My Fashion Life
Lucinda Chambers
Speaking at the Vogue festival, in partnership with Vertu, Vogue fashion director Lucinda Chambers revealed her lengthy career in fashion started with a cigarette.
"Smoking got me my first job," she said. "At the time when I joined Condé Nast as an assistant, all the office was partitioned. One day, my boss left for lunch and I quickly lit myself a cigarette. She forgot something and came back, so I threw my cigarette over the partition and it landed on the desk of the assistant to the then-editor of Vogue - Beatrix Miller. Luckily, she was a smoker too and she got me an interview at Vogue."
Describing her schoolgirl self as a "real under-achiever" ("but I didn't care, I wanted to be a secretary and get married anyway"), Chambers also revealed a few of her fashion disasters - involving three famous Vogue cover girls.
"The first [disaster] was the first trip I ever went abroad for. I had seen this place called Nadak in the National Geographic - it's in a rural, very remote part of India and very difficult to get into and also to get out of. I thought that this would be a wonderful place to take Cindy Crawford and Patrick Demarchelier. Of course they wouldn't mind sleeping in tents with the make-up artists or not having any running water... They didn't, but I wouldn't assume their good nature again!" she laughed.
"Then there was Emma Watson's cover shoot. A US train driver stole the luggage, carrying hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of couture. So the shoot started with me finding a pair of sunglasses in my bag - picture one -and Emma wearing the assistant's hat - picture two. All the while I had her assistant there saying: "Emma's been waiting for this moment for 10 years, you're losing her here."
"Then there was a shoot with Cheryl Cole where she turned up drenched in sweat, saying that she really needed to lie down. I told her that she could have a quick sleep, but we had to start. When she woke up I put her in a skin-tight zip-up dress. I found out later that she gone straight from the shoot to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with malaria."
And what does she think it takes to become one of the world's most successful fashion editors?
"You have to be a bit bonkers," she said. "You have to be able to look at people, places, wrappers - everything - in a slightly skewed way."
