Grace Coddington: the flame-haired stylist, creative director of American Vogue and sidekick of the magazine’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour. While Wintour described her as “one of the great unsung heroines of our business”, she’s actually been sung about quite a lot recently – particularly since stealing the show in 2009 documentary The September Issue and publishing Grace: A Memoir in 2012. There’s even rumours of a biopic in the works. Now, Phaidon have reissued Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion At Vogue, a retrospective covering three decades of her work for the magazine. Why? Because only 5000 copies of the monograph were originally printed with some later reaching as much as $10,000 online.
Naturally Coddington’s creative collaborators exist in the most upper echelons of the fashion industry, and the book includes her accounts of these collaborations. From photographers including Steven Meisel, Mario Testino, Ellen von Unwerth and Bruce Weber to models Jerry Hall, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell. She not only tells the stories behind some of her most famous images, but explains the process too: “I like to bring fashion to life,” she says, “so in my head I write a script.” Out now, the book is available to buy for £100 – considerably less than you’d have to fork out for a copy of the first edition.
Check out the gallery above for a sneak peak of the book
