Vogue Stories, Part Five: Lauren Hutton, Gucci Westman, and Others Share Their Most Memorable Moments (2024)

On the cusp of a new year, as we look forward, it’s vital to also look back, to discover what made us who we are, to trace our steps as we plot our next moves. For many of us, it begins with an image. In “Vogue Stories, Part Five,” Lauren Hutton recounts how, years ago in Paris, it took Richard Avedon’s endless curiosity to reveal what had subconsciously propelled her toward a life as a model. Anthony Vaccarello recalls a groundbreaking photograph that first called to him as a budding designer, while Pucci’s Peter Dundas tells of carving out a fashion education in the vintage magazine racks and book stalls of Paris and New York. And sought-after makeup artist Gucci Westman shares the inner workings behind the creation of some of those thousand-word Vogue pictures that send us ever into the future as they remind us of the past.

Click through the pages below to read their Vogue stories.

Read Vogue Stories, Part One,Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.

LAUREN HUTTON
The girl raised in the Florida swamplands grew up to be a woman with an unrivaled 26 covers of Vogue, who, after more than 40 years before the lens of legendary photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, continues to embark on one of the most unconventionally glamorous careers in the business. Perhaps still more surprising is what spurred her on the path.
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The first time I saw a copy of Vogue, it was rolled up under my 24-year-old mother’s gloved arm as she strode out our door leaving for work. Or rather, she was on her way to the hairdresser’s to have her platinum-blonde Veronica Lake pageboy combed out before work. As she walked out into the Miami sunshine, she flashed a brilliant World War II glamour-girl smile, thanks to a precision red shade that, because of rationing, was hard to get in those days. She worked in the only skyscraper (“seventeen stories plus the Pan-Am penthouse!” she’d say) on the southeastern coast, the Alfred I. duPont building (she always said the I). She loved work; she’d started at the bank, in payroll, in the lobby, where the hairdresser’s salon was also located; and she later worked in another department in the building.

I was probably three or four years old. My father, whom I never knew except through the letters and drawings he sent, was in England serving in World War II; he and my mother were about to divorce. My mother and I had moved from Charleston, South Carolina—a town still more Victorian than Edwardian in those days and which had been my family’s home for many years—to what just as well might have been Las Vegas to them: 1940s Miami, a wild, racy place. We lived with her married older sister’s family, and though Mother was home every night by 6:00 p.m., the fact that she went off and worked in a giant skyscraper alongside all those strange men was considered “overly modern” back home. She was a judge’s youngest daughter, well educated and well mannered and beautiful—she spoke a very Southern French, and decades later, when I made films in Paris, the crews would line up to hear her speak, including Yves Montand. She dressed wonderfully, a silhouette like a borzoi, and I know she felt brave every day, sliding through all of that marble and glass!

While my father was illustrating pinup girls for the weekly military newspaper Stars and Stripes, every day my mother would march off to work like almost all of the women in America, to help save her country. Hard to imagine now that those were the first women in history along with those on the other side of the Atlantic who held jobs en masse, with independence and glee! The rolled Vogue was most often under her arm as she left, and twentysome years later I guess I became part of what had given her and Rosie the Riveter, and millions like them, the courage and audacity to enter the work force.

In all my years with Vogue, working with mentors like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon on hundreds of extraordinary, magical stories, I’d always thought I became a model to earn the money to go out and see the great world. And it’s true—I saw a lot. But Dick Avedon’s insatiable curiosity and questions untangled the real reasons, one of the great traumas of my life that I’d buried since my father died when I was still young, before I was ever allowed to see him. Years ago Dick and I were in Paris; in those days, the collections were shown all day to editors and grandes dames, and the magazines would shoot all night. We’d been working for three days and nights, and being the only model, I was bone tired and at one point fell asleep on the studio sofa between shots. I woke still in position with Dick shaking me, saying, “Lauren, look at you—you’re sleeping in a pose!” “This is the way I’ve always slept,” I said. “But why?” Dick asked.

With his letters, my father would include pictures he’d drawn for Stars and Stripes, all those forties poster girls, Rita Hayworth– and Betty Grable–style, and as a child I thought that if I looked like them, if I slept by the front window, he would come and pull the screen from outside and take me away. From a very early age I’d learned to sleep in imitation of his covers—elbows out, my hands curled at my ears or one hand at my ear, one down by my hip. As Dick pulled all these answers out of me for the first time, in the dark of the studio, with the hairdresser and the crew waiting outside, he sat next to me and patted my arm; he was wonderful, a great reporter—he always got the story behind the picture. And I was crying and he was laughing; his laughter was delighted because we both knew how important this was. “You were born to do this!” he said.

I now realize that becoming a model came from both my father and my mother. It’s why that image of my mother, dressed in her indescribably Vogue-ishly World War working-woman American chic, carrying the pictures that inspired her, consumed me then and stays with me still.

ANTHONY VACCARELLO Well before he even thought about becoming a designer, a revolutionary fashion photograph struck a chord with Anthony Vaccarello; more than two decades later, he found his way into the pages of the magazine whose images first spoke to him.
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Growing up in Brussels, I wasn’t always obsessed with fashion; it was more something that was growing slowly and slowly inside of me. Certain images awakened my interest: The first picture I have in my mind of American Vogue is the first cover by Anna Wintour. I remember that girl with the embroidered top and the jeans, such an amazing image. It was 1988, and it was very modern at the time. Now stylists do this a lot, the very chic top paired with the very casual jeans. But back then it was very new, it was very different for Vogue, it was such a cool, strong image, and it has always stayed with me.

My own clothes were first shown in Vogue in September 2010; it was the first magazine that gave me the opportunity to show my work, in fact. I had been introduced to [Fashion News Director] Mark Holgate through Kirna Zabête, and he called me to organize a shoot in Paris; it was the biggest production I’d had for my clothes yet—the hair, the makeup, everything—and it all came out perfectly. As soon as the issue was out, I ran to the newsstand to buy a copy and show it to my boyfriend. Because I was a Parisian designer, it was very important to have that recognition; it was very exciting, a dream come true.

PETER DUNDAS

It’s perhaps little surprise that the designer who revived the storied house of Pucci built his aesthetic from the trove of vintage fashion images he began collecting years ago.

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I think you would be challenged to find a designer for whom Vogue does not occupy a prominent part of their fashion memory. For me it has been a particularly rich and long-spanning love affair, as I thrive on the images in vintage fashion magazines. Combing through the stacks and stacks in the basem*nt of bookstores in New York as a student, I drew inspiration from pictures of my American heroes Beene, Gernreich, and Sprouse, and their muses. Later at the bouquinistes by the Seine in Paris I would discover masters like YSL, Cardin, and Courrèges—images that made you rediscover that initial flame that propelled you toward this crazy business. The magazines had as much to do with whom I am today as the long hours I spent on the school benches; they gave my dreams wings to fly. Today there is an element of reality in fashion that I appreciate; it feels in tune with who we are as a society and it’s right for now, but I can still count on those beautiful pages from Vogue, many taken half a century ago, to remind me of why I’m here and why I love so much what I do.

GUCCI WESTMAN
Growing up in Sweden, young “Chelsea Westman” wouldn’t encounter American Vogue until she was in her twenties, yet when she finally did, she knew it was where she wanted to be. Here, the makeup artist behind some of the magazine’s most inspired fashion stories tells how she got the job.
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Around 2000 or 2001, I was living in Los Angeles and working with Bruce Weber and Annie Leibovitz and doing music videos with Spike Jonze; that's when Trudi Tapscott mentioned me to Grace Coddington, and after I met with Grace, I ended up doing two Vogue shoots back to back, one with Bruce Weber and an Arthur Elgort shoot with Stella Tennant. The most special thing about working on both was that I had no idea if I was being “good” or “bad”—I was just so nervous about creating those incredible, iconic, timeless images. When we got back to the airport in L.A. after shooting in the desert, I was in a van with Grace going to the various terminals, and when we arrived at mine, she got out of the front seat and I didn’t know why. “I haven’t felt this way about a makeup artist since I discovered Pat McGrath,” she said, “and Pat’s so difficult to get now, but I really want you to be on my team.” And we hugged and I think I maybe cried a little—I know I didn’t sleep for a week when I got back to New York! All of a sudden I had all these assignments for Vogue.

When you work with Grace, you’re inventing a story. I’ve worked in video, and I’ve worked in movies, and for me that whole narrative sensibility comes from things trying to seem authentic and natural. I love a character; I love a story. A narrative for me is a no-brainer—it doesn’t have to be literal; even an adaptation is much more straightforward than if someone said, “Do drag-queen makeup.” I have to think about exactly where to put the eyebrow. I am such a sucker for nostalgia, so channeling that mood is a dream for me.

For “Alice in Wonderland” [December 2003], the goal was to make Natalia Vodianova look like a little girl—but a cool, interesting girl. It was a three-day shoot, and every day Grace would pick me up from her hotel, and every day the call time got earlier and earlier. We left at 3:45 a.m. the first day, but Karl [Lagerfeld, in the role of the “visiting royal”] had to be at work at a certain hour, so suddenly call time got to be 3:00 a.m., and finally ten to three. Grace was never a second late—during our three-hour car ride, we’d talk; we had a good time. And that’s the aspect of the transformation that I love: the collaboration, the interactive way of working. It makes people feel really good even when they’re pushed to do things they might not want to. But ultimately it brings a lot of joy, the reward that comes after creating pictures that are truly great.

Click here to read Part One: Sarah Jessica Parker, Isabella Rossellini, Vera Wang, and Joseph Altuzarra.

Click here to read Part Two: Karen Elson, Arthur Elgort, Proenza Schouler's Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, and Ali MacGraw.

Click here to read Part Four: Iman, Alexander Wang, Peter Copping, and Guido Palau.