For Grace Coddington, the best parties didn’t come with a proper guest list: Fashion shoots became dinners; then dinners drifted onto the dance floor. “When you went dancing, you were dancing. You didn’t go to be photographed dancing,” Coddington explains. “Perhaps the sign of a great party is that nobody thought to take a picture until it was over.” She was always more interested in what happened just before a party began, or after everyone else thought it had ended. This instinct to notice overlooked details has defined her career, first as an It girl model in Swinging Sixties London, then as one of fashion’s greatest editors. Across nearly five decades at British and American Vogue, she created many of fashion’s most indelible images with photographers including Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, and Peter Lindbergh. In 2016, she stepped down as American Vogue’s creative director and went freelance. Ever since, she’s followed her curiosity, with projects as diverse as creating two cat-centric Louis Vuitton collections with Nicolas Ghesquière and partnering with the Parisian ceramics house Astier de Villatte. This month, Coddington, 85, debuts Grace: Now, the latest volume in Phaidon’s career-spanning trilogy. Chronicling her decade as an independent creative, it includes many of her remarkable W collaborations. For all the social scenes she’s moved through, Coddington still prefers making the picture to making an entrance. “I was never very good at working a room,” she says. “I was much happier working on set.”
Coddington (right) and her sister, Rosemary, at the Trearddur Bay Hotel, in North Wales, “which my parents ran and is where we grew up. During World War II, American soldiers were billeted there. They brought us chocolate, which was rationed in Britain at the time, and then, before leaving, rather thoroughly trashed the place,” says Coddington.
“There were always strangers arriving and little dramas unfolding just beyond our private rooms. That was where I first learned that watching could be just as interesting as taking part.” Coddington and her sister “are wearing things knitted by our mother. Rosie was five years older than me and, as older sisters tend to be, wonderfully bossy.”
Coddington took her first model card in 1959. “I sent the photograph to a British Vogue model competition, and it changed my life.” She was thrust into London’s raucous Youthquake scene, appearing on magazine covers and gallivanting with Twiggy and the Rolling Stones. It’s often said that a 1961 car accident ended her modeling career, but that’s fashion folklore. After her recovery, she continued modeling until 1968, when she joined British Vogue.
Coddington modeling in an Yves Saint Laurent show in 1970. “By then, I was already a fashion editor, but I still occasionally found myself back on the runway,” says Coddington. “Shows felt much less like productions in those days and more like gatherings. This one took place at Maunkberry’s, a West London glitterati haunt. Everyone was packed in so tightly, you felt you might step straight into someone’s lap. We did rather more for ourselves then too, from doing our own hair and makeup to finding our way down whatever passed for a catwalk.”
Coddington with her first husband, the restaurateur Michael Chow, on their wedding day in 1968. “We were considered quite the It couple for a while, although that always amused me. Michael is standing on an apple box because he’s shorter than me.”
In 1969, Coddington assisted photographer Norman Parkinson on his official portrait of Prince Charles’s investiture, taken at Windsor Castle. “Parks thought Charles might arrive red-faced from playing polo, so he asked me to bring something to calm him down, visually at least. I had never done anyone’s makeup but my own, so I arrived with a tube of very heavy Pan Stik makeup and pretended I knew exactly what I was doing. The room was terribly hot, Charles was wearing fur, and the makeup began to streak, so Parks sent me back in with my powder puff. Charles was quite shy. When he said, ‘I suppose you do this all the time,’ I had to admit it was my first attempt.”
Around 1969, Coddington went to Jamaica for a photo shoot with Parkinson. “It was my first trip outside Europe as an editor. We were staying at one of those Caribbean hotels where men were expected to wear black tie despite the unbearable heat. As Parks was leaving for dinner, he suddenly said, ‘Come here. I’m going to teach you the Lindy Hop.’”
Coddington (right) is with British Vogue editor Beatrix Miller (left) in 1971, walking on the Rue de Castiglione, in Paris. “Bea hired me as a junior fashion editor and saw me through some very difficult times. She could be formidable, but she trusted the people she chose and gave me the space to find my own way. I’m not sure I would have become the editor I did without her,” says Coddington. As for her outfit, “I made the skirt myself, and I was wearing the white hat because I was growing out my hair and trying to hide it.”
With her second husband, photographer Willie Christie, “at a friend’s house in Devon [England] after riding there on a motorcycle during my brief Harley-Davidson biker girl phase! We weren’t married yet. This is one of the very few photographs you’ll ever find of me in denim—never mind a denim miniskirt.”
Coddington in Paris in 1972 with photographer Eric Boman, captured by his partner, the artist and photographer Peter Schlesinger. “They were both true bons vivants, but never in a showy way. There was something quietly magnetic about being around them,” says Coddington. “Eric was impossibly good-looking and wonderfully funny, as you can see by my expression here. Some of the best moments happened before or after the shows and shoots, in those quieter hours, simply walking and sharing secrets and gossip with friends.”
Coddington and fashion photographer David Bailey in Venice attending Walter Albini’s fall 1973–74 show. “It looks rather like a paparazzi photograph, which always makes me laugh because nobody was chasing us. Albini was a superstar maverick and one of my favorite designers. For a time, I wore almost nothing but his clothes and wonderful hats, which were always an important part of the look,” says Coddington. “The Venice show was prescient, taking fashion out of the salon and into one of the city’s most beautiful cafés. It would be decades before destination shows and presenting clothes in unexpected places became the norm.”
“This behind-the-scenes photograph was taken in 1973 during a British Vogue shoot at Helmut Newton’s small stone house in Ramatuelle, in the South of France, after a fabulous dinner,” says Coddington. “That’s me on Helmut’s lap with [from left] Manolo Blahnik, Anjelica Huston, and David Bailey. Bailey had recently split from Jean Shrimpton, and while Jack Nicholson was away filming The Passenger, Anjelica had a quick affair with Bailey, which she later portrayed in her memoir as something of a tit-for-tat for Jack’s own infidelities. I had a little crush on Bailey myself, though he always seemed to have a harem of beautiful women around him.”
“Some fashion shoots felt more like parties than work, and ‘Limelight Nights,’ photographed in 1973 by Helmut Newton at the pool of the Hotel Byblos in Saint-Tropez, was certainly one of them,” says Coddington of the photo above. Though she was on the shoot as an editor, “Helmut looked at the eveningwear I had brought to style and declared, ‘These are really terrible fucking clothes,’ so he decided to put me in the picture wearing a bikini and use the party as the background.”
During the “Limelight Nights” shoot, Newton photographed Coddington alone by the pool.
“Years later, I turned the picture into a drawing for my very first Instagram post to promote a charity auction of nude pictures. I drew myself topless, and Instagram promptly removed the post for indecency and shut me down.”
“I later redrew the picture with a cat in my place, sensibly giving her a bikini. I incorporated the image into a print for my recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton.”
Coddington’s style has continually evolved. In the late 1970s, “I went through a very serious Yves Saint Laurent period and regularly dressed almost head to toe in his clothes,” she says.
Around 1980, there was her version of Studio 54: “smoking, wearing metallic tights, and looking far more louche than I really was.”
Then, in the mid-1980s, as an editor at British Vogue, she wore a lot of Calvin Klein. “Not long afterward, I moved to New York to join the company. Calvin believed in stripping everything back to its essence, and my time there taught me that simplicity is often much harder than decoration.” In 1988, she left Calvin Klein to work at American Vogue.
Coddington in Texas in the late ’90s with photographer Arthur Elgort for a shoot. “I have no idea what prompted this particular impromptu twirl, except that with Arthur there was always jumping, dancing, and music. He also traveled with a trumpet and would play jazz in his hotel room at night, with pot smoke drifting out under the door. Working with him never felt solemn, even when we were making serious pictures.”
For Coddington’s 50th birthday, in 1991, Anna Wintour threw her a party at Indochine. “As you age, the guest list at a birthday party becomes a bit of a map of one’s life, with editors, photographers, models, and friends all in one room,” she says. “I’d never separated collaborators from friends very neatly. We’d already spent hours together on planes, in vans—waiting for the light, arguing over one shoe, and trying to make something work when everything had gone wrong.”
“At my 50th birthday, the cake was the size of a small table, with my face piped across the top in icing. Anna [Wintour] thought it looked nothing like me—because it didn’t—so she took off her now-signature sunglasses and pushed them straight into the cake. It instantly looked much better. It was a very Anna edit: immediate, decisive, and accomplished without consulting a committee,” says Coddington. “Then a salsa band started playing. I remember Elizabeth Saltzman, Candy Pratts Price, Arthur Elgort, Raúl Martinez, and Anna dancing wildly, which people never quite believe.”
Coddington with her partner, the hairstylist Didier Malige, at American Vogue’s 100th-anniversary celebration at the New York Public Library, in 1992. “Didier has been my partner since the early 1980s, and we spent most of our lives in studios and on location, both together and separately. So it was nice to clean up for an evening,” says Coddington. “The photograph was taken by Marina Schiano, who had been one of Yves Saint Laurent’s muses before becoming a PR maven, socialite, and ultimately Vanity Fair’s creative style director. She always seemed to have a camera, a great story, and everyone in New York on speed dial.”
Coddington frolicking around the English countryside while on a shoot with Malige in 1981. “At the time, love wasn’t exactly in the air, despite what this image of me dreamily fluttering about in my Kenzo outfit might suggest. I was the fashion editor, he was doing the hair, and we spent years making stories before either of us imagined we’d end up together,” she says. The pair began dating around 1983 and have been partners, on set and off, ever since. “He’s been cutting my hair all these years too. Didier always says, ‘Even if we’re not together anymore, I’ll still do your hair.’”
Coddington at a mid-2000s Met Gala with Edward Enninful, who would go on to work at W and become the editor in chief of British Vogue. “The Met felt quite different then. It was still very grand, but more like a private fashion party than a global broadcast. There were mostly flip phones and BlackBerrys, and no influencers in sight. Influence happened in the room and traveled by word of mouth, which I rather miss.”
When Coddington wore silk Michael Kors pajamas to the 2015 Met Gala, “many people assumed I was making some sort of rebellious fashion statement. The truth was much more pragmatic: I had to leave the Met early and go straight to JFK for an overnight flight to the South of France for a shoot with Peter Lindbergh, Natalia Vodianova, and Adrien Brody. Michael had designed the pajamas for the young Vogue team helping guests that evening. By the time everyone else was heading to the afterparties, I was sitting in the Delta lounge waiting to board.”
After receiving copies of her latest book, Coddington had her friend the photographer Craig McDean snap a photo of her with it. “Craig has been one of my closest collaborators and friends over the past decade. We seem to share the same visual language, although we disagree just enough to keep things interesting. Naturally, he is featured heavily in the book. The yellow cover was inspired by the trusty Smythson diary I carry everywhere. After all the parties, photographs, and fashion shows, the work is still the thing that matters most.”
