1972projects

[1972projects]

The Replacement Girl 8/90. Baker, Fred. Havana, 1953. 

Clustered round the mothership that was midcentury Vogue were a battalion of satellite publications, providing everything from beauty tips to knitting patterns. The Pattern Books were, in their time, particularly popular; starting out as a coupon service offered to readers of the main magazine in 1905, they blossomed into standalone titles after World War I, offering patterns that ranged from simple sportswear separates and children swear to Parisian couture copies. They came complete with their own editorial and photographic teams — amongst them Fred Baker, a Nebraskan-born photographer who’d been under contract at Condé Nast since the Thirties. By the early Fifties, he’d branched out with three other staffers (Constantin Joffé, Herbert Matter and Serge Balkin) to found a commercial photography firm, Studio Associates, based in the old House & Garden studios on 37th Street. But he continued to shoot biannual sewing and knitting editorials for editor Ruth Seder Cooke.

In the spring of 1953, Baker and Cooke booked Mullen and Mary Jane Russell for that season’s Pattern Book shoot. The team flew to Havana, where they photographed sleek summer knits and lightweight poolside separates in the grounds of the Hotel Nacional, an elaborate Twenties cocktail of Renaissance, Art Deco and Moorish styles perched on a hill overlooking the city’s harbour. In the most memorable image from the shoot, which appeared in Vogue itself that June, Baker posed the two models leaning against the swirling architecture of the hotel’s wraparound terrace. Wearing a simple, polka-dotted shift, Russell faces Baker’s camera with a steady gaze. But Mullen, with the wind ruffling her hair and her slim linen sheath adrift in clouds of DuPont nylon, seems lost in a dream. #BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #Unbound #DuPont #Vogue #FredBaker #1953

[1972projects]

The Replacement Girl 7/90. Avedon, Richard. Manhattan, 1950. 

A midcentury model’s portfolio was a simple affair — in Mullen’s case, just a slim manila folder with her name and that of the Ford Agency neatly handwritten on the cover. Inside, past a white page across which she’d scribbled ‘À retourner, please’, lay a handful of clippings showing her remarkable range; dewy and doe-eyed for Scavullo, introspective in a Bill Klein Vogue Paris spread, and alluringly sophisticated in a 1950 Bazaar editorial shot by Dick Avedon. 

‘You have to make them feel beautiful.’ Avedon once said, talking about the models of Mullen’s generation. And Mullen clearly felt beautiful in the Bazaar shot, cast as a ruby-lipped 20th century Eve, skin glowing and limbs unfurling from a navy velvet Nelly de Grab bodice to tempt the male model with a lit cigarette. ‘The woman inside the clothes may look joyous, wistful, lonely, arrogant, bored, expectant, surprised, annoyed,’ Winthrop Sergeant wrote in a 1958 New Yorker profile of Avedon ‘—she may even weep, though weeping models have not been particularly popular with the editors of Harper’s Bazaar . . . she invariably seems to have been caught unawares by the camera at some evanescent moment, and everything about her expression and bearing suggests a drama beginning long before and concluding long after the click of the shutter.’ Avedon would become one of Mullen’s most loyal supporters, shooting four out of her five Bazaar covers, and booking her for lucrative ad campaign work as well as high-profile editorials. She came alive for his camera — whether rapt and dreamy in a fairytale Bergdorf Goodman ballgown, or wreaking havoc in a TV studio in a sleek trouser suit. They shared an affectionate, teasing relationship that would stretch across the decades; when the Met curated a retrospective of his work in 2000, Avedon sent Mullen a poster covered with an energetic, exasperated scrawl; ‘Barbara. This is an order! You must be at our opening. The Met Museum. Dick.’ 

#BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #Unbound #NellyDeGrab #Revlon #HarpersBazaar #RichardAvedon #1950.

[1972projects]

The Replacement Girl 6/90. Arsac, Guy. Paris, 1957.

  When Barbara Mullen moved to Paris in the mid-Fifties, she was faced with starting her career over again in a new country, and finding a place for herself within a new modelling hierarchy. Just as Manhattan had its Seventh Avenue showroom models, Paris had hundreds of rank-and-file mannequins, ensconced at the various couture cabinet in the 1st and 8th arrondissements. And it already had a cluster of big names — Bettina Graziani, Sophie Malgat, Capucine, Marie-Hélène Arnaud — who’d all risen from those cabines to front-page stardom. It was only to be expected, of course, that visiting American magazines would gravitate towards the safety of an experienced New York name, just as they did with fellow expats Suzy Parker, Ivy Nicholson and Dorian Leigh; apart from anything else, not having to fly in models from Manhattan meant a substantial saving on costs. But right from the outset, Mullen was kept just as busy by homegrown photographers. Amongst them was Guy Arsac, a successful freelancer whose work appeared regularly in Vogue and Elle, and who booked her in the summer of 1957 to shoot the season’s couture collections for L'Officiel de la Mode. It wasn't a particularly vintage year in French fashion; Dior’s New Look was now a decade old, and younger rivals like Cardin were still finding their feet. But Mullen got to model some of the season’s most beautiful evening gowns - including a dramatic swirl of pale blue silk crepe, created by the embroiders at Lesage for Jacques Griffe. 

For added spice, Arsac photographed Mullen at the already-notorious Crazy Horse Saloon, the Wild-West themed burlesque club Alain Bernardin had opened in an Avenue George V cellar a few doors away from Balenciaga, complete with waiters dressed as cowboys and a doorman in Mountie uniform. Arsac wasn’t alone in his quest to add a touch of danger to the season’s shoots; the same month, Dick Avedon shot Suzy Parker in the same Griffe dress, floating through the Moulin Rouge, colliding a beautiful dress with a suggestive dash of naughtiness a la francaise. 

#BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #LOfficiel #GuyArsac #JacquesGriffe #1957

[1972projects]

The Replacement Girl 5/90. Arbus, Diane & Allan. Manhattan, 1954.

"I hate fashion photography,” Diane Arbus declared, “because the clothes don’t belong to the people who are wearing them. When the clothes do belong to the person wearing them, they take on a person's flaws and characteristics, and are wonderful.” But that was later, after Arbus had carved out a new reputation by zoning in on the flaws of mid-century Manhattan's misfits, and long after she’d extricated herself from the ‘Diane and Allan Arbus’ strapline - a line stamped across regular magazine editorials from 1946 to 1956, and backed up by a thin but steady stream of commercial work (including the account for Russeks, the lavish fur store on Fifth and West 36th which was owned by Diane’s father, and where the couple had first met as teenagers when Allan came to work in the ad department). Arbus, like Stephens Sondheim and Lois Gould, grew up in a world of garment-industry privilege. And after she married Allan, with backing from Vogue’s Alex Liberman and Glamour’s Tina Fredericks, the couple gradually forged a name for themselves in Manhattan’s crowded fashion photography scene.

The Arbuses were known for their elaborately-staged, multiple-model set-ups. In early 1954,though, for Vogue’s ‘The News on the Dot’, they kept things simple and graphic. ‘If anyone should decide to design an American fashion flag this year,’ the accompanying copy cooed, ‘it would probably be polka-dotted, navy-blue and white, and shaped as the wind blows.’ The Arbuses posed Cherry Nelms and Evelyn Tripp in long, white-spotted dresses by Harvey Berin and Mollie Parnis, shot in long-exposure frames so that the accompanying male model disappeared into a blur — and, in a small, tight crop in the upper corner of the spread, a photograph of Barbara Mullen, in a spotted silk Bergdorf Goodman turban inspired by Givenchy’s latest collection. Mullen looks amused, as most models confronted by the Arbuses’ intimate, secretive working dynamic were — as though what was happening off camera was infinitely more interesting than anything caught in the frame. #BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #DianeArbus #AllanArbus #Vogue #1954

[1972projects]

The Replacement Girl, 4/90 Amstutz, Gerry. Zurich, 2012.

“Oh . . . my . . . GOD!” Barbara groaned when she saw this picture, and flipped the page over. “What the hell do I look like?” She rolled her eyes and tutted, half-laughing, pulling her skin back to sit taut against her cheekbones. But after a few seconds she stopped and turned the page back, skimming her hands across the paper. “But, no. Actually . . . you know what, it’s right to have this picture in here — for people to see all of it, the whole thing.” The ‘whole thing’ was a catalogue I’d put together for Mullen’s 90th birthday, drawn from the thousands of pictures she’d had taken across her life. There was little from her early life — just a scattering of faded childhood photos with forgotten cousins and complaisant dogs, and a couple of endearingly gawky teenage portraits. And then, from late 1947, a flood that carried on unabated for the best part of twenty years, before dwindling away back into nothing. 

After the early Sixties, the intervals between pictures began to stretch longer, from days to years to decades; trips abroad with friends, family reunions, the occasional portrait for local newspapers and magazines. And then there was the picture The Observer had used in the first piece I’d published about Mullen, in the summer of 2013. It had been taken a year earlier by Swiss photographer Gerry Amstutz, in the leafy garden of Mullen’s Zurich home, six decades after she’d walked away from a life lived in the camera’s cross-hairs; six decades during which she’d had plenty of time to rehearse the role of ‘former top model’ — and to slip back into model mode, on request, twisting her face and arching her eyebrows to fix the lens with amusement and defiance; ‘This is it.’ 

#BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #GerryAmstutz #TheObserver #2012

[1972projects]

3/90. Abbe, Kathryn. Manhattan, 1948. There was an extraordinary gracefulness about the way Kathryn and Frances McLaughlin’s lives and careers reflected and refracted each other across the decades. Born in Brooklyn in 1919, the twin sisters studied art and design at the Pratt Institute (where they both became fascinated by the school’s photo lab in their second year), and then both made it to the finals of Vogue’s annual Prix de Paris contest in 1941. But whilst Frances became the first woman photographer to be given a Vogue contract, Kathryn stayed freelance — assisting Toni Frissell for two years before branching out on her own, marrying James Abbe Jr, and shooting from their shared studio at 572 Madison Avenue. She shot for a broad roster of publications, ranging from new arrivals like Charm and Mademoiselle to stalwarts like Good Housekeeping — where, in the summer of 1948, shortly before she had her first child, she shot a 21-year-old Mullen. Heading beauty editor Ruth Murrin's regular advice section, the image presided over a page that sternly admonished its readers to remember that ‘fifty percent of good looks is plain good grooming.’ Frances McLaughlin famously defined her photography the art of capturing the ‘moment passing.’ But where McLaughlin was fascinated by motion and gesture, Kathryn Abbe focused on the stillness and serenity of the captured moment itself. That may, in part, have come from the nature of fashion photography in those first decades, when cumbersome cameras and long exposure times meant that models had to perfect the art of holding each position for long, agonising seconds. In the photograph, you can almost see Mullen waiting for the signal to drop the pose; torso tense and stretched, shoulders bared in a long Filcol dress that folds softly to the floor, her breath straining to release. #BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #Unbound #KathrynAbbe #GoodHousekeeping #1949

[1972projects]

2/90. Abbe, James (Jr). Manhattan, 1949. Barbara Mullen was a Cosmo Girl, decades before Helen Gurley Brown cooked up the idea. In the summer of 1949, the young model would have been an obvious choice for the magazine to feature — a glamorous career woman, with an interesting job and a seen-it-all, well-travelled attitude (on the strength of one road-trip to Los Angeles, and her recent Paris couture shoot with Lillian Bassman). Mullen wrote (or at least, was credited with) a 4-page piece for the magazine, suggesting a capsule girl-on-the-go wardrobe furnished by Peck & Peck, a Fifth Avenue manufacturing house that then had stores all across the US. ‘It’s the most light-minded collection of budgeted fashions I’ve seen . . .’ she assured readers, ‘And believe me, the man power photographed below (an unlikely fashion advisory panel formed of actors Montgomery Clift and Peter Lawford and Broadway star Ezio Pinza) convinced me it has glamour.’ With its breezy, confidential tone, it’s actually one of the most ‘Cosmo’-feeling pieces in a magazine that at the time was still searching for its spot in a crowded publishing market; elsewhere, the issue veers from racy serials and Louella Parsons-penned gossip to W. Somerset Maugham excerpts and Ethel Merman’s no-nonsense party tips ('I found out a long time ago that it is still possible for a group of people, thrown into contact with a fair amount of refreshment and with each other, to have good time without the aid of geisha girls, bingo or artificial respiration.’) And, as it's 1949, there's terrifying advertising — like Lysol’s cautionary tale; ('Frozen by unsureness, wives may lose love . . through one intimate physical neglect . . .') The accompanying pictures were taken by James Abbe Jr, a successful photographer who’d started out by assisting his famous father - a pioneering photojournalist best known for his portraits of Hollywood stars and dictators. Abbe Jr had an easy, uncluttered style, and shot Mullen in relaxed motion - kneeling, swirling her coat, or turned, cigarette in hand, to answer an invisible actor lurking out-of-shot.

#BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl#Cosmopolitan #JamesAbbeJr #1949

[1972projects]

1/90. Aarons, Slim. Klosters, 1963.

Today, Barbara Mullen is 90. She’s an extraordinary woman who’s lived an extraordinary life — from a childhood in Depression-era Harlem, to success as one of the world’s top models, to starting over in Paris at a time when her contemporaries were retiring, to having a glamorous retirement of her own in Klosters during the resort’s Hollywood-goes-to-the-Alps heyday. Her adaptable features helped to reshape fashion’s definition of beauty, in images which have endured across the decades. Along the way she’s shared dressing rooms with Monroe, been led astray in Paris by Dior, played hostess to Princess Margaret, and turned down a job with Chanel. So, today, after four years of research (and more false starts than I care to remember) we’ve launched a campaign to publish her story. I’ll be sharing a picture of Barbara each day for the next 90 days, by 90 different photographers. First is Slim Aarons, who photographed her in Klosters in 1963. By then, Barbara’s first career, and first life — as one of the world’s most in-demand models, complete with picture-perfect Long Island marriage — had ended in heartbreak. She escaped to Europe, where she became one of the linchpins of fellow model Dorian Leigh’s new agency. But by the winter of 1957 she was unhappy, and exhausted. Never one to sugar-coat the truth, Dorian told her she looked awful, and packed her off to Klosters to recharge. The trip changed Barbara’s life; she fell in love with Fredi Morel, a local student drafted in to teach her to ski when his father fell ill. She moved to Klosters full-time, and opened a successful fashion boutique there. But from time to time, photographers still came to her - like Aarons, in town that season to practice his much-quoted mantra of shooting “attractive people in attractive places doing attractive things”. He shot Barbara outdoors - tanned, dishevelled, clutching skis and wearing one of the oversized Klosters sweatshirts that sold so well in her boutique. It was a relaxed, throwaway snap, which at some point in its afterlife was fancifully re-titled 'Ski Siren' #BarbaraMullen #TheReplacementGirl #Unbound #SlimAarons #Klosters #1963

[1972projects]

THE HANGOVER - Hollywood’s Morning After

Faye Dunaway at the Beverly Hills Hotel | Terry O’Neill, 1977

Winning never looked so lonely.

Exterior, early morning. Newspapers, scattered across an empty pool terrace. A solitary woman, slumped in a lounge chair, stares bleakly past the Oscar statuette on the table by her side.

If the set-up feels like a movie mise-en-scène, then that’s quite probably how the participants intended it. In the run up the 1977 Oscars, Faye Dunaway had quickly emerged as Best Actress front-runner for her dazzling turn as Diana, the mercenary TV executive in Sidney Lumet’s Network. Up against Liv Ullmann, Sissy Spacek, Talia Shire and Marie-Christine Barrault, she didn’t have high expectations: she’d been nominated, and lost, twice before (to Katharine Hepburn in 1967, and then to Ellen Burstyn in 1974). 

And Dunaway had never won anything, really; had always been the runner-up, the second choice, the understudy - ever since she’d placed an unspectacular second in the Miss University of Florida pageant back in 1959. She wasn’t even been the automatic choice for Network: as with Chinatown, the role was a cast-off from Jane Fonda. On the night, standing on stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in her loose Geoffrey Beene two-piece, her acceptance speech started equivocally: “Well, I didn’t expect this to happen quite yet …”

Dunaway and photographer Terry O’Neill had first met six years earlier, on the set of the revisionist Western Doc in Spain: then, Dunaway had been nearing the end of a relationship with Marcello Mastroianni. In January of 1977, with Dunaway now married to musician Peter Wolf, they’d crossed paths again. This time the meeting was at the actress’ home in Boston, where O’Neill shot her for a People cover story which hit newsstands on the morning of the Oscars, headlined Will She Win The Big O? 

As the buzz had grown around Dunaway in the weeks after the nominations were announced, several photographers had approached her to pitch ideas a victory shot. But a few days beforehand, she’d agreed to go with O’Neill’s idea of a morning-after shot to run alongside a Michael Parkinson interview in the Sunday Times - capturing, not the moment of victory, but the reality of its aftermath. Photographed poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel (where Dunaway, and Wolf, and half of Hollywood, were staying that week), and wearing a copy of the satin monogrammed bathrobe she���d famously worn as Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown, she was triumphant and abandoned: a queen, but of an empty kingdom.

It was the end of an extraordinary month in Hollywood. 1977, in several ways, represented a significant changing of the guard between generations. The city’s silver screen legends - Mae West, Bob Hope, Mitzi Gaynor, Loretta Young - were still about, in some force. But the new generation (Nicholson, Hopper, Rowlands, Cassavetes, plus second-generation stars like Jane Fonda or Anjelica Huston) were becoming increasingly dominant. There was an influx of European stars, like Jeanne Moreau (recently married to William Friedkin, the man responsible for directing the Oscars that year), Lina Wertmuller and Isabelle Huppert - and an ambitious Austrian bodybuilder called Arnold Schwarzenegger, who against all odds had won Best Newcomer at the Golden Globes that January. And there were the bystanders and onlookers - Diana Vreeland and her granddaughter Phoebe, sports star Joe Namath, singer Tom Jones.

They had plenty to talk about. Not just the Oscar nominations themselves (a notably eclectic line-up, with another outsider - the boxing movie Rocky, written by and starring a cocky New Yorker called Sylvester Stallone - tying with Network for 10 nominations. (An eclectic list, but not a diverse one: on the night, demonstrators outside the pavilion would protest against the absence of black nominees - whilst inside, co-host Richard Pryor delivered a monologue starting “I am here tonight to explain why black people will never be nominated for anything...") There was drama over the ceremony itself, which Friedkin had stripped back to basics: “People said the Oscars would never survive without Bob Hope.” designer Bob Mackie said, after quitting the show in protest. “Now let’s see if they can survive without glamour.” 

Down the coast, at a secluded beachfront house in Monarch Bay, disgraced former president Richard Nixon was locked in a tense series of interviews with David Frost (whilst the film about the investigation which had precipitated his undoing, All The President’s Men, kept his activities in the headlines). Andy Warhol was in town, celebrating what would be his final film -  Jed Johnson’s Bad. And to top it all, two weeks earlier, Roman Polanski had been arrested in the lobby of the Beverley Wiltshire  on suspicion of rape, sodomy, child molestation and giving dangerous drugs to a minor. The incident had taken place at Jack Nicholson’s house off Mulholland Drive: Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s on again/off again girlfriend, was caught up in the aftershock, arraigned on possession charges after police found cocaine at the property. On the night of the Oscars themselves, despite Friedkin’s best efforts, the show had overrun. The Governor’s Ball, a black-and-white spectacle held at the Hilton, had gone on till the small hours of the morning. Dunaway’s two-piece had been swapped for the t-shirt her husband had made up for her, screen-printed with the words: ALL THE WAY WITH FAYE. Even on the night, though, her victory hadn’t been the big story - that honour had been split between Stallone, who’d lost Best Actor (“If it’s not this year, it will be next year.” he’d told reporters bullishly backstage), and Peter Finch, who’d posthumously won. (Finch had dropped dead in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hilton two months before).

But for now, at least in front of O’Neill’s lens, Dunaway was the undisputed star of the show. She’d just signed a deal to star in Jon Peters’ The Eyes of Laura Mars, and her fee had gone up to a million dollars a movie. In the shot the Times eventually used - not the one which has gone down in history - the breakfast tray and dressing gown have gone. The actress sits bolt-upright and wary, in a cream trouser suit and heels, clutching Walker Percy’s 1971 satire, Love In The Ruins. In the middle of her autobiography, Looking for Gatsby, Dunaway recalls the shoot: ‘It looks to be just after sunrise, but thankfully it was shot much later in the day.’ 

But by then, the ‘morning after’ shot had already become entrenched in Hollywood myth. And by then, no-one was paying much attention to Dunaway any more. After Network, she’d struggled to maintain momentum: The Eyes of Laura Mars was followed by movies like Mommie Dearest and Supergirl, which pushed her further and further into caricature. Her reputation as a difficult, often volatile collaborator worse and worse. In 2003, O’Neill came forward to admit that the Liam, the son they’d had together 20 years earlier, was adopted. So if Dunaway could fudge the truth on that, why should she be any more reliable on the time of day a photograph was taken?

But the shadows give it away. Look up to the top third of the frame. Just along the left hand rim, there are long, low slices of light and shade cutting into the side range of the Beverly Hills Hotel. That light is cast from over the boundary wall with Hartford Way, as it spills across Sunset Boulevard and into Rodeo Drive; light which was coming not from the morning east, but from the west, where the sun was lowering into a Pacific horizon. 

Roman Polanski had spent the day somewhere out in that western light, in a Santa Monica courtroom. His alleged victim had testified a few days earlier, and the proceedings which would soon lead to his permanent departure from the US were underway. In a surreal twist, a horde of teenage schoolgirls had found out his location, and chased him through the building with their autograph books. (In another, sadder twist, Manson Family member Leslie Van Houten was also in the courthouse that day, applying for one of many appeals to have her conviction for her part in the death of Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, overturned). 

On Oscar night itself, Polanski’s name hadn’t been mentioned (although beforehand, an agent had made the bizarre suggestion of teaming him up with child star Tatum O’Neal to present an award). The film he’d been preparing for, The First Deadly Sin, went into a long production limbo. Anjelica Huston moved out of Nicholson’s home, and in with Ryan O’Neal: Nicholson tersely told reporters he’d be ensuring that no visitors would use his property again. And for now, the rest of Hollywood closed ranks. 

But something had been broken. New Hollywood - independent, challenging, provocative - was irretrievably damaged. The coming decade would see that independence replaced by nostalgia and gung-ho patriotism, by PG-rated franchises like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. And Dunaway’s gaze was east, away from all of that. She and Polanski had never got on particularly well; he'd cheerfully labelled her a ‘gigantic pain in the ass’, and the Chinatown shoot had been a deeply bruising experience. And the papers surrounding her in O'Neill's set-up had to be carefully folded to focus on the Oscars. Like it or not, the day’s headlines belonged to Polanski, not her. The world had already moved on. Dunaway's moment in the sun, like the day itself, was almost over. Darrach, Brad Will She Win The Big O?, People Magazine, 1977 http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20067582,00.html Dunaway, Faye Looking for Gatsby: My Life, 1998 (with Betsy Sharkey) http://www.worldcat.org/title/looking-for-gatsby-my-life/oclc/32970016&referer=brief_results Hunter, Allan Faye Dunaway, 1986 http://www.worldcat.org/title/faye-dunaway/oclc/13643667&referer=brief_results Jacobs, Jody Kiernan, Thomas Repulsion: The Life and Times of Roman Polanski, 1981 http://www.worldcat.org/title/repulsion-the-life-and-times-of-roman-polanski/oclc/16564253&referer=brief_results Kilday, Gregg Outtakes from an Oscarcast, The Los Angeles Times, 1977 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes Morrison, James Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s, 2010 http://www.worldcat.org/title/hollywood-reborn-movie-stars-of-the-1970s/oclc/659579856&referer=brief_results Parkinson, Michael Faye as a Runaway, The Sunday Times Magazine, 1977 Rose, George Hollywood, Beverly Hills & Other Perversities: Pop Culture of the 1970s and 1980s, 2008 http://www.worldcat.org/title/hollywood-beverly-hills-other-perversities-pop-culture-of-the-1970s-and-1980s/oclc/190621292&referer=brief_results Zenovich, Marina Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired http://www.imdb.co.uk/title/tt1157705/

Faye Dunaway at the Beverly Hills Hotel | Contact Sheet, Terry O’Neill, 1977

[1972projects]

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BOY

Ten Years of Fashion East’s MAN

A Craig Green model backstage at the Sorting Office, 7th January 2013 © Rebecca Thomas/Fashion East

Late one September evening, ten years ago, the pavement outside Brick Lane’s Truman Brewery filled up with people waiting for the last show of London Fashion Week. Nothing unusual about that, in the city whose fashion weeks have turned passive-aggressive queueing an art-form - bar the fact that, this time, the crowd were lining up to watch a menswear show.

‘The idea came into my head whilst watching the Central Saint Martins M.A. show that February,' Lulu Kennedy - founder of Fashion East, the support scheme which had already been working with the capital’s young womenswear designers for several seasons - explains. 'I was like, ‘Why is no one supporting this incredible menswear talent in London?’ So I approached Topman to be our partner, and by September we were doing our first show together. It really was as simple as that.' ‘Lulu mentioned that she'd seen so many great graduating menswear collections that year,' Topman’s Gordon Richardson continues, 'and we unanimously agreed we couldn’t let those designers fade into anonymity.' Kennedy and Richardson were tapping into a new sense of energy in London menswear. Adventurous stores like Dover Street Market, bStore, Oki-Ni and The Pineal Eye had begun to open doors for the city’s young designers; the resurgent clubland scene was in the middle of spawning an exuberant new aesthetic; the first generation of menswear bloggers were starting to emerge, eager to anoint their own new fashion heroes; and new magazines like GQ Style and Another Man, both launched that same month, heralded what would become an extraordinary print media renaissance. It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to do something about promoting London’s menswear; Fifty-five years earlier, almost to the day, a band of brands led by Aquascutum had launched a men’s fashion showcase at the Savoy, held under the banner of the British Menswear Guild; and in the late Nineties, a short-lived London Men’s Fashion Week championed a wave of successful contemporary labels like Katharine Hamnett, Burro and Designworks. But each time, the promised menswear golden age failed to materialise - and so, whilst Simons, Slimane and Lang were producing provocative, challenging, acclaimed men’s fashion in Paris and New York, British designers - quite literally - had nowhere to go. ‘There really was no place to show menswear in London,’ says Siv Støldal, one of the three designers who took part in that first event. ‘I used to show my collections off the womenswear schedule, or as part of gallery exhibitions, outside of the calendar altogether. I can’t remember if I was invited or if I applied to take part, but I remember I was completely blown away by the opportunity.’  For Patrick Söderstam, who also showed that night, it came about more casually. ‘My PR at the time, Mandi Lennard, told me that the people who organised [MAN] were interested in me doing it. I’d put together a collection that I’d been working on  for some time, without any intention of selling or producing – I was just realising ideas.’ That first season set the template for the decade that followed; unplanned, uneven, and brilliantly unpredictable. Söderstam sent out colourful polka-dot ruffles, supersized jackets and paint streaked jeans; Benjamin Kirchhoff teamed dishevelled knits and baggy tailoring with jelly sandals; whilst Støldal, the most established of the three, showed thoughtfully luxurious sportswear and inflatable shirts. ‘I was working with the stylist Thom Murphy at the time,’ she remembers, ‘and he went around the East End hiring all these boys from boxing gyms. Two of the best boys were only sixteen, but were already wearing electronic ankle bracelets; they each had a policeman following them everywhere - to the studio fittings, hanging out backstage. It was quite intense; I remember one of them threatening to kill the hairdresser if he fucked up his hair . . .’ ‘I remember being quite stressed backstage,’ Söderstam reflects, ‘while my friends were smoking weed with the other models. I remember the people who did the music for the show [Swedish electro band Revl9n] played the wrong track, they were supposed to play a more hardcore version. And I remember Mandi saying that she didn’t like the trashy old sneakers I had the models wearing - and I remember thinking she was fucking wrong.’ As it turned out, the show was a runaway success. The next day, Opening Ceremony called, wanting to buy Støldal’s inflatable pieces, and Söderstam had interest from Barneys New York. ‘If I’d been looking for a career in the fashion business, the show might have had a big impact.’ he concedes. But he wasn’t, and it didn’t; he returned to Sweden, where he became a university lecturer. Kirchhoff also discontinued his menswear, switching focus to womenswear and triumphantly re-emerging under the Meadham Kirchhoff banner. Only Støldal carried on, becoming the first of 12 designers to have completed the MAN hat trick, getting invited back for the scheme’s maximum three seasons. ‘We were so hungry for it,’ she says, ‘and used every show to make each a bit better than the last.’ MAN also grew with each season, forging a reputation for its consistently exciting, thought-provoking design. And along the way, it became the nucleus of what is now London Collections:Men, a thriving four-day event which has solidified British menswear’s place on the international schedules. Today, MAN alumni are in some of the most powerful positions in menswear - from Loewe’s JW Anderson, to Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton. Of the 32 designers showing at London Collections this season, 9 started out on the MAN catwalk - and a further 5 have featured in Fashion East’s subsidiary menswear presentations. Over the years, the British Fashion Awards’ menswear trophies have been on almost-permanent rotation amongst MAN stars like Jones, Anderson, Agi & Sam and Craig Green. ‘Obviously their talent was there from the outset,' Richardson reflects, 'but it’s humbling to know that through MAN’s support we’ve helped them on their way to success.’ And Topman itself has played a significant part in the story; for several seasons, it showed its premium line, Topman Design, as part of the MAN event, narrowing the gap between high-concept and the high street. ‘Topman Design had been in existence before MAN,’ Richardson quickly qualifies, ‘so it was really a natural extension of that. Showing alongside MAN was more about creating a more substantial and powerful menswear moment than anything else.’

Over the years, MAN has created no shortage of menswear moments. And this season, they’re looking backwards. For the first time, only two designers - Liam Hodges and Rory Parnell Mooney - will be featured, with the third slot devoted to a specially commissioned MAN Turns 10 film. Flicking through Fashion East’s archive, it’s clear there are no shortage of memories. ‘There are so many!’ Kennedy laughs. ‘I particularly loved when Chris Shannon sent his boys out in lip gloss and on-purpose tan lines . . . and Craig Green using Roxette’s ‘Listen To Your Heart’ for the entire show, which floored everyone.’ Richardson, meanwhile, singles out Aitor Throup’s haunting 2007 installation in Holborn’s derelict Sorting Office for special praise. But then he reconsiders; ‘Emotionally it will, however, always be the very first show, when it felt like we were on the cusp of something monumental.’ They were; it was. But along the way, there’s also the fun of seeing menswear’s front row weather their way through a decade’s worth of shifting hemlines and hairlines, and no shortage of opportunities to play spot-the-famous-face; over the years, models have ranged from boyband members to retired rally drivers (in a mobility scooter. Obviously.), to fashion designers Henrik Vibskov, Patrick Grant and William Richard Green. And there’s a nice circularity to the event, too: Hans Christian Madsen started out as studio manager for Carola Euler, while Thom Murphy, Stoldal’s stylist for that first show, returned to MAN four years later with New Power Studio. ‘Showing alongside my friend and hero Kim Jones was such a honour to me.’ remembers Carrie Munden of Cassette Playa - a label whose vibrant shows were regular highlights during MAN’s early years. 'It was also emotional to see my former assistant and (not so little) little brother Liam Hodges’ debut.' Hodges, one of the showcase’s most recent success stories, returns the compliment; ‘My very first MAN experience was probably seeing Sonic the Hedgehog on Cassette Playa's SS07 catwalk, when I first started studying fashion. That show, and some of the new menswear around that time, was when I first started getting interested in fashion, to be honest; I guess MAN is something I've always aspired to, from the start.’ It would be a wild overstatement to attribute menswear’s decade-long boom entirely to MAN, but it’s played a crucial part. That’s not to denigrate the part played by the resurgence of once-staid Savile Row, or the powerful international clout of homegrown megabrands like Burberry. But British menswear simply wouldn’t be what it has become without the stream of young designers who’ve left their mark on the MAN runway; Jaiden RVA James’ bondage gear, New Power Studio’ joss-stick crowns and dildo hats, Shaun Samson’s beach-bum blankets, Astrid Andersen’s ab-flashing sportswear, Alan Taylor’s exploded tailoring, Craig Green’s monastic robes (not to mention the plank headpieces that featured in his first show, which launched a thousand headlines and made MAN a Daily Mail staple) The clothing it has presented - tough, tender, angry, silly, sexy, cheeky, moving, baffling, provocative, bold - has made the language of modern British menswear immeasurably richer. It’s not all been perfect - and in the harsh world beyond the scheme’s supporting embrace, its graduates have gone on to encounter as much failure as success. Some (Jones, Anderson, Green) have become stars. Some have fallen off the radar, or stepped away from fashion entirely. But most have simply taken detours; Kesh, for example, moved to California, where she’s reinvented herself as a digital artist - hitting headlines earlier this year when Versace (allegedly) copied one of her t-shirt prints. Lotta Skeletrix moved to Paris, and became a womenswear designer: Ann-Sofie Back did likewise, in Sweden and New York. Aitor Throup returned to his studio, leaving the catwalk schedule behind to continue his endless experiments and refinements. And many, after their London years, went home; Støldal, for example, now works in Norway, as part of a collective called HaiK. Back in Scotland, Deryck Walker has collaborated with Harris Tweed, and forged parallel careers in tutoring, consulting and costume design. And Söderstam is in Sweden, where - ten years and four children later - he’s finally starting to feel his old appetite for fashion again, and is working under a new banner, #sawwwpop. But all of the designers I speak to, no matter how their careers have evolved, stress MAN’s importance in their journey. Of all of them, though, Munden - who famously submitted her entry for the scheme in a pizza box, back in 2006 - perhaps sums it up at its exuberant, incestuous, optimistic best; ‘e v e r y t h i n g = the first level / the beginning + a family for life’

Katie Eary models backstage at Somerset House, 23rd September 2009 © 1972projects

A shorter version of this piece appeared in The Observer Magazine

[1972projects]

THE MONEY SHOT - Bill Helburn's Midcentury Advertising Photography

Deborah Dixon for Hélene Curtis | William Helburn, 1960

In the Fifties and Sixties, William Helburn was one of America’s most prolific fashion photographers. But it would take decades before anyone wondered whether he might also have been one of the best.

Brooke Helburn remembers her father as “just the best dad - a great, full-time dad. He was basically everything you could want in a really awesome father.” Sometimes, for fun, he’d play the family show reels of his old commercials. “But for the most part,” Brooke reflects, “I think he was really glad to have his Connecticut life. He didn’t talk about the past a lot.”

He still doesn’t. And yet the past has caught up with William Helburn nonetheless. His name isn’t a familiar one - for reasons I’ll come on to. But, twenty-five years after his retirement, the first book on his work is being published. And with it, a chapter in the history of fashion photography may have to be revised. 

Born on New York’s Upper East Side, Helburn took up photography after World War II. He and an Army buddy, Ted Croner, rented a cheap studio (“about the size of two bathrooms. And it STANK!”) near Central Park, and made their start doing test shots for aspiring models like Tippi Hedren and Grace Kelly. At nights, they studied with legendary Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, at whose New School classes (held round a table in Richard Avedon's 57th Street studio, a few short blocks from Brodovitch's offices) Helburn excelled. He was soon busy working for  America’s top magazines (Bazaar, LIFE, Charm, Glamour, LOOK), part of an extraordinary generation of image-makers - amongst them Stanley Kubrick, Andy Warhol, Louis Faurer, Irving Penn and Diane Arbus. 

But there was one key difference: Helburn did advertising. Most fashion photographers did, in fact: Avedon shot for Revlon and Vanity Fair underwear, and Penn for Jell-O and Haig & Haig whisky. Even the fastidious Cecil Beaton managed to photograph (discreet) campaigns for sanitary napkins. But Helburn made commercial work the mainstay of his career - and, as he cheerfully owns, “Even when I had the option, I always said no to having a credit line. That way no-one knew who’d taken the picture, so I could take more jobs, and make more money. And THAT was how I measured success.”

So while others struggled for their art, Helburn rode the tidal wave of postwar America’s boom years. He became part of a select group, alongside Howard Zieff and Art Kane, chosen to provide the visual punchline to Madison Avenue’s pioneering ad campaigns. And the photographs? Kept in his darkroom filing cabinets, they were simply thrown away whenever he needed more space. So what remains - in thirty plastic garbage bags which his eldest son, Will, retrieved from the basement of Helburn’s last studio - is only a partial archive. “For many years, I’ve bemoaned the fact that my father was pretty talented,” Will explains, “but because he was seen as ‘commercial’, he never pushed the ‘art’ button. And so, as different people crossed my path over the years, I’d always try to push his case.”

In 2009, Will’s path intersected with Lois and Robert Lilly, who set to work on piecing Helburn Senior’s story together. Rightly, the book they’ve produced is unapologetically image-driven, zooming in on four decades’ worth of famous faces: Jean Patchett, Carmen Dell’Orefice, Ali MacGraw, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Sharon Tate, Naomi Sims. Women would always be Helburn’s inspiration (and distraction): he married two Ford models in a row, had affairs with Elsa Martinelli and Dorian Leigh, and flirted with just about any other female that came within radius. English model Sandra Paul - now Sandra Howard - remembers him well; “I worked a lot with Bill - he was always, always Bill, never William! It was always fun, and he certainly wasn’t reserved!! But he was always very clear about the story he was telling, too. And he was a serious pro - you knew that he was ALWAYS going to take a glorious photo.” 

Recent years have seen resurrection after resurrection for the photographers of America’s midcentury - from Faurer to Bassman to Leiter, and most notably in the cottage industry that’s bloomed around the ghost of Vivian Maier. Helburn and Maier couldn’t be further apart; where she worked invisibly, he was a larger-than-life mainstay of Manhattan’s gossip columns, throwing star-studded parties at his Park Avenue studio and racing Ferraris with a spectacular lack of success. And where Maier documented the America that she saw from the shadows, Helburn invented a New World wonderland that was brighter, more whimsical and more surreally witty than any reality could ever have been. 

The images are powerfully of their time - but when that moment was over, Bill Helburn simply moved on. “I think nostalgia implies a certain sadness”, Helburn’s youngest son, Hardy, expands, “but Dad’s always just been very excited to reminisce about his work - the places he got to travel to, the people he got to meet. He’s excited about the book - but I don’t think he ever felt like it HAD to happen. He got everything he needed from each picture as he took it. This is just the icing on the cake.”

And despite this second turn in the limelight, Helburn’s not interested in self-mythology. He’s honest to a fault; “Look, I tried to copy Avedon as much as I could. He was always the master. But I kept getting it wrong, and maybe somewhere along the way I became me. Avedon was the master of posing, and Penn was extraordinary at lighting - and me, I guess I was ideas.” 

So what does he think of the ideas in fashion photography today? Helburn shakes with laughter; just a regular Connecticut dad again. “I haven’t looked at a fashion magazine in a LOOOONG time.”

Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward, Town & Country | William Helburn, 1955

Written for The Observer

[1972projects]

October, 1924: The front cover of British Vogue, illustrated by Georges Lepape

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October, 1924: Edith, Countess Annesley, photographed at the Bassano Studios

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October, 1924: A photograph of Bidder Street, in Canning Town

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October, 1924: Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, photographed by Ottoline Morrell on his 80th (he got a clavichord.)

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October, 1924: Sexton Blake's 'The Affair Of The Country Club'

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October, 1924: Margery, Viscountess Greenwood - DBE, drawing-room diplomat, future Delavingne great-grandmother.