Grace Coddington on How Fashion Changed After The September Issue

Grace Coddington Says Fashion Has Changed — and So Has She

Grace Coddington has spent decades building the kind of fashion images that made fantasy feel almost tangible. Now, with her new book Grace: Now, she’s looking back at the last 10 years of work — and admitting that her eye has taken a pretty major turn.

During a wonderfully loose conversation with Chloe Malle for The Run-Through with Vogue, Coddington gets into the making of the enormous yellow book, her changing relationship with fashion fantasy, the late Michael Roberts, Karen Elson, Annie Leibovitz, Anna Wintour and what she still believes makes a great fashion picture work.

Grace: Now gathers Coddington’s favorite shoots from the past decade across the pages of Vogue, W, Document, British Vogue, Italian Vogue and more. The book brings together work with 13 photographers and photographic duos, including Annie Leibovitz, Craig McDean, Steven Meisel, Rafael Pavarotti, David Sims, Paolo Roversi and Inez & Vinoodh.

Her selection process is still delightfully old-school. Coddington talks about collecting tear sheets, arranging miniature layouts on boards and eventually making a physical dummy book — basically treating the project the way a major magazine issue would once have been built. As she puts it, she “learned from the best.”

But the most interesting part is what she says the pictures reveal when placed together. The woman once synonymous with towering fashion fantasy — those huge, cinematic Vogue worlds that practically swallowed the page — now finds herself pulled toward something more immediate. Reportage. Streets. Clothes people can actually wear. Reality, but made beautiful.

Coddington says that shift was intentional. She no longer feels particularly interested in photographing giant fantasy clothes simply because they exist, and wonders whether the times themselves have changed the appetite for that kind of excess. The point isn’t to make fashion bleak. Quite the opposite: she still wants beauty, softness and joy — just without pretending the world around it hasn’t changed.

Gallery images: Vogue / The Run-Through video.

There’s also a much more personal layer running through the book. It opens with Coddington’s handwritten remembrance of Michael Roberts, her longtime friend and collaborator who had worked with her on previous books and her memoir. She explains that writing the tribute by hand made it feel as though she were speaking directly to him — and admits that making this book without his brutally honest final opinion hanging over her was difficult.

The conversation wanders exactly where you want a Grace Coddington conversation to wander. She remembers first meeting Karen Elson after Steven Meisel’s studio essentially told her, “you’re going to love this girl.” She talks about why fashion editors should still be physically involved on set instead of staring endlessly at a monitor, and why that hands-on connection with a model matters.

And yes, there are stories about Annie Leibovitz trying to cinch a dress Coddington absolutely did not want cinched, Coddington quietly undoing the clamps, and Annie ultimately getting the last word in retouching. Fashion history, but told the way it should be: slightly exasperated and very funny.

Naturally, The September Issue comes up too. The 2009 documentary made Coddington recognizable far beyond fashion circles and immortalized that push-and-pull with Anna Wintour. Looking back now, Coddington sees that era as a point before fashion shifted dramatically — when shows, clothes, magazines and the appetite for spectacle seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger.

Her answer today is almost the reverse: less noise, less excess, more humanity. Still beautiful. Still Grace. Just a different kind of picture.

Grace Coddington on Grace: Now, Fashion’s Shift and The September Issue

Watch Grace Coddington join Chloe Malle on The Run-Through with Vogue to discuss Grace: Now, her creative process and how her view of fashion has changed.

Source: Vogue / The Run-Through with Vogue.