At the tail end of the 1980s there was a brief ritual
of shooting the Paris collections on the brightest
celebrities of the day. In 1989 it was the turn of
American actor Kim Basinger. She’d already had
a moment in American Vogue, as a fashion model favoured
by Irving Penn, but by the time this springtime couture cover
story came around, she was a bona fide Hollywood star.
Nineteen-eighty-six’s erotic drama 9½ Weeks, though a box-
office disaster, had propelled Basinger to fame. Three years
later, she would steal the show as Vicki Vale in Tim Burton’s
Batman. Such was her earning power that in the same year,
backed by business partners, she spent an estimated $20 million
buying up much of Braselton, a small town in Georgia. It
didn’t end well. A legal dispute with a film studio led to
bankruptcy and, by 1995, Basinger sold her properties there.
Heady times. Kate Phelan, now a Vogue contributing fashion
director, then assistant to senior fashion editor Sarajane Hoare,recalls shoots such as this one, at the Château de Maisons-
Laffitte, ushering in an era of “endless budgets, the sets
beginning to cost more than the rest of the shoot put together”.
Basinger was Phelan’s heroine. “I loved her in 9½ Weeks,”
she says. “Kim was totally professional. We were in a freezing
baroque château outside Paris and whatever Herb asked her
to do, she did without complaint; shivering on a table in flimsy
chiffon, hanging on to a chandelier, anything. She trusted
him to make her look fantastic.” More disquieting were Ritts’s
two assistants, who, Phelan recalls, “were like American cops.
So tough, so... terrifying. At night, in their hotel room,
I had to help them cut up the processed 35mm film to put
into slides for Herb to edit, and I remember cutting a whole
roll the wrong way. I thought, ‘They are actually going to kill
me.’ I didn’t sleep that night.” Basinger went on to win an
Oscar for her performance in 1997’s LA Confidential, and
she remains an intriguing Hollywood figure to this day. nARCHIVEBAROQUE STEADYRobin Muir looks back on Herb Ritts’s vision of couture,
starring Kim Basinger, Vogue April 198904-20-Archive_2007131.indd 125 06/02/2020 08:48
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