46 NOVEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
the point of a new Vogue and change fashion in one fell
swoop, you have to change the cover. This is it, because
this is everything an American Vogue cover isn’t.” And
that picture did; it revolutionized everything.
I’d worked with Peter at British Vogue, but my first
shoot with him at American Vogue was in Santorini
with Carré Otis and Linda Evangelista [December 1988],
whose hair Julien had just cut short. I think everybody
liked the freedom of that story. Peter always wanted to do
his own thing. You could kill him, but you loved him, too.
Afterward he’d just laugh—and laugh at himself.
He’d copy his own pictures all the time. He’d bring out
his old Polaroids and say, “This is what we’re doing,
and it’s going to be cropped here,” and it was all very
funny. In the back of his head there were movies, too,
and he was very inspired by August Sander and Paul
Strand–like pictures—but he never
copied anything other than himself.
Except one shoot, “Wild at Heart”
[September 1991], which was all about
motorbikes. A particular shot was
inspired by Cecil Beaton’s 1948
photograph of all the models dressed in
Charles James ball gowns. Karl
Lagerfeld had just done these motorbike
jackets with ball gowns, and we used all
sorts of hip-hop-style jewelry, the stuff
that you found on Eighth Street. We
shot under the Brooklyn Bridge with a
wind machine and smoke machine
because Brooklyn was his place at that
point. He used to love the meat market
downtown, but then it got too posh, so
NATURAL WONDER
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ONE OF
LINDBERGH’S ICONIC GROUP PORTRAITS,
VOGUE, 1988; ON LOCATION IN 1996;
CHANEL MEETS INDUSTRIAL CHIC IN
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, VOGUE, 1991.
he started going to Brooklyn. I guess he was searching
for things that looked like Paris because there were
cobbled streets there.
We had a nightmare-load of girls playing silly buggers
on that shoot, and we had one little bus to get them to the
location. They were all supermodels who were not used
to being treated like that. And trying to get them into those
huge ball dresses in a tiny space! He said, “You know,
we’ve only got a few frames, because it’s pouring with rain
and these are couture.” Nevertheless, it was fun.
I loved the Naomi “Dalmatian” story [June 1990]: I
always felt his pictures were so much better in black-and-
white; they better told a story. They were so much
more emotional. And when he first started doing color
for American Vogue, he just drained it all and made it
all blue, which was better! So in a CONTINUED ON PAGE 162 PORTRAIT: PATRICK LAUGIER
