Walk-In (My) Closet: Grace Coddington: A Memoir

"To me, fashion falls into one of two categories. It can be instantly appealing and you would like to wear it; or it is something you wouldn’t necessarily wear but it is driving fashion forward." -Grace Coddington

Who is Grace Coddington?

Even after reading Grace’s memoir, I’m still not sure I can answer that question; her book was not so much a soul-searching journey to the past as much as a quick overview of events and ideas that have shaped the model-turned-creative director of Vogue.

Grace Coddington, 72

But I am okay with that—Grace’s talent lies in composing photographs, not prose.

As you may or may not already know, Grace’s name entered pop culture with a bang when The September Issue (2009) was released. She was a grudging participant in the film, which documented her and Anna Wintour’s hot-and-cold professional relationship—a relationship that, nonetheless, has resulted in mesmerizing fashion editorials.

Before her gig as creative director, Grace was a Vogue cover model, whose camera-ready “characters” (she insists she was not a “pretty” model) attained icon status.

Grace's iconic five-point cut by Vidal Sassoon

A bad car accident that happened when her career began to take off changed all that. One of her eyelids was torn away; five plastic surgeries later, Grace's face still didn't look quite right.

She began thinking about entering other aspects of fashion when someone well placed told her, rather bluntly, “Grace, you should become a fashion editor. You’re too old to be a model” (86). She soon began a job at British Vogue as a junior fashion editor.

Grace modelling with cat

Once she'd decided to move to the States, Grace became the design director at Calvin Klein. I love how candidly she owns up to the fact she wasn’t the right “fit” for the new role:

The head designer in my department … was prompted to create a stole in heavy duchesse satin decorated with motifs taken from the ceiling of the Alhambra Palace in Granada. The stole was then beaded in Paris by Lesage, the celebrated couture embroiderer who had worked with every grand fashion house from Yves Saint Laurent and Dior to Schiaparelli and Chanel. As you can imagine, it turned out to be probably the most expensive stole in the world, and if I had been more objective, I would have seen that it was not a suitable item to include in a collection of what, after all, was a sportswear company.

When Grace finally began working with Anna Wintour at Vogue, everything fell into place. Despite both of them being uncompromising visionaries, who butt heads from time to time, Anna maintains that the day Grace quits, she will quit, too.