DMD: The establishment being dressed in immaculate, almost bulletproof looks. And yourself and your contemporaries taking, for want of a better term, ‘anti-fashion’ and making that more covetable. I love the abrasiveness of it.
VS: That’s how it seemed. We were going to the Paris shows and suddenly everyone was focusing on us. Not that that was important, but there was a certain relish, it felt anarchic and great. The end of an era, reacting against the establishment that had been in place and showing people that weren’t with perfect athletic bodies, trying to convey more the spirit of somebody. Using people that would never have been cast before.
DMD: Would the way you dressed correlate with the way your shoots looked? Would you dress in that manner?
VS: I think we mixed it up, yes. We all had long John Galliano skirts and big army coats over the top.
DMD: That’s what you’ve given this generation the freedom to do...
VS: Except now it’s shot in looks. When I first started at Vogue you’d get all the clothes in, have your rail and you’d make looks. Whereas now the designers do the looks. You can’t mix Chanel now with other designers - the power of advertising is that if you don’t do it in the way that they want you to shoot it then the magazines become scared that they’ll lose the cash. When I first started there wasn’t really any bargaining power between the advertisers and editorial; they were two completely separate things. Now it’s ‘I’ll take out a couple of pages and you give me a couple of pages’.
DMD: It’s a relationship now, which I find terrifying. I don’t know where it’ll end up, and it does increasingly feel like we’ll never be able to go back...
VS: No, no. It’s like when you do a shoot and the client is on it with you - if you let them in too much you’ve had it. It’s best to either not have them on it or keep yourself a bit scary so they don’t feel they can chip in all the time. You’re never going be able to create the vision otherwise. With the screen and the digital they’re all there and on it and making decisions like that. Everyone’s got their thing: the hairdresser is looking from that point of view and the client is looking to see whether there’s a crease. If you do it with contact sheets, you’re sitting on a light box, every morning coming back to it and whittling it slowly down. How you’re reacting, looking through this little lupe, trying to look at the face and think how you’re reading that expression. Do you want them to look aggressive towards you or have their guard down, totally connected to you? You’re looking at that, you’re looking at their eyes. With the monitor and ten people around I think... Well, I don’t do that, so...
DMD: With the monitor there’s also the question of not knowing when to stop - digital is infinite so ‘we can do twenty more’. There’s a loss of magic and spontaneity. It’s rawness and unpredictability that creates something special...
VS: I mean there’s nothing like looking through the camera. And I suppose with Juergen we were always right there, I was almost looking through the camera as well. If you now open that up with the monitor, you haven’t got that one-on-one, there’s not that intimacy. It’s the difference between spending time alone with a person and in a crowd. And on the styling side now, even if you work for big, biannual magazines, before you start you’ve got ten designers you have to include over twelve pages. So you’re sort of stuck, trying to build up something that looks - like you were saying - like it’s a documentary. How can you do that when you’ve got those restrictions on you? I never really do that, and maybe I’m lucky because I’ve done it for so long. I don’t really have the fear that if I use a pair of sneakers on the end of a Chanel outfit that I’m never going to work again. If you’re new and you’re given ten outfits for ten pages you’re going to shoot them because if you don’t then there’s a real fear you’re not in the magazine next time; you didn’t follow the rules. Whereas I tend to think that I won’t do it - if I don’t work for them again it doesn’t really matter because I’ll work for someone else. Which happens a lot. Someone gets fed up with you and you don’t work for them the next season.
DMD: Do you think that’s something rarer these days? People worry more...
VS: I think they play the game much, much more. And there’s even some who I’m so surprised that they’re playing this game - they don’t realise that if they didn’t play it they’d still get the work because they’re good, you know? I was talking to someone, saying ‘why are you doing all this stuff, why are you doing all these shoots?’ And he says because his agent says so, he has to do this, that and the other. You’re the one that’s really in control, you know? I’m amazed that they’re listening to their agents. And I’m amazed by stylists that are also maybe a bit younger than me but sort of my contemporaries, who are established and good, and they’re saying they have to include all these credits. I've done shoots with these stylists and I think ‘just say **** it, it didn’t work’. It doesn’t work within the story. The sense of belief is going to be broken because there’s a Prada shirt sticking out like a sore thumb and we’re meant to be doing Russian prisoners. If you put that in, it’s not believable anymore.
DMD: The more people play that game the worse it gets and the more and more is expected. It’s a vicious spiral...
VS: Maybe I’m very lucky because I’ve got a contract with Marc Jacobs. While that goes on I’m ‘safe’, so it’s very easy for me to say ‘**** it!’ It’s like a safety net.
DMD: Can we talk about grunge? You mentioned the Perry Ellis collection by Marc that everyone always references. Were you in contact at that time? How did you meet?
VS: We weren’t in contact at that time. We met in New York because I was styling a Louis Vuitton campaign and I went to Marc to pick up clothes. It must’ve been ’97 or ’96. And then Joe McKenna who was styling the [Marc Jacobs] show went to Jil Sander and had an exclusive, so they were looking for someone else. I’d just actually had Lola, who was three weeks old, and said ‘I don’t want to do it, I just don’t feel like I’m in the right space for it’. And I was in Cornwall. Kim Sion who was my agent then said ‘I really think you should meet up with him’. She normally would say things like ‘I don’t think you need to worry about this’ but she was quite emphatic this time. I said ‘can they come to Cornwall?’ and she said ‘no they can’t - Marc’s frightened of the dark and doesn’t like the country’. [Laughs]. We ended up meeting at our house in London and I got persuaded to do the first show. Lola was about six weeks old then and we flew to New York - I felt terrified about the whole thing. It was my first big show, I hadn’t really styled a show -I’d only done Katharine Hamnett which was quite a chaotic, small production in London. Suddenly I was in New York, the venue was the Armory and it was huge. I hadn’t seen the collection and I thought ‘I want to just pack up and go home’. I really seriously thought after two days I’d have to say ‘this isn’t possible’. But we worked through it and it was great; we won the CFDA award for the show... It was twelve years ago.
DMD: And it continued from there. Can you tell us about your role at Marc Jacobs now? Is your title creative director?
VS: The title is creative director, yes. For both lines. But I’m much more involved now on the second line [Marc by Marc Jacobs] –research; colour; fabric; print. Though I still style the shows for first line.
DMD: Do you think Marc by Marc correlates with the body of work you’ve built up throughout your career? Or do you not think about that and treat it as a separate entity?
VS: Essentially I think there’s a link between them in that I think the girl puts herself together. The idea for the first show was that every girl would have their own look, they wouldn’t just be used as models, each girl we cast would be a type-of-girl. So they weren’t like mannequins walking out in one dress. Camille Bidault-Waddington styles it and it’s quite layered up and individual. Hopefully our girl doesn’t look like she’s conforming, she’s got her own thing going on and there’s a bit of rebellion in it or character.
DMD: It’s about five years you’ve been photographing for magazines now...
VS: Yes I guess it is. It wasn’t really a conscious thing. When Juergen and I stopped working together I did do editorial with different people and I found it increasingly frustrating that I’d be standing there and not seeing it in the way they were seeing it. Whereas with Juergen I felt that I was on the same track. Now I will still work with a photographer - I work with Stephen Shore who I admire, and I would’ve worked with [Helmut] Newton if he was still around. I did some shoots with Horst [Diekgerdes] that I enjoyed too, but on the whole I just... I’d been at Nova and looked through millions of photography books. I just didn’t find that many people worth putting my energy into doing a whole story with. Beth [Fenton, stylist] had been assisting me for about four years and she said ‘you should just do it’. I think she was getting fed up with me going ‘oh, I wouldn’t do it like that’. [Laughs]. I thought ‘oh **** I should just do it and not think about what anyone’s going to think - when people look at it, they’ll look at it for two minutes’. You know when you go through magazines and you go ‘oh this is crap and this is crap...’? Just do it. It’s quite good mental training to just think of that day and not the next. People get so afraid about others’ responses that they just don’t do anything...
