Steven Meisel

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Steven Meisel (born 1954) is an American photographer, who obtained popular acclaim with his work in US and Italian Vogue and his photographs of friend Madonna in the latter's 1992 book Sex designed by Fabien Baron. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry, shooting regularly for both US and Italian Vogue and lately W (also edited by Condé Nast).

Contents 1 Biography 2 Career 3 Supermodels maker 4 Anna & Franca 5 Fashion campaigns 6 Meisel groupies 7 Meisel's elusiveness 8 Further reading 9 External links

Biography

His fascination for beauty and models started at a young age. At that time Meisel would not play with toys, but would instead draw women all the time. He used to turn to magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as sources of inspiration for his drawings. Meisel dreamt of women from the high society like Gloria Guinness and Babe Paley, who personified to his eyes the ideas of beauty and high society . Other icons were his mother and his sister.

As he became obsessed with models such as Twiggy, Veruschka, and Jean Shrimpton, at 12 years old he asked some girlfriends to call model agencies and, by pretending to be secretaries of Richard Avedon, to get pictures of the models. To meet famous model Twiggy, the 12-year-old Meisel stood outside waiting for her at Melvin Sokolsky's studio.

He studied at the High School of Art and Design and Parsons School of Design where he attended different courses but, as affirmed in an interview with Ingrid Sischy for Vogue France, he finally majored in fashion illustration.

Career

One of Meisel's first jobs was to work for fashion designer Halston as an illustrator. Meisel never thought he could become a photographer. He admired photographers like Jerry Schatzberg, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Bert Stern. Later on, while working at Women's Wear Daily as an illustrator, he went to Elite model agency where two girls working there allowed him take pictures of some of their models. He would photograph them in his apartment in Gramercy Park or on the street: on weekdays he would work at Women's Wear Daily and on weekends with the models. One of them was Phoebe Cates. Some of these models took their pictures to Seventeen magazine to show their model books and the people at Seventeen subsequently called Meisel and asked if he wanted to work with them.

Meisel currently works for many different fashion magazines, including fashion bibles such as US and Italian Vogue, amongst others. For the latter he has been the only photograper for its cover for almost 15 years. His studio is located in New York at 64 Wooster Street but he often rents the studios at Pier59.

Supermodels maker

Meisel is credited with "discovering" or promoting the careers of many supermodels, most importantly, Linda Evangelista, who reached stardom by dyeing and cutting her hair according to Meisel's whims. Recently he has propelled models Heather Bratton , Coco Rocha and James Rousseau to fame by regularly featuring them in Italian Vogue. Among his favourite models can also be cited Shana Zadrick, Stella Tennant, Karen Elson, Kristen McMenamy, Elsa Benitez and Kylie Bax. Today Meisel is particularly fascinated with new models like Jessica Stam, Lily Donaldson, Hannelore Knuts, Missy Rayder and Elise Crombez. Other models Meisel celebrated in the pages of Vogue were: Natalia Vodianova, Gisele Bundchen, Malgosia Bela, Caroline Ribeiro, Carmen Kass, Jacquetta Wheeler, Devon Aoki, Emily Sandberg, Frankie Rayder, Eugenia Silvia, Guinevere Van Seenus, Angela Lindvall, Liisa Winkler, Amy Wesson and Kim Peers.

Anna & Franca

Meisel has been a protégé of both reigning queens of the fashion press, editors-in-chief Franca Sozzani (Italian Vogue) and Anna Wintour (US Vogue).

Fashion campaigns

Amongst others, Meisel has shot campaigns for Versace, Valentino, Dolce & Gabbana and Calvin Klein (for whom he has shot very controversial campaigns).^{[citation needed]} He is a big friend of designer Anna Sui for whom he also shot several campaigns.

Meisel groupies

He has also been the force behind the career of many fashion people he regularly used on his Vogue shoots, such as hairstylists Oribe Canales, Garren, Orlando Pita and Guido Palau, and make-up artists François Nars, Laura Mercier, Pat McGrath and the late Kevyn Aucoin .

Meisel's elusiveness

Meisel is notorious for rarely giving interviews or being photographed. He was interviewed by Ingrid Sischy for Vogue France^{[citation needed]}

Meisel is also one of very few famous photographers that does not have a proper book solely dedicated to his work. A book collecting some of his photographs called Steven Meisel^[1] was published by German Teneues Buchverlag in 2003 and totally sold out.

Further reading

1. ^ Meisel, S. Steven Meisel (Broschiert) (German website), Teneues Buchverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-570-19421-3

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