A new monograph reveals the best and most enduring photographs by Patrick Demarchelier, who redefined the way we look at fashion and glamour.
BY DAVID MASELLO
Before the great, late Bill Cunningham would famously stand on a very particular corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York City to take his brilliant, candid shots of stylish strangers, a young Patrick Demarchelier was doing something quite similar, but from an entirely different perch. It was the early 1960s, and Demarchelier, a budding photographer, was loitering at a corner of Paris’ grand Place de la Concorde. As the enchanting and wonderfully lengthy introductory essay by Brad Gooch in the new monograph, Patrick Demarchelier: Works 1970–2020 (Rizzoli), reveals, he was surreptitiously capturing beautiful young women with his camera. This wasn’t born of prurience, mind you, but rather from a deep, abiding admiration for beauty in its most natural, effortless form.
Throughout his dazzling decades-long career as a fixture for various international editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and the mastermind behind innumerable ad campaigns for the world’s most significant brands, Demarchelier’s great genius was his ability to coax out the intrinsic, unfiltered beauty in people, especially women. As designer Fabien Baron so perfectly puts it in the book, “Patrick cared more about making others happy than he did about pleasing himself. It was evident in his life and his work. And it made him the rarest of things: an artist with no ego.”
His discerning eye was a particular favorite of the iconic Calvin Klein, who is quoted in the volume as saying, “[Patrick] understood the clients he worked with. He understood the clothes. Only a few of the real greats did that—like Avedon and Penn. I’ve worked with the top photographers of our time, so when Patrick’s photographs stand out as special, they stand out among the best there is.” Indeed, to gaze upon the extraordinary parade of portraits within this lavishly scaled book is to be reminded that some of the most iconic images now eared into our cultural consciousness were first crystallized by Demarchelier’s lens.
When then–British Vogue editor-in-chief Liz Tilberis commissioned him to photograph the newly enthroned Princess Diana (a momentous occasion, as he was the first non-British photographer granted such an honor by the royal family), the resulting shots were nothing short of breathtaking and have become what we remember best. There she is, draped in her tiara and pearls, looking not just regal, but entirely approachable—a vision of accessible elegance. Consider the moment when Calvin Klein tasked him with photographing the ethereally beautiful Kate Moss. Demarchelier had her pose on the floor in a casual crouch, bare-breasted, in a pair of the designer’s jeans. The resulting photograph is a masterclass in subtlety and sophistication; it’s both discreetly elegant and utterly seductive. Then there’s his legendary 1992 Harper’s Bazaar cover shot of Linda Evangelista. He captured her with an almost immortal quality; the vision of her in that black, beaded Donna Karan bodysuit with her arm raised in a gesture of pure, unadulterated fabulousness is an image that, decades later, still gives one a thrill. As Gooch so aptly writes, “Evangelista conveyed the intensity of forties movie glamour, though devoid of any camp and full of her very contemporary presence.”
While he was perhaps most celebrated for his luminous portraits of famous women, Demarchelier’s artistry extended to fetching and powerful men in the 1990s, including the likes of Tom Cruise, Jasper Johns, Leo Castelli, and Sting. Even the handsomest of working biographers, Brad Gooch himself, confesses to having been jetted off to Paris for a Chanel ad campaign—a testament to Demarchelier’s pervasive influence.
Demarchelier, born in Paris in 1943, grew up in the gritty industrial port town of Le Havre, Normandy, with a mostly absent father. Gooch’s biography paints the picture of a self-taught photographer with a burning ambition to escape to the glamour of Paris and immerse himself in the scintillating world of fashion. “It was not lost on him that fashion photographers were as celebrated as the models they were exposing,” Gooch writes, tracing Demarchelier’s meteoric rise to a point where he became so famous he was known by a single name. And, as his cameo in Sex and the City and name-drop in The Devil Wears Prada attests, that fame was everlasting.
Demarchelier, who passed away in 2022, remained largely behind the camera’s lens throughout his life. But in this extraordinary volume, he is finally, and gloriously, the star.
