Vogue creative director Grace Coddington stole the show in “The September Issue,” a documentary on the inner workings of the illustrious magazine. Now, she’s released Grace, a memoir of her life, detailing the behind-the-scenes glamour and larger-than-life personalities of her years in fashion. The Daily Beast takes a look at Coddington’s transformation from a young British model into one of the most respected leaders in the industry, confidant of Anna Wintour, and a celebrity in her own right.
Evening Standard / Getty Images
A child of Britain’s postwar years, Coddington was born in Anglesey, off the coast of Wales. With her classically haunting beauty, she turned to modeling as a lark and a way to escape small-town life. Here, in a 1964 shoot, she walks a dachshund in the Buckinghamshire woods.
Lichfield / Getty Images
A photographer captures Coddington in 1967, at the nascence of her career in modeling and fashion. She would go on to become a respected fashion editor at Vogue, one who worked with—and often befriended—all the great names in modern fashion photography, from Mario Testino and Steven Meisel to Annie Leibovitz.
Evening Standard / Getty Images
When Coddington was 26, her modeling career was sidelined by an auto accident that left her with, among other injuries, a detached left eyelid. It took five plastic surgeries and two years before she could return to work.
In her memoir, Coddington—a natural introvert—admits that she is a reluctant celebrity. While well known in the fashion industry, she was content with a wider relative anonymity until her sudden fame thanks to The September Issue. Now she’s a fixture of the popular-culture conversation on blogs and on Twitter.
David Montgomery / Getty Images
Coddington poses with her then-husband, photographer Willie Christie, at a charity fashion show at The Savoy in London in 1973. While Coddington sprinkles tantalizing snippets of love affairs in her memoir—including a tryst with Mick Jagger—she is coy about divulging the hot-and-heavy details.
Tim Jenkins, Conde Nast Archive / Corbis
Coddington and Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour attend Zac Posen’s fall 2010 fashion show in New York. Their relationship, as portrayed in the memoir and The September Issue, is a marriage of opposites: Coddington the romantic dreamer and fashion purist; Wintour the inscrutable, business-savvy pragmatist.
