Madonna and Steven Meisel

[ryan]

Thanks so much XXL

This footage should be permanently kept for reference to prove the point that all of those so called "untouched" leaks of Madonna in this campaign were grossly tampered with to make her look like an old hag. I have seen people use those "untouched" photos in loads of articles etc on the net to claim that Madonna looks old and hideous. They have been touched up so much the other way by anti-Madonna people to make Madonna look as old and unattractive as possible. When you watch the video of the making of this campaign, you can see just how beautiful Madonna really looks.

Jazzy, whenever there's a video camera around, Madonna always has a jar of vaseline to smear

[Roland Barthes]

[Roland Barthes]

[Roland Barthes]

[XXL]

[ryan]

That photo session is everything. Hollywood Glitz n Glamor.

[ryan]

That pic would be a delight if someone shopped in Gaga's face over the pig.

[XXL]

^

[Shine]

That pic would be a delight if someone shopped in Gaga's face over the pig.

The poor pig probably doesn't deserve that !

[Roland Barthes]

[Elysium]

[ryan]

[Shine]

The expression on her face is exquisite !

[XXL]

At half-hour intervals over two days in mid-September, some of the most influential figures in fashion arrived at Industria Superstudio. The vast studio, a scene to begin with, became — for 48 hours, anyway — the focal point of the fashion universe.

Some visitors were from the pop past, like Warhol superstar Jane Holzer. Others came from stock of a more recent vintage, like designer Stephen Sprouse. There were powers of the present, too: rocker Lenny Kravitz, actor Kyle MacLachlan, models Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, designers Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi. They’d all been assembled — 39 strong — for a sort of group ego trip. The hottest photographer in their world had asked each of them to sit for a portrait. They’d been chosen.

Behind the camera was Steven Meisel, 38. The object of fierce bidding in the recent magazine war between Vogue and Hearst’s Harper’s Bazaar, Meisel ended up the highest-paid photographer in fashion — Conde Nast Publishing’s $2-million man. Meisel also pulls in a seven-figure income as an advertising photographer for just about everyone who’s anyone in fashion — The Gap, Revlon, Valentino, Anne Klein, Calvin Klein, Gian Franco Ferre, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, Lancome, and Barneys, to name only a few.

More important for now, Meisel is the man behind Sex, the sure-to-be-controversial photo book of raw hetero-, homo-, and omni-sexual fantasies (to be published October 21), starring and more or less written by Madonna, the world’s most advanced human publicity-seeking missile. It was inevitable that the ultimate exhibitionist would find common cause with this master imagician. What’s more surprising is that the ambitious blonde and her Boswell meet as equals. Despite her power and wealth, Madonna still needs people like Meisel. She puts on the show, but he immortalizes it. And in his small world, Meisel is as well known and as powerful as she is.

A fashion Pygmalion, he “cultivates” and “trains” models — “the girls.” The naturalist snapshot style that has dominated fashion photography lately isn’t his thing. “Women today are striving to be perfect, to be the ultimate Barbie doll,” Meisel told England’s Independent. “I can’t think back in history where women have been so plastic. I mean, how many women are going out to have face-lifts and are having their teeth done and are dyeing their hair? Sociologically, it’s definitely a modern thing.”

[XXL]

But many competitors consider Meisel a scavenger of the past, a sort of re-photographer. “He does a very good job of systematically making a story out of other photographers’ styles,” says Bert Stern, who threatened legal action over photographs of Madonna that Meisel copied from Stern’s famous 1962 “last sitting” with Marilyn Monroe.

Meisel has also cribbed from Brassai in shooting Madonna. “Everyone is influenced,” Stern goes on. “That’s natural. But he takes.” Stern sighs. “We live in an age of nostalgia. It’s what’s going on, I guess.” Meisel’s canny, postmodern samplings are all of a piece with the fin de siecle ragpicking that has given us everything from the AT&T Building to haute couture influenced by rap music.

Frequently, insecure fashion clients hire him because he has the eye and the buzz. Editors love him. Mirabella, Elle, and Bazaar have all thought of hiring him. Bazaar’s top editors, several of whom have worked steadily with him for years, are apparently still smarting from his recent rejection. They replied to requests for interviews through a spokeswoman, who said, “Your quotes should come from Vogue.”

“He’s widely acknowledged as one of the superstars of fashion photography,” says his Vogue boss, Anna Wintour, who earns far less than Meisel does.

“He is one of the few,” agrees top Elle photographer Gilles Bensimon. “He knows fashion better than anybody, perhaps.”

Advertising clients hail him, too. “He makes Valentino very modern, and that is very important,” says the couturier’s partner, Giancarlo Giammetti. He also brings out the best in the troops. “People try to go to the limit for him,” says Ronnie Cooke, the creative director of Barneys New York Advertising. “What other photographer has both a sense of style and a sense of humor?”

Models die to work with him. The daily fantasies that inform the work in most fashion-photography studios are taken to the nth degree in Meisel’s. “He makes you believe in whatever it is you’re supposed to be from the minute you walk in the door,” says Cindy Crawford. “You walk out thinking you took the most brilliant pictures ever. He makes you look . . . genius, basically. There’s so much drivel out there. Working with Steven is fashion at its most fun. You feel you’re doing art.”

[Shine]

Very interesting read, thanks !

[XXL]

Or at least artifice. Meisel’s work is controlled, graphic, idealized, strangely beautiful, provocative, and always artificial. So inspection yields little about the man behind the camera. Artifice is also Meisel’s mask. In fact, everything about him seems calculated to conceal. He rides around in a chauffeured, tinted-window Mercedes he calls his Darth Vader — mobile, usually surrounded by impossibly beautiful models or a pack of acolytes dressed just like him.

He looks like a Jewish Cherokee, with thick, straight black hair cascading to his shoulders past dark eyes and extra-thick brows and lashes. He has worn only black since leaving high school. His Industria outfit was typical. Black boots, jeans, turtle-neck, trench coat, and a do-rag bandanna under a black rabbit hat with flying fur earflaps — never mind the weather.

Ah, that hat. It’s been mocked by the New York Times, ridiculed in the bitchy fashion world as a cover-up for baldness (which Meisel denies). But like the black rain hat he dons for less formal occasions, it is also admired as a compelling signature by people who spend their lives in pursuit of such things.

And that, it turns out, is precisely the point of the exercise at Industria. The elect have been asked to write down what they do on a small paper sign, and pose — one by one — wearing Meisel’s furry hat.

Linda Evangelista, Meisel’s muse, wrote, “I serve.” Quentin Crisp wore Meisel’s hat over his own and announced, “I do nothing.” Jane Holzer was a “retail slut” and wore two of Meisel’s hats. Nan Kempner called herself a “housewife” and wore the hat flaps up.

The results will appear soon, filling fourteen pages in Italian Vogue. And for a month at least, that famous stupid hat will be transformed into… genius.

Steven Meisel has been described that way ever since he started making a mark on the city’s downtown social life as the center of an intriguingly sinister, sexually ambiguous black-clad pack of night-crawlers. To understand Meisel, one must first grasp the importance of his ever-evolving clique. Its members are planets circling his sun, taking energy from him, and reflecting back light for the greater glory of them all.

[Guest]

Nah, he's a total "model" photographer, his work is always very posed, but in a brilliant way.

Didn't Madonna once say he's very meticulous that way & that he never captures a moment

but composes it, he's not one of those photographers that just shoots what happens.

Ritts was quite the opposite that way, u can tell he's all about that magical unpredicted moment.

Much mre suitable 4 video imo.

Yes! Very true. Meisel is a pure genius. There's lots of narrative in his work unlike Ritts who tried to embody simplified or focused emotion in his photography. Ritts was very pure in that way. More of a portrait photographer. Meisel created beautiful and captivating imagery for the most important publications with the most important people. He's my favourite photographer. He's Linda's favourite photographer too.

[XXL]

“Steven always had the ability to recognize talent in other people and bring them into a group situation,” says Deborah Marquit, a lingerie designer who met Meisel in art school. “You’re acceptable only if you’re ‘off,’ though. You have to be both different and conforming enough to want to be in the group. Steven is insecure. He needs people to see what he sees and think what he thinks. They even use the same lingo he uses. It’s what he’s had around him since the cafeteria at school.”

For those who fit the bill, Meisel’s set was and is a launching pad. Meisel ignited the cometlike career of designer Stephen Sprouse and molded the ephemeral modeling legend of Teri Toye, the post-operative transsexual who gained minor renown as 1984′s Girl of the Year. Some time later, he replaced them with three models who became known as the Trinity — Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, and Linda Evangelista. Meisel packaged them into a collective fashion force, a fantasy of image as powerful as any designer label or glossy magazine.

It would be easy to mistake Steven, Naomi, Christy, and Linda for mere updates of sixties fashion sensations David Bailey, Twiggy, the Shrimp, and Penelope Tree. Meisel has also been compared to an earlier avatar, Richard Avedon, whom he’s worshiped since grade school. At first, Meisel’s work was both slavishly imitative of and less intellectual than Avedon’s. But Meisel’s ambitions have always been different. Indeed, his vision may be more in tune with this crass mass-media era than with Avedon’s aristocratic age.

“I don’t really consider myself a photographer,” Meisel told me in an interview eight years ago, when his star was first ascendant. “I’m more of a visual and a vision type of thing. … I think I’d like to direct films. I haven’t planned it out yet. I don’t want to do what I’m doing forever.”

[XXL]

Very interesting read, thanks !

You're welcome

[XXL]

If Avedon and Andy Warhol had had a baby, he would be Steven Meisel. “When he was very young, he questioned how to develop a mystique to become an artist,” says a woman who knew him then and allowed him to make her over repeatedly, long before he did it professionally. “He was more an observer than a participant. He’d always take somebody, shape them, and then push them out and watch. Photography was just a vehicle. He has no ulterior motives at all [except to] make a scene and be in the shadows and watch. It’s so much fun that he could cause such a scene. I’m sure that’s how he sees it. It was never that deep to begin with.”

Certainly, Meisel and Madonna’s Sex is going to cause a scene. Lots of people are bound to like it. Warner Books and six foreign publishers are printing an optimistic 750,000-plus copies .(and asking $49.95 for each one). But outside that small circle of the young and liberated, many others here in Puritan America are likely — especially in this highly charged election season — to see the book as godless, utterly obscene, a call to ‘Working with Steven is comfortable for me,” Madonna says. “We have a similar sense of humor and beauty, similar tastes in life and people. He’s very theatrical, and working with him is like working with a great director.”

[XXL]

From a just-off-the-presses glimpse at 32 of the book’s 128 pages (which hold a tiny fraction of the 80,000-plus photographs Meisel ended up taking), one thing besides Madonna’s id is clear. Sex sizzles. No overt acts of intercourse are pictured, though many are suggested. Some pictures are sweet, especially the one of Madonna holding her breasts like a 12-year-old who has just discovered them. But other shots border on the medical. Is it sexy? Disgusting? Stupid? That will depend on the eye of the beholder. Madonna’s Sex, as rendered by Steven Meisel, is sure to be a sociosexual Rorschach test, if not quite a blot on our culture.

Madonna has known Meisel ever since they collaborated on the cover photograph for her second album, Like a Virgin, in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel. Today, that slutty Madonna in a white wedding dress seems downright demure. “She thrives on shocking people,” says Mark Bego, who wrote Madonna: Blonde Ambition. He’s heard that Sex also includes an eight-page section on incest. “Giving her bad publicity,” Bego says, “is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.”

[XXL]

Madonna’s penchant for provocation has caused consternation in the house that Henry Luce and Steve Ross built. “Time Warner cautioned her to tone down the book,” says Christopher Anderson, a former Time Inc. editor whose biography Madonna Unauthorized is a best-seller. “When she got nervous, Meisel bolstered her. He was the strongest advocate of whips, knives, and chains.”

Sitting in her office at Warner Books, publisher Nanscy Nei-man proudly displays the silver Mylar bag with a ghostly blue image of the singer that Sex will wear to market. Madonna “is both the medium and the message,” Neiman says. “It is Madonna’s book. Madonna wanted to push the envelope, and she found people who were capable of taking the journey with her” — meaning Meisel. “He takes a celebrity image and plays with it in situations that are playful, dangerous, provocative — however those pictures play to you.”

Neiman sounds as if she can’t wait for the brouhaha that is bound to ensue. “We know it’s gonna be controversial and it’s gonna sell books,” she says quite seriously. Then I ask her if she thinks Sex could affect this year’s presidential election, and her eyes really light up. “Wouldn’t it be fun if Murphy Brown hired Madonna as a baby-sitter?”

[XXL]

Steven Meisel is no stranger to controversies, though he’s played his out on smaller stages until now. Both his private life and his career have been filled with contretemps. The first to hit the press was his falling-out with Teri Toye and Stephen Sprouse. More recently, Meisel fell out — and back in — with Conde Nast’s American magazines. He’s also had public spats with Bert Stern and with model Christy Turlington. After she was profiled in New York and spoke about her break with the Trinity (“Model Model,” March 9, 1992), she and Meisel stopped speaking.

Today, Turlington politely declines to discuss Meisel. He, too, refused to be interviewed. He also contacted many people and “asked all of us not to talk,” says the advertising director for a major American designer. “Steven is like a publicity hound, so I don’t know why he doesn’t want this.”

Nonetheless, matters of both loyalty and Meisel’s influence on their bottom lines kept many from talking. Some of fashion’s biggest names — advertisers, designers, photo stylists, models, and magazine editors — declined to discuss Meisel. “I’d hate for our girls not to work with him,” a top model-agency executive explains. “He makes them. If they work for him, they work for anyone. He’s that powerful because he’s that good.”

[Guest]

I mean, look at the complex narrative in this. It hits you in the face and then makes you start exploring your thoughts!

[XXL]

By cutting off relations with American Vogue, Meisel had taken a considerable gamble. “He went out on a limb, but it really paid off for him,” says a stylist he’s worked with. Luckily, Meisel had a friend in Franca Sozzani, who’d first used him in 1980 at Lei and then, when she was made editor of Italian Vogue in 1988, gave him incredible freedom and a regular showcase shooting covers and multi-page spreads for almost every issue.

Meisel also enjoyed working with Sozzani’s art director, Fabien Baron. After Baron left Vogue in 1988 and opened a design studio, Meisel’s ad work increased significantly. His income, he has said, has quadrupled in the past two years.

He even bragged that he’d made more than $30,000 on advertising jobs “just for walking in the door.”

One door he didn’t like walking in much was Anna Win-tour’s. She didn’t really like him much, either. By 1990, they were taking potshots at each other in the press. Only one of his stories had run the previous year, and he’d canceled his contract. “There’s just not much discussion with him,” Wintour told WWD. Meisel responded that although “editors scream and carry on,” he was opposed to “kissing ass” and being “taken advantage of.” Friends worried aloud that Meisel was “depressed like crazy,” developing an ulcer, unable to work. He had no domestic outlet. “It just gets so tiresome,” he would complain. “What I need is freedom.”

[ryan]

Love the stuff XXL. But what happened to that sexy photo of you in your avatar?

[Jazzy Jan]

Jazzy, whenever there's a video camera around, Madonna always has a jar of vaseline to smear

You are very naughty to say that Makes Madonna sound like Cybil Shepherd back in the Moonlighting days !

[XXL]

Thanks so much XXL

This footage should be permanently kept for reference to prove the point that all of those so called "untouched" leaks of Madonna in this campaign were grossly tampered with to make her look like an old hag. I have seen people use those "untouched" photos in loads of articles etc on the net to claim that Madonna looks old and hideous. They have been touched up so much the other way by anti-Madonna people to make Madonna look as old and unattractive as possible. When you watch the video of the making of this campaign, you can see just how beautiful Madonna really looks

[XXL]