Thing of Beauty (30 page)

“I was trying to convince her what an opportunity she had, regardless of whether she liked the work,” Long said. “Being Italian myself, I didn’t like the preoccupation with the Aryan neo-Nazi look the agencies had. Here was this attractive Italian girl going into the land of the Vikings, where blondes have more fun and Jewish girls are getting nose jobs so they can look like they come from Sweden. I felt there were Italian and Jewish girls who were seeking their own standard of beauty to identify with.

“Gia was a brunette woman with full lips and big bosoms: that’s
certainly
a standard of beauty. She was the first to bring that look in. It didn’t exemplify the highest socioeconomic echelon. It was more of an urban American look. I said, ‘Gia, there are more dark-haired girls in America than
blondes, and they would look up to you.’ Gia was what an Italian, Spanish, Jewish girl wants to look like.

“She just hadn’t discovered what her media should be. She was convinced that photography wasn’t creative, and I reinforced that. She was surrounded with photographers who were trying to convince her that they were artists. I tried to convince her that
she was the art
and they were just capturing her. There was a model around at the time who was a friend of mine and Gia’s, and she was being teased by this photographer. ‘He keeps saying I’m distracting his artistic temperament,’ she’d say. I told her the next time he hassles you, simply say that light bounces off of me and creates what you see. If there’s art in this room, it’s not you, it’s
me.”

F
ashion illustrator Joe Eula had, at the height of Studio 54, jumped off the Halston bandwagon to save his own life. He feared he could drug and drink and screw himself to death. By leaving the company that had become his biggest client, he found himself with a lot of bridges burned: he had blown off a very lucrative arrangement with American
Vogue
, doing fashion sketches and commentating around the country, to commit full-time to Halston. But luckily, Joe Eula was still
Joe Eula
to someone: one client’s burnout was another’s time-honored genius. So Italian
Bazaar
discovered Joe Eula, giving him all the magazine illustrating work he could do and covering the walls of their Milan office complex with his paintings.

The Italian
Bazaar
scene was, predictably, getting out of hand. Rumors began circulating that Peponi Della Schiava’s vanity publication was becoming too vain even for the beauty-industrial complex. The drugs and drink at the photo sessions and after were becoming legendary. Stories were circulating of a model booking with no photographers, just Peponi and his pals. This was common enough at the bottom of the business: almost every model had a story about being tricked by a phony photographer or being seduced after a filmless photo session. But it wasn’t supposed to happen to real, working models from major agencies. And it wasn’t supposed to be done by married executives at major magazines.
“Look, I don’t want to say anything because Peponi has been awfully good to me, he saved my life, really,” said Joe Eula. “Let’s just say he’s Italian with a capital I, as in ‘I can do whatever I want.’”

Some of the photographers who had brought
Bazaar
fame had already stopped working for the magazine. Gia wasn’t doing much for
Bazaar
either, but she still did some posing for Joe Eula.

“We would just hole up in
Bazaar’s
office on Seventy-ninth Street for a weekend,” recalled Eula. “Gia liked a little drink you know, so we had to get ourselves motivated. We’d try some gin. When that was done we needed some powder.

“She could be sitting there in that awful goddamn office, with this awful office furniture and we’d turn it into a modern ice palace, according to what we had to illustrate. Lizzette would be there too. ‘Our job today will be furs,’ she’d say, but we didn’t have the furs. Just some pieces of cloth; or a photograph of something hanging on a hanger, and we had to make it become real.

“Gia would get into poses that were extraordinary. She could hold it together, maybe because she was so stoned, for what literally could be an hour. With me, Gia didn’t have to make up. She didn’t have to have silk stockings on—she just had to have that leg. If it was an evening gown, all she’d really need was a pair of high heels. She could have her hair all raw or tied in a kerchief and she could make it the most marvelous turban or whatever came out of her. We
talked
it. She’d get herself in the attitude and she’d feel this great luxury. She was a true actress. She really was, in front of me, the movie actress, the star, wearing 5 & 10 shit and making you think it’s the greatest thing since sewing.”

Gia had this impact on the people she worked with every day. It no longer mattered how well or how badly she treated them because her reputation always preceded her. And the camera generally found something in her she had trouble recognizing herself. She was a star. And when she showed up—often hours late—she was not so much delivering herself as her career, which was now an important thing to get a piece of.

Her “look” was now a presence in the business: a palpable commodity, a thing of beauty. Fashion editors and photographers referred to it when trying to tell other models what they wanted, would-be models invoked it when describing themselves. When Scavullo and Diana Ross decided to change the singer’s glamorous image by slicking back her hair and dressing her down for an album cover, they thought of Gia: not the way she looked on-camera, but the way she appeared at the studio in the morning, or in the clubs at night.

“We called Gia up and said, ‘Can we borrow your jeans, the ones with the hole?’” recalled Scavullo. “Those are Gia’s jeans in that picture. Diana Ross said she wanted to keep them after the shooting, but Gia wouldn’t let her.”

Gia liked to tell a story about how photographers picked up on her style. “She told me that she would be at Sandy’s and Andrea Blanche would come up,” recalled one friend. “You know how when you’re relaxing and you undo the top button of your pants? Gia said that sometimes she and Sandy would lounge around like that—and then next thing she knew, she would see it in
Vogue.
Andrea would pick up little things from them.”

“Gia dressed street chic
way
before its time,” said Scavullo’s fashion editor Sean Byrnes. “And she’s the one who brought that look right into
Vogue
magazine. She just gave a modern, street-smart look to photography. She made it believable yet unbelievable. She’d wear black pants and white men’s shirts and black flat pumps, or a motorcycle jacket, and, of course, the beat-up jeans. And she made it so
stylish
, she looked so stunning. You could put a woman in a couture gown next to her and she looked better. She was the only one to do that in modeling at that time.

“In real life, a lot of models don’t wear makeup and they don’t look so hot. But Gia looked beautiful with no makeup. She also had the most beautiful breasts of any model I’ve ever worked with in my life, and I’ve been doing
Cosmo
covers for fifteen years. I dress these girls. And Gia had an incredible body. She exuded a sexuality without trying.

“She was very clever and she had a good brain. She was good at figuring out people, it was not easy to fool her…. You know, models are models. Models are beautiful, but
very seldom do they get any element of their life in the photo. They’re doing it as a job, and they do it well. But Gia brought some of what she had lived into her photos, and that’s what made her really special.”

In May of 1979, the pesky art-versus-commerce debate that had always hung over the world of commercial photography was settled once and for all. The news came in a
New York Times Magazine
profile of Alexander Liberman, the sixty-six-year-old Condé Nast editorial director. The first paragraph of the article would be invoked in the industry for years to come. “It’s a mistake to consider fashion journalism an art,” Liberman declared. “True art doesn’t belong in the medium anymore. I say this to my friends, to writers and photographers: ‘Do what I do in my life! Do what is necessary. Take the pictures, write the articles I need for my magazine, and then use the money you make for your private, creative purposes. Don’t put your deepest soul into this kind of work!’”

Liberman pronounced that he had recently come to realize that he had been “kidding myself and the public. I know I’ll get shot for this, but I don’t consider photography an art.” The quote appeared right next to a picture of him walking with Avedon through the photographer’s recent show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had received both art-world accolades and a
Newsweek
cover.

Since the Condé Nast magazines were where photography was first elevated to art, Liberman’s words amounted to a weighty public attack. It didn’t matter how commercial the publications seemed to be getting, and how outraged the photographers were about the monthly reader’s surveys—the dreaded “Clements Reports”—that produced a score for each page in the magazine. As long as
Vogue
could still be …
Vogue
, they could justify the way that making fashion pictures controlled their lives. But here was Liberman, in
The New York Times
, saying that what they did had no intrinsic value and that the only standard their work had to meet, or
could
meet, was that of public acceptance.

Some photographers never forgave him. “Liberman is a snake and phony of the worst order and a phony artist,” said photographer Peter Beard, who had already been out
of the Condé Nast fold for years and might have been the company’s ultimate disgruntled former employee. “Art is like a Rorschach test. You can’t pass if you don’t have what it takes. Liberman is a ‘designer artist’: that’s what I’d call it.”

Right or wrong, Liberman’s new approach was highly successful.
Vogue
had more than saved itself from the 1970 midi skirt disaster. The
Times
article attached numbers to the trends, and now everyone knew that
Vogue’s
circulation had risen seventy-three percent in the previous five years, to just over a million. In just the past three years,
Vogue’s
gross advertising revenues had more than doubled, to nearly $22 million.

Vogue
staffers had begun to refer to their magazine as The Bible again. But this time, it was more a description of its physical density than its previous air of infallibility. It could no longer dictate fashion. Its center—the decades of creative arrogance and unmitigated gall to tell people what to wear and care about—had not held.
Vogue
now
took
pulses rather than quickening them. And its financial success was being measured in such astronomical figures—amounts no one had dreamed of a few years before—that it was easy to believe that any excesses involved in documenting this less brave, less new fashion world were being tolerated for the right reasons.

Denis Piel was American
Vogue’s
hot new find, the next underappreciated photographer in his mid-thirties to be summoned from Paris, where he was doing magazine work. The difference between Piel and the French Mafia before him was the difference in the business between 1975 and 1979: Piel was brought over with far less major magazine experience in Europe, and was almost immediately given a level of
carte blanche
that made even the regular stable of indulged
Vogue
shooters blanch.

Piel considered himself extremely lucky to have risen so quickly, and the more established
Vogue
photographers couldn’t have agreed more. They ascribed his success to luck, and perhaps the innovation of his signature range of prone poses. In most of Piel’s most memorable shots, the models were either sitting in a chair, leaning across a sofa,
or reclining on a table or floor—often with a drink nearby, since Piel was a wine connoisseur. What could be more appropriate for this go-go time when models were so inebriated with their own success—and the inebriants that came with it—that they could barely get up in the morning? What a masterstroke for
Vogue
to find a photographer who specialized in beautiful, romantic shots of girls literally
swept off their feet.
“All the sudden Piel shows up in New York and he’s doing girls lying down ready to throw up,” recalled Alex Chatelain. “I hated it at the time. Now I see it as good, but I hated him then.”

Piel booked Gia for his first job with
Vogue
, along with hairstylist John Sahag—who, like Piel, had come to America via Australia and then Paris. With a revolving cast of makeup artists and editors, Piel established Gia and Sahag as part of his regular team for the deluge of work that was suddenly thrown his way: especially his contracts with American
Vogue
and Christian Dior in Paris. At Dior, he was performing the same function as Chris von Wangenheim was in the United States—creating signature magazine ads for all the different boutiques and licensees the couture house had in Europe. But the European Dior Boutique ads were ten-to-twenty-page
groupages
that appeared regularly in fashion magazines in Italy, France and Britain: they were omnipresent. Gia wasn’t officially “the Dior girl”—she had no contract with the company, and simply got her normal advertising day rate and residuals—but she might as well have been. Through Piel, she would be in ninety percent of the Dior Boutique shots appearing that fall in Europe.

With all due speed, Piel was given the plum assignment at
Vogue:
shooting the Paris collections. He took Nancy Donahue and Gia, whose second
Cosmo
cover, a shot of her barely contained in a yellow Giorgio Sant’Angelo bathing suit, was the focal point of America’s newsstands. This was Gia’s third time at the collections, but going with American
Vogue
was different from going with any other magazine. American
Vogue
had all but invented European collection coverage. While the world’s other fashion magazines tried to outdo each other,
Vogue
was above the throng trying to outdo itself.
Vogue
was like
The New York Times
or CBS News and the Paris collections were its equivalent
of the presidential elections: when the organization’s creativity and professional efficiency were put to their ultimate tests.