A Brie Grows in Brooklyn

Icon of the Week: Grace Coddington

On my way to get milk this morning, I thought about Grace Coddington.

I’ve been reading a bit about her, and by reading, I mean scanning articles in New York Magazine and Gawker. They don’t tell me much, except that she’s nicer than Anna Wintour and was married for a year, in the late 1960s, to Mr. Chow. Both of those things are uninteresting- will anyone ever get sick of villainizing Anna Wintour or eating at Mr. Chow’s? I’m weary of both.

What makes Grace Coddington interesting is not her personal life, but rather the work that she’s done for Vogue.

When I was younger, I would pour over fashion magazines, and cut out spreads or advertisements that reminded me of falling in love. Then I would paste them to what I called “my wall of love” with blue tack.

By the end of my freshman year of college, every square inch of my room was covered with glossy pages torn from Vogue, or Harper’s Bazaar, or the Anthropologie catalog. I went to sleep at night gazing upon the Ralph Lauren Romance ads, and I woke up every morning in a Kate Moss fantasyland.

I can’t imagine that on my wall there weren’t more than a few Grace Coddington spreads, which have remained iconic throughout the years that I’ve grown up.

For you, Grace. For working frequently with Natalia Vodianova. For the gorgeous flush of your colors, both in your work and in your red hair, your alabaster skin. For referencing times when women could flounce in lace and chiffon and live life always conscious of what they were wearing.

For the romance of clothing, for the way that fashion magazines can allow a teenager to imagine a life more beautiful than her own, one worth hoping for and dreaming of, one full of stolen kisses and train platforms in the rain. For giving me fodder for my daydreams, Grace Coddington, you’re my icon of the week.

Icon of the Week: Grace Coddington

In the throes of heat-soaked depression last week, I spent an afternoon catching up with my Netflix queue. The first movie to appear was The September Issue, which is a documentary about Vogue creating, shockingly, it’s September issue. 

You can tell the filmmakers started out thinking that the movie was going to be about Anna Wintour. She truly is a wonder to behold, but she’s too smart to really let anyone get beneath the crust of her perfect bowl cut coiffe. There are moments, when she speaks of her family, or when she interacts with her daughter, Bee Shaffer, that you think you see glimmers of what she must really be like when she’s alone. Like anyone so successful, she has to be layered ad infinitum with personality flaws and quirks, but I would guess that no one ever sees her as she truly is, in her natural state. Such glimpses as the movie offers hardly gives a picture of the whole.

Grace Coddington, the creative director of US Vogue, is a different story. Where Anna is frigid, Grace is warm. Where Anna is detached, Grace is invested. Where Anna is guarded, Grace is open. Where Anna loves color blocking, Grace loves romanticism, the lure of the chateau, the great wigs and draperies of the 18th century.

Grace really steals the movie. She befriends the cameraman after Anna tells him he’s fat, by assuring him that he doesn’t need to go to the gym. She feeds the models on her shoots cherry tartines. By the end, you’re convinced not only that you love her, but also that she’s a genius. Almost all of the spreads in the September issue were her creations, and they are lovely and color soaked and full of fantasy.

In her younger years, before she had an accident that caused her to lose one of her eyelids (how does that happen, I wonder?), Grace was a Vogue model herself.

Which makes her a kind of perfect Icon.

For you, Grace Coddington, for being beautiful and smart and successful. For kindness in a cold profession, for romanticism in the face of modernity, for the photos you’ve created that I’ve poured over and loved and pasted on my wall. For red hair and pale skin and wearing comfortable sandals, for an eye for images, for your silent movie glamour, Grace Coddington, you’re my icon of the week.