and expected his assistants and hair and makeup people—he usually worked with his best friend, Christian, one of the few straight hairdressers in the business—to keep the shootings loose and friendly. His pictures made the clothes look exciting, and made modeling look like great, glamorous fun—more fun, in fact, than it often really was. Elgort excelled at tapping into the growing public interest in finding out what happened “behind the scenes.” He created scenes with exciting behinds.

Bloomingdale’s, among the hippest and most heavily promoted of the New York department stores, was one of Elgort’s bread-and-butter advertising clients. The store’s large advertising department generally had as much work for Elgort as he had time to do; when he wasn’t out on location, he tended to shoot for them at least one day a week. Like all fashion photographers, Elgort did editorial work to stay in the public eye and generate advertising jobs, and did advertising jobs to generate cash to support his studio and his lifestyle and grant him freedom to do “personal stuff’—in his case, ballet pictures. And, like all fashion photographers,
he never had as much time for the personal stuff as he wanted.

But Arthur Elgort’s position in the very small world of fashion photography was an enviable one. And because honoring his many commitments required a small but dependable cast of assistants, models and stylists in and out of his studio at 300 Central Park West, Elgort was one of the people a fledgling model most wanted to impress. He didn’t yet have many major American advertising clients, but he worked for every publication those clients read. Finding favor with Elgort meant that everyone who was anyone would soon know your face. If he liked you, a lot of your dues were already paid.

Both Elgort and Bloomingdale’s in-house ad people were sold on Gia by Wilhelmina. Elgort used Gia in a lot of shots during the day-long session for Bloomingdale’s, and liked her so much that he decided to use her again. She was funny, she was loose, she was wild. She was a hot dancer, which always came in handy at an Elgort session. She looked like a more American version of Apollonia von Ravenstein or an Italian version of Lisa Taylor, two of Elgort’s favorite models. Gia could be exotic or just an ethnic, American girl-next-door. She wasn’t shy about taking off her clothes—she sat around comfortably in nothing more than hair curlers and a smile, puffing away at a Marlboro and paging through a magazine.

It was May 17. Gia had been working less than three months and this was only her second real job. But she already knew everything she had to know to be Arthur Elgort’s kind of model. And his nod was all she needed to leapfrog over all the other new faces at Wilhelmina and every other agency, and head for the Hollywood Board.

Several days later, the issue of
Ambiance
with Gia’s pictures hit the stands. The shots weren’t great, but they were good enough, and a tear sheet from a real job in a glossy magazine sometimes looked better in a model’s book than all the great photos in the world. But the pictures had already been eclipsed by the news—which the agency was circulating to anyone who would listen—that Elgort was hot on Gia. And in the next three weeks there would be so
many pictures taken that it would be hard to find room in her portfolio for the
Ambiance
shots. She was about to become the new darling of the Italian edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
, which was every photographer’s favorite magazine of the moment. There wasn’t another glossy fashion book in the world that was giving photographers as much freedom; the magazine didn’t seem to have any rules to break. Unlike other European magazines, Italian
Bazaar
had an office in New York, as well as Milan, and they didn’t care if the pictures didn’t appear to have been taken in Italy. Top photographers could work for them without leaving their Manhattan studios.

Elgort did the first pictures of Gia for
Bazaar.
Even though it was the end of May, they went outside to shoot tweed blazers and casual clothes for a fall preview story. The next day, Gia was sent to be seen by another of the magazine’s regular contributors, Chris von Wangenheim, the dark prince of fashion photography. Von Wangenheim, thirty-six, had left Germany and his high social position there—he was, technically, a baron—in the mid-sixties to settle in New York and pursue photography. But he had never put aside his fascination with strong, sometimes shocking, sexually charged images: Freudian nightmares realized. He could shoot standard fashion photos. But his best work showed the clothes, told a suggestive story and—perhaps more than the work of any other fashion photographer of the day-could almost be taken seriously as art. Although he had been shooting for major magazines and advertising clients since the late sixties, he was probably best known in America for a picture he had taken in 1976 for a Christian Dior jewelry ad.

The ad was not for the Paris-based House of Dior itself. It was part of the Your Dior campaign, a way for all the various firms with licenses to manufacture Dior-label products in America to appear as one company, with a slightly more approachable image than the French couture house. Von Wangenheim had been given nearly unprecedented freedom to make whatever pictures he liked for the campaign. Adman Gene Federico would then pick an appropriate adjective to complete the campaign slogan
“Blank
is Your Dior.”

The campaign had been controversial since Dior had refused to use the first ad: a Father’s Day shot of then eleven-year-old Brooke Shields made up like a woman and dressed only in a man’s white dress shirt, standing next to a male model cast to look like her father. They also later yanked the 1977 summer sunglasses ad with the model firing a pistol (“Explosive Is Your Dior”) because of the “Son of Sam” killings: its one appearance still merited lengthy commentary in the book
Terrorist Chic.
But the jewelry ad was still the one that elicited the most photographic nostalgia. For that one, Von Wangenheim had adorned model Lisa Taylor with a diamond bracelet, ring and earrings. Then he brought in a Doberman pinscher, clamped its jaws down on her wrist, and flashed the shot so the dog’s eyes glowed demonically red. “Fetching Is Your Dior.”

The Your Dior campaign had established Von Wangenheim visually in America. It became known for producing very edgy shots of very big models: one of the classic photos of Patti Hansen was the Your Dior shot of her in an evening dress and a fur, standing in front of a burning car. Von Wangenheim was another photographer who could single-handedly make a model’s career.

Von Wangenheim had a combined beauty and fashion feature to shoot for Italian
Bazaar
the next week. In all fashion magazines, beauty shots offered more freedom than fashion shots. With no clothes to show, just makeup products and hairstyles, there was a better chance that the magazines would accept a nude or an unorthodox pose. A beauty picture could be anything, as long as it fit someone’s definition of beautiful.

A location scout had suggested to Von Wangenheim that the top of the still-uncompleted Citicorp Building might be an interesting place to shoot. An assistant was sent over to “Polaroid” the location, and then arranged with the building’s management and security staff to do some shots there. After meeting her, Von Wangenheim decided to book Gia and another model, as well as bearded, Texas-born hairstylist Maury Hopson and first-name-only top makeup artist Ariella. On the first day of what turned into a tough three-day shoot, the four met at nine
A.M.
in the lower level of the Citicorp Building.

Upstairs, Von Wangenheim and his assistants were meeting with “the client”—twenty-seven-year-old Lizzette Kattan, Italian
Bazaar’s
one-woman fashion department and a big reason for the magazine’s popularity with top photographers. Born in Honduras, where her father was in the coffee business, Lizzette was raised in New York and became a Ford model in her late teens—working mostly in Europe during the early seventies, occasionally with Von Wangenheim.

After a solid but unremarkable modeling career, Lizzette became friendly with the owner of Italian
Bazaar
, who hired her to install the most forward fashion philosophy in the glossy magazine business, and commute between Milan and Manhattan. Besides her growing importance among
fashionistas
, who respected her taste and the sheer volume of high fashion jobs she had to dole out, Lizzette had industry cachet because she was often seen in the company of designer Calvin Klein. That coupling raised eyebrows for any number of reasons. Besides bitchy questions about Lizzette’s place in Klein’s bisexual social life, their relationship was also sometimes blamed for a feud between designer Giorgio Armani and Italian
Bazaar.
The magazine wouldn’t cover Armani’s shows and the designer refused to advertise in it: the never-proven reason was that someone high in the Armani organization was convinced that Kattan was somehow spying for Klein.

While Lizzette and Chris were upstairs looking at locations, Gia was having her face put on in a makeshift dressing room. Ariella sat Gia down and began the ritualized application of the layers of creams, bases, powders and pencils required for the beyond-perfect makeup jobs expected of fashion photographs. Because the bright lights washed out so much color, it took a great deal of makeup just to make a model look, on film, clean-scrubbed rather than stone-cold dead. To get strong features onto film, the makeup artist had to prime the model’s face like a canvas and paint new and improved features on top of the old ones. Because the dresses had bared shoulders and plunging necklines, the models’ shoulders, chests and backs had to be made-up as well.

“That whole process is just unbelievable,” recalled one
top model of the first time she was “done” by one of the top hair and makeup teams. “These people grab your hands and the next thing, they’re doing this manicure, and you don’t know
who
these people are. They are doing your face, they are doing your hair. You’ve got hands all over your body, you know. People are making up your tits and everything else you could think of.”

Because the hair and makeup people had to get nearly inside the girls to do their jobs, it wasn’t surprising that they were the ones who were most in touch with the gossip of the business. The world of fashion photography had no real trade paper of its own: it rarely even merited coverage in
WWD
or the new, mass-market weekly
W.
So information was circulated—with no standards of accuracy whatsoever—via magazine photo credits and morning makeup-room chatter. From there it was disseminated by telephone from photographer’s assistant to fashion editor’s assistant to model agency booker and back through the rest of the chat-cycle.

“It’s that whole army of hair and makeup people that sort of create reputations: that’s where everything is discussed, in the morning,” said photographer Mike Reinhardt, often the subject of more than his share of morning gossip. “The models sit there while they’re doing hair and makeup and talk about their boyfriends, about work, about the magazines, about what they’re doing, where they travel, who they see, what money they have.