I have been preparing to do a presentation of an icon, and i decided to do Grace Coddington, and seeing as she is such an inspiration i thought i would post what i spoke about:
I first heard of Grace Coddington when I read an article about her in an edition of Lula. I didn’t quite understand who she was at the time, and it was later on that I was truly inspired by her and her work. Ever since I first started seeing her styled shoots, and through watching the documentary ‘The September Issue’. Now I can instantly tell when a shoot has been styled by Grace now, whether it’s been published in American Vogue or just found on the internet.
She lived in a small town in North Wales, and at a young age she was interesting in fashion, however she was very far away from the fashion world literally and metaphorically as she use to rush to be able to get a copy of vogue that was at least three months out of date. However this made her love fashion even more as she has said that she loves:‘the whole sort of chic thing about Vogue that was so entirely out of context compared to the lifestyle that I led’.
I think this has made her even better as a stylist because of how she loved fashion but it seemed to be a completely different world to the one she was living as she creates fashion to be a world of play and make believe.
At the age of 18 she sent of a photo of her into the Vogue Young Model Competition, which she ended up winning therefore starting her career in modelling. Even though before hand she tried doing a modelling course in London and got told she was ‘hopeless and too fat’ by the head of Ford Models. However at the ages of 26 she was in car crash, in which she lost her eyelid and had to have plastic surgery. Nevertheless that didn’t stop her she still got modelling jobs after, but it was two years after the car crash she was offered the role of Junior Editor at British Vogue, which she worked her way up. Until the age of 47 where she went to work at American Vogue the same that Anna Wintour started.The reason why I love Grace is how she is still traditional and tweaks everything when styling a shoot; she works at it, until it’s perfect. She’s traditional in the way that she’s one of the only stylists to actually dress the models, its now the modern thing for fashion editors to not touch a model, assistants are suppose to do that. She also traditional in the fact she’s not caught up in the whole celebrity culture, with the glitzy front row thing, she doesn’t like trends. She puts passion into every shoot and truly believes in it and will stand up for getting her ideas across, insisting to make it work, including pieces that editors would say no to, because every detail matters to her.
She seems to look at fashion in an artistic and historical view. Her shoots are whimsical and seem to keep fashion in a world of dreams, however her ideas are fresh. She can quickly pull things together, as in one instant five days before closing the issue a new shoot was wanted, and she suddenly came with a new idea to have the camera men in the shot. It created such a new and innovative way to look at how shoots are created. In my opinion her photo shoots read almost as a story or a picture book.
When I watched the September Issue one of the main things that stuck to me was when she spoke of a photographer ‘Norman Parkinson’, with who she worked with, was taught by and got her through her first shoots which were considered ‘an unqualified disaster’. He taught her to:
‘always keep your eyes open, never go to sleep in the car, keep watching because what ever you see out the window, or wherever you are, it can inspired you’.
And this just seems to describe Grace in what she does best, she’s a visionary, who seems to get inspired by a lot of things, too many things sometimes as Anna Wintour would say but overall understands the direction fashion goes in.
"I like fairy tales, and I like dreaming. I try to weave the reality into the dream," she says. "When readers pick up Vogue, I want them to smile. Everything should be a little tongue in cheek, a little dare-to-go-there."
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