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.”
There’s an intriguing image of Linda as Katharine Hepburn, which, it turns out, is almost accidental. “Starting with Blow Up, I have all these images from the movies in my head. It’s who I am, it’s part of me. But I wasn’t going for Katharine Hepburn. Maybe by the time we took the first Polaroids I said, ‘It kind of looks like Hepburn,’ but it wasn’t that we went in that day thinking, ‘Oh, we’re doing a Katharine Hepburn story.’” It reminded me of a particular style, and we went with that… but it wasn’t premeditated.”
Location has always been important for Steven and at this time nowhere more so than the wide hallways of the Ritz Paris. “I was obsessed with those wide hallways. Christy would be in one room. Linda would be in another. And then Madonna would be upstairs in the attic room. It was like a fun house.” Fun is an important part of his creative process – a feeling of play that allows him to create an environment with models. “It’s part of everything. We have to laugh. I mean I can focus on a dime when I need to, but I also need laughter and fun with everyone and that includes the client and the models and the whole team.”
This great, quintessentially Parisian hotel provided the perfect backdrop for Steven’s work with numerous models including Kristen McMenamy, who we find slumped on a sofa wearing just a hat or striking a sequence of exaggerated doll-like poses. “Kristen is another special one – there aren’t that many. She interpreted me straightaway. Half the time I didn’t even have to say anything to either her or Linda. By this time, I don’t know if she needed my guidance anymore because I had been working with her for a while. It was like she instinctively knew what to do. She loved to create. Now that I’m looking at the poses, it’s my body language but exaggerated because of her. Of course, I want to give Kristen the credit she deserves… but it’s also me.”
Steven, who is widely admired for his meticulous attention to detail, draws my attention to a small dog in his portrait of Isabella Blow. “That was in Paris. At a small café in an alleyway by the studios where I was working. That was Azzedine [Alaïa]’s dog so of course we used him in the pictures.”
Nineteen-ninety-three saw Meisel’s first professional assignment in London where he collaborated with Blow on “Anglo-Saxon Attitude”. It was Blow, too, who first introduced him to Stella Tennant. “She had no interest. She had never modelled before. It just wasn’t something that she wanted to do. Issie just gave me all these different pictures of society girls that she knew. And of course, I fell in love with Stella, everything about Stella. What an incredible model. She gave everything and I adored her. She would sit there reading books in Chinese. We took her to Paris to work on Versace with Linda and Kristen. And Stella was like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ It was Linda who said to her, ‘No, you’re great.’ And she really was.”
Steven’s remarkable year of 1993 included a 60-page feature on men’s fashion for Per Lui, and the A Coruña exhibition is punctuated with images that are unlike any other images of men made at the time. He coaches his men in the same way he works with women. The result is a group of images that are by turn innovative, warm, provocative and very often just great fun. Like Hamish Bowles riffing on Cecil Beaton’s 1920s images of the Bright Young Things. “I knew Hamish really well and this was organic. It was in his apartment and I just said, ‘Stand here by the window, just pose like this.’”
And with that, Steven disappears into the night, leaving a trail of stories and a collection of images that, as Marta Ortega Pérez says, “remind us that he is an exquisite artist – a true master of style.”
Steven Meisel 1993 A Year in Photographs is at A Coruña, Galicia, Spain, from 19 November to 1 May 2023
Steven Meisel1/7Hamish Bowles
The future World of Interiors editor-in-chief Hamish Bowles captured in his New York apartment. As Steven recalls, “I just said, ‘Stand here by the window, just pose like this.’”
Steven Meisel2/7Twiggy
Wearing a leopard-print coat found at Lower East Side vintage store O Mistress Mine, 1960s icon Twiggy was pictured on a New York stairwell, some 26 years after Steven first shot the model on her debut trip to the city.
Steven Meisel3/7Stella Tennant and Plum Sykes
Model Stella Tennant and fashion assistant (later author) Plum Sykes, appear in British Vogue’s story Anglo-Saxon Attitude. The former wears an Alexander McQueen dress with Vivienne Westwood heels and the latter a baby-blue mohair minidress by Jennifer Jones.
Steven Meisel4/7Kristen McMenamy
“He makes a girl feel like a million dollars,” Kristen McMenamy – here, the star of a March 1993 Vanity Fair profile that labelled her the “model of the moment” – told British Vogue in January this year. “You know, I fell in love with him back in the day.”
