Share your thoughts on the... 2024 Met Gala
Fourteen campaign images. Six videos. A string of celebrity portraits. All in one day.
“It was a large list of deliverables,” says photographer Inez van Lamsweerde, who, along with partner Vinoodh Matadin, was tasked with turning around all of the above in less than 24 hours. The client? Tom Ford, who staged an in-season runway show at New York Fashion Week in September. Ford was one of the first designers to adopt the “instant fashion” approach, making his clothes available to purchase immediately after they debuted on the catwalk. “The project itself seemed sort of daunting,” van Lamsweerde adds. “Before we were actually shooting.”
But by the time the duo set a small studio up within the show venue — tapping the same hair and makeup artists that would prep the models for the runway — “it was a wonderful, easy process,” van Lamsweerde says. “It’s a super-fast way of working. We’re lucky that we have an incredible team around us doing print retouching, video editing and video colour in-house.”
The day began at 10am, and they were finished shooting by the 4.30pm show rehearsal. They spent the time before the show editing photographs and videos with 10-or-so members of the team, and by the time the first model hit the runway, they were done. At the show, the photographers were on hand to capture the celebrity front row, snapping more than a dozen black-and-white portraits of A-listers including Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson and Julianne Moore. Just a few days later, a shot from the campaign ran on a full page advertisement in the print edition of The New York Times. “We had to be extremely prepared going in,” van Lamsweerde says. “It’s a different way of thinking.”