Having tied the knot, Grand flew straight back to London without a honeymoon — Mackey’s tour dates had been set in January and couldn’t be changed, and she needed to finish off the second issue of Love.
She selects the writers, photographers, stylists, make-up artists, hair stylists and subjects. The first issue caused a stir with its naked cover girl — the plus-sized pop star Beth Ditto. Editorial content was kept to a few lines here and there; airbrushing was minimal. It speaks volumes about her standing that Condé Nast, the publishers of Love, gave Grand her own magazine. Love instantly sold out.
“She has this slight outsider view,” says Frith. “She’s very questioning about the fashion world at times and likes to shake it up a bit.”
Today Grand is dressed in a simple black dress and flat sandals. Her black hair is frizzy and the famously generous front teeth are framed by a face bare of make-up. But she is, of course, wearing labels from the highest end of fashion: Azzedine Alaïa (the dress) and Prada (the shoes). The 38-year-old speaks in a soft Brummie accent. “The last issue was quite mature,” she says, looking at the pages of issue No 2, which are pasted on the wall of Love’s London office in Clerkenwell. “So we decided to do a youth issue. I wanted to get a sense of what 15-year-olds were into. A lot of those London kids, they’re all hanging out with each other and are all so educated. You know, my husband… ” she pauses at the novelty. They finally decided to get married after he read an interview she had given in which she said he wouldn’t marry her. “My husband has a 13-year-old son, and all his school friends are children of famous film directors or musicians, and they are so sussed, they think everything is so boring. So it was hard, actually.”
Mackey’s son, Marley, lives with them every weekend and for a day or two in the week. “He’s a great kid. Very cool. At the wedding he obviously thought we were all so old and stupid — he’s 13, so everyone over 18 is boring.” Grand herself doesn’t want children. “It’s a bit like going to India — I can’t ever imagine myself going. I just never wanted to have kids. It’s just one of those things, some women just don’t.”
The Love office is an air-conditioned oasis of calm. Her young staff work silently amid a sea of robots fashioned from novelty trinkets sent from press offices. They barely look up as she bounces through the room and squeals an excited “Hiya” at me. She has been commissioning big-name photographers to shoot no-name people; it’s her reaction to celebrity culture. “I thought it was interesting to add the new category of ‘unknown’ into the mix,” she says, looking thoughtfully at the layout on the wall. On the other hand, some of these youngsters have very famous parents, so the cover still reads like a junior Who’s Who.
“She’s like a whirlwind that sucks in information everywhere she goes,” gushes Ben Reardon, the editor of the style-magazine i-D. “Katie is a visionary.” Then there are the industry heretics, one of whom tells me (off the record — they are far too scared to cross Grand; it would be career suicide) that the first issue was a “load of self-indulgent editorial nonsense, a complete waste of a fiver — there was nothing to read and the pictures were really boring”.
One of her two cover stars, Alex Hartley, is an 18-year-old music teacher. He had no idea who Grand, David Sims — the photographer who shot him — or the hairstylist, one of the best in the industry, were. Alex, who they found on a social-networking site, is still not sure why he’s on the cover. “I’m just a guy from a small town,” he says. “I’m very lucky. And very excited. And very grateful to have worked with such amazing people.” The other cover star is Coco Sumner, the daughter of Sting and a rising musician. She was shot by the photographers Mert and Marcus, who are known for their super-glossy fantastical images. Grand had them shoot Coco in the clothes she walked in off the street in, with no hair or make-up. “She’s pretty unknown: what’s the point of reinventing her when no one knows what you are reinventing?” she says. She is shrewdly tapping into the new spirit of the times — heavily airbrushed celebrities seem gauche and embarrassing during a recession.
Although from an advertising point of view Condé Nast may have wanted Love to be more obviously a fashion magazine, they have been relatively hands-off. Agreeing to publish Love was a huge commitment at a financially unstable moment, but it could pay off — in terms of cachet at least.
Grand’s first foray into publishing was to set up Dazed and Confused, the trendsetting magazine of the 1990s, with the writer and editor Jefferson Hack and the portrait photographer Rankin, Grand’s then-boyfriend (she met them both in a bar). From there she skipped to Another Magazine as launch editor, then to The Face as fashion director. It was during her stint at The Face that she set up another era-defining fashion publication, Pop. This was 2000, and Grand went about “reinventing” celebrities left, right and centre. Madonna was shot in black and white, semi-naked and vulnerable; Liz Hurley appeared looking toned, tanned and fierce in a cut-out bikini, six weeks after giving birth; and Agyness Deyn graced the cover in fluorescent “new-rave” hues, parping on a whistle.
Grand styles the catwalk shows and advertising campaigns of some of the biggest names in fashion: Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Giles Deacon, Calvin Klein Underwear, Dior Homme, Prada. “Katie has such a lucid and bold vision of fashion. I always admired her work. She’s never afraid of anything,” says Miuccia Prada. For those who don’t know what stylists do, they help push the designer in a certain direction with the theme of the collection, the colours and the models that are used. They make sense of what a designer is doing, rather like art curators.
“Working with Katie Grand is great on all levels,” says the designer Marc Jacobs, with whom she has worked for several years. “She is inspiring, and her energy provides a great lift. Her references and constant interest in pop culture and youth fill me with creative ideas.” Grand grins. “People don’t want you to invent the wheel, they want you to help them. Sometimes it’s hard: sometimes they just want you there at 3am to play Dolly Parton and lighten the mood; sometimes you have to hold back your opinions. The older and more experienced I get, the harder it’s become to sit in a room and be subservient.”
I was just coming to this thread to say something similar.
