The Walter Cronkite of the Paris collections was
Vogue’s
fashion editor, Polly Mellen—“
Mrs
. Mellen” to all but those few who could address her informally. Even though her boss,
Vogue
editor Grace Mirabella, was clearly the ranking member of the entourage that always got the prime seats along the Paris runways, Paris was Polly Mellen’s show. The editors-in-chief at Condé Nast magazines had too many corporate and ceremonial responsibilities to get involved in all the detail work that went into running the magazines. At the collections, Grace Mirabella would select her favorite pieces, meet with the designers, and decide what “directions” were “important” But the fashion editors were the ones who sat in the studios and oversaw the photo sessions. They were the ones who primed the girls for the camera and screeched if they noticed an errant thread on a dress while surveying the scene through their opera glasses. They were the ones who alternately drove the photographers crazy with their minutiae and contributed the One Idea—a tilt of a hat, a suggestion to a model about what to think about, an invocation of a mood—that made the picture work. They were the ones in the trenches, making sure their whims were properly executed.
And fifty-three-year-old Polly Mellen was their archetype. She was the last of the true Vreelanders still working full-time for
Vogue.
And she was the one who carried the “anything for a great picture” ethos into the era when “anything” and “great picture” were being drastically redefined. Her first
Vogue
sitting had been in the mid-sixties: five weeks in Japan with Avedon and top model Veruschka, producing landmark fashion photos. And she maintained the vestiges of the old
Vogue
as it tried to respond better to working girls: “Working girls,
working
girls,” she said, “look, I have great respect for the working girl, but she does not have to be so boring, boring,
boring
.”
Polly Mellen’s fashion free association was legendary, and many of
Vogue’s
actual fashion statements—the headlines, the trios of descriptive adjectives, “The New Allure: Soft, Spirited and Leggy!”—went from her mouth to her assistant’s
notepad to the typesetter. Her ability to look at a garment, describe its relevance in the universe and riff on its practical applications was often parodied—like in the standing
Vogue
joke about space travel, “Zero gravity … I
see scarves!
”
But Polly Mellen’s brainstorming was also the standard by which other fashion editors were judged. How else was one to properly execute the job of choosing clothes for a living and putting them on beautiful girls than to exaggerate the importance of every detail? If millions of American women were going to make major wardrobe decisions because of the photos in
Vogue
, didn’t they deserve someone who took the mission of channeling their fashion energy seriously? If zero gravity didn’t make you see scarves, what was the point of being a fashion editor?
But for the first time in years, Polly Mellen wasn’t coming to Paris. Just before the collections, she had a personal catastrophe. During a party she and her husband were giving at the summer home they rented in Connecticut, the deck, which was built out over a rock ledge, separated from the house and sent Polly and many of her sixty guests toppling fifteen feet down. One woman died of a heart attack, and there were many other serious injuries—including Polly’s sister-in-law, who broke both legs and her pelvis. Polly herself escaped with two hematomas on her arms, and considered herself fortunate because “a nail missed my spinal column by
that much.“
Because of her injuries, she decided to skip the collections, even though it meant missing Denis Piel’s couture debut.
It also meant missing one of the most talked-about runway shows of the decade. The fashion press had been quietly grumbling for years that the couture was dead—that it had become nothing more than an expensive public relations spectacle to increase awareness of certain fashion
names
and increase the value of lucrative licensing deals being made by the couture houses. But then Yves St. Laurent had hidden away for six months and created a collection that inspired everyone. In his show—which, as always, was the grand finale of the collections—he offered some fashion direction
and
he included some clothes that humans could wear.
St. Laurent also brilliantly co-opted the resurging interest in Picasso. As the collections were underway in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was holding a massive retrospective of the painter’s work, as important in its artistic scope as its hype. The demand for tickets to the show was unprecedented, as was the viewing policy: for the first time in major museum history, tickets had to be purchased in advance for a certain day and a certain two-hour time period. With its restrictive pricing and excessive hype of a marketable brand name, the Picasso show was the first “designer” art exhibit. St. Laurent had chosen an economically convenient time to be inspired by the late painter’s work.
But Polly Mellen would miss out on all the excitement. Which meant there would be even more pressure than usual during Gia’s first Paris collections sittings for American
Vogue.
The magazine had a full-time editor in Paris and had hired a young American student, Charla Carter, to act as a bilingual gofer and assist the incoming editors during the collections. Robert Turner,
Vogue’s
only male fashion editor, was assigned, at the last minute, to do the sitting.
And then Denis Piel announced that his photographic innovation would be to shoot the collections in available daylight
only. Vogue
had never shot collections during the day. Couturiers wanted the clothes during the day so they could be sold, and, since the earliest days of transatlantic travel,
Vogue
editors had always stayed on New York time while in Paris—to minimize boat, and later, jet lag. Besides the daylight, Piel also wanted more than just the simple props usually used for the hotel room shots. Among other things, he required the two little boys St. Laurent had dressed as harlequins from a Picasso painting to add a theatrical flair to his runway show.
“Denis loved the
mise en scène
and he wanted props,” recalled Charla Carter. “We had to bring in special armchairs and couches. On the desk had to be a Hermès pigskin agenda, nothing else. He was quite extravagant. His bills at the Hotel Crillon … breakfast omelet with truffles, $50, five bottles of red wine at dinner.
“That was just added to the normal extravagance, which made the
Vogue
collections pictures a bigger deal than everyone else’s. They had photographers shooting the shows
themselves, and the pictures were then immediately developed. All the editors who had been sitting in the front row would be driven back to the office, this beautiful room in the Place du Palais Bourbon. They spent hours poring over the slides and cutting down the choices. There was a whole security system for the clothes, since you were getting these garments worth $30,000 and they had to be returned or
Vogue
paid. There was this whole stable of
Vogue
chauffeurs. And you knew that after the pictures were shot, they had to be developed
immediately
, so they could be sent to New York on the Concorde to be on Mr. Liberman’s desk. So they had a whole complicated system worked out.
“Like, we always had kimonos for the models. And each girl, when she arrived, even if she didn’t want to, had to put on one of these navy and white cotton kimonos. If they weren’t dressed like that when having hair and makeup done, it was a
scandal
. … We’d always have coffee pots, rented refrigerators filled with juices, huge bowls of dried fruits, cookies, big plates of cheese, goat cheese, little white round chevre. I’d have to go out and buy from markets, they didn’t have services in Paris then, nobody delivered. So I had to buy the food, and make sure I had Polly’s pins when she called. She had this little stuffed tomato on a leather cord around her neck with straight pins and T-pins. And I had to make sure the prop kit was stocked—the metallic suitcases with everything in them. Belt-hole punchers, falsies, tampons, pins, malaria tablets. Double-edge tape. If Polly was on set and she screamed ‘double-edge tape!’ well, you better have it. It’s the single most useful stylist’s tool.”
Even by
Vogue
’s standards for Paris craziness, July 1979 was madness. “I had difficulty with the editor there,” recalled John Sahag. “He was a son of a bitch. The situation is, we’re in Paris to shoot the collections. It’s a big fucking deal. Everybody from New York is panicking. Denis has his own thing also. He was a little bit of an
arriviste
, that’s what we call them. He’s in a battle. He wants to shoot the clothes the way he wants them. But at the same time he’s nervous about what they’ll say in New York. For me, I want to be able to get another assignment, but I’m looking to score some really unbelievable-looking hair. No matter who’s in
my way, I’m going to do what I want to do. And for every shot, I have to do the hair differently.”
After being told for the umpteenth time what was wrong with the way he had styled Gia’s hair, Sahag decided to have a temper tantrum of his own. He marched Gia to the hotel bathroom, screamed “Get the fuck out of here,” and slammed the door behind them. “Gia was on the bathroom floor, laughing hysterically,” Sahag recalled. “She was just so pleased to see something like that. I was so upset. I was red. And then I started to laugh like her. She goes, ‘Yeah, he’s a son of a bitch.’ She was trying to calm
me
down.”
The sessions might have been crazed, but the pictures were a huge success. The stunner was a photo of Gia, in a lace evening dress, lying down with the two harlequin boys from the runway show on either side, holding tight bouquets of flowers. All the effort to locate and redress the little boys had been well worth it. St. Laurent himself later used the picture for his own book as the shot that summed up the collection. American
Vogue
used twelve shots of Gia in all. Alternate versions of the same pictures appeared in the new German edition of
Vogue
, which had just started publishing out of Munich the month before and wasn’t yet able to do its own collection coverage.
Gia was becoming a big enough model that taking extraordinary measures on her behalf became ordinary. “We usually just booked a backup model for any session we used Gia,” recalled photographer Albert Watson. “She was beautiful enough that if she showed up, it was worth doing it that way.” Such a businesslike attitude was typical of Watson, a thirty-seven-year-old from Scotland who had begun his commercial photography career in the then-unlikely locale of Los Angeles before relocating to New York in the late seventies. He was known as a glossy, commercial photographer with an extremely
professional
operation. Photography wasn’t his lifestyle, it was his job. His work “team” wasn’t his “family.” He had his own family, a wife, Elizabeth, and two sons: Liz Watson ran his business, and was branching out into representing hair and makeup people.
“One time I shot with Gia the entire day,” Watson recalled, “and on the very end of the shooting we needed one
more shot. We were outside, and there was a Hell’s Angel guy on a motorbike. The guy had stopped at a traffic light and I asked if he would be used for the shot. I wanted to put Gia on the back of the motorbike with him. She was wearing a leather outfit—Montana I think. So he agreed and he made about five or six passes past the camera. I went up to her and said, ‘That was terrific’ She said, ‘Have you got the shot?’ I said yeah. She said, ‘So that’s it?’ I said, ‘That’s it.’
“She turned to the guy and said, ‘Let’s go.’ So, still wearing the clothes, she hopped on his bike and they just split. It took about three days to get the outfit back.”
But Watson’s favorite Gia story took place in Paris during an advertising session for St. Laurent during the
haute couture.
“We were shooting these dresses that were each $60,000, $70,000, $80,000,” recalled Watson, “and when Gia put on the first one, she was chewing bubble gum and snapping it. There were all these ladies there from St. Laurent to dress her. The head dresser had been with St. Laurent since the beginning—and had been at Dior with him before. She came in and she tied the bow on one of the black evening dresses a certain way. So Gia was kind of looking at this, chewing gum at the same time, and the first thing she did was untie the bow. She said, ‘No, no, no, no, it should be more like
this
,’ and she retied the bow.
“Of course, the expression on this dresser’s face was just incredible, with Gia retying the bow and snapping her gum. So eventually they retied it four or five times and they agreed it was all right. So that was fine. Gia came downstairs wearing the outfit and she saw that dinner had arrived. It was a night shooting, and there was a roast chicken there. So she walked over to the film table, picked up the film scissors, and went—in the St. Laurent dress and the bow, with the makeup and the hair—and picked up the chicken, put the scissors in and proceeded to cut the chicken in half. I must say, she didn’t get anything on the dress. Then she peeled off a leg of the chicken and just ate it. When she was done, they redid the lips and she looked beautiful.”
Gia was doing more than sustaining professional fabulousness. To the lower echelon of
fashionistas—the
assistants
who did all the drudge work for fashion editors and photographers, the models who coveted her position—Gia was becoming something of a hero.
“God, I don’t want to turn Gia into something mythological,” said Helen Murray, one of the reigning
Vogue
assistants in the late seventies, “but I would hear these stories, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who lived vicariously through them. She was doing stuff we all wanted to do but were too afraid to. This spectacular-looking girl who didn’t give a shit—I greatly admired the stories I heard about her.”
Murray worked for Polly Mellen in the mid-seventies, but also became professionally friendly with Frances Stein, the mercurial
Vogue
fashion editor who was “much scarier than Mrs. Mellen.” Stein left the magazine in 1979 to become a vice president and designer with Calvin Klein—whose exploding company was grossing over $100 million a year—and soon convinced Murray to leave for Calvin as well. She languished there in the fragrance division and received continual
Vogue
updates on the phone.