I’ve lost count of the number of times during my years in fashion publishing when I’ve heard it said models as cover stars are over. To this statement I’ve only ever had one response: not on my watch. When it comes to the women who most often and most purely embody fashion’s course – who by sheer force of personality can distil a moment, an outfit, a mood – I will always have the utmost adoration and respect for the professionals.
This month, Vogue heralds a “supermodel summer” with an issue fit to burst with the brightest stars from across the fashion industry. Our leading light? It had to be the one and only Gisele. To mark her return to British Vogue’s cover for the first time in seven years, the Brazilian super stars in an epic 22-page photographic story by Steven Meisel, an ode to the timeless dazzle of hotel glamour, created over two days on location in New York. Styling Gisele for the shoot, I found myself once again marvelling at her boundless facility to create extraordinary fashion imagery. Now a married mother of two, her energy remains off the hook, her sense of the lens, of the light, of her own lustre are nothing short of magical. As she tells writer Chioma Nnadi in the accompanying profile, over vegan spring rolls in the kitchen of her Manhattan apartment, now that she’s in her forties, with the craziness of youth behind her, she’s never felt better – and it shows.
Next we hopped the Atlantic for Paris, where, amid the buzz of a re-enlivened fashion month, we spent several days photographing the stars of today’s runways in their natural habitat, backstage at the shows.
This new generation of one-namers – Adut, Kaia, Paloma et al – have found their way into the hearts of fashion fans by combining extraordinary beauty with unique senses of style and all the relatability of 21st-century digital intimacy. I love how stylists Jack Borkett and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson leant into the reality of the world between shows for the new supers to create a joyful and candid salute to the life of the modern model.
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Lastly, we present the finalists of this year’s BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund. Alongside British Fashion Council’s chief executive Caroline Rush and our fellow judges, I spent an energised and enlightening day talking through all of the brilliant fashion talents on the final list and the important and exciting work they are making. After much deliberation, the 2022 winner is Richard Quinn, an extraordinary designer who has spent the past few years honing his vision and exquisite craft, sense of pattern, elevated and esoteric ideas about form and beauty, while never losing sight of his keen flair for the transgressive. He is a fitting winner and an important creative who we look forward to supporting more in the years ahead.