admin On a warm Sunday morning in November of 1989, a small group of models huddled on a street in downtown New York. British Vogue had lined up five of the “supers”—Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Tatjana Patitz—to be photographed by Peter Lindbergh for the magazine’s January 1990 cover.
Christiaan, the hairstylist on the shoot, recalls Lindbergh using a “kind but determined” approach to getting the five women, each with “extremely different personalities,” to align in front of his lens. With gentle persuading, Lindbergh and fashion stylist Brana Wolf were able to produce an image that has become a landmark in fashion photography.
It seems that even before the issue went to print, the British Vogue team knew they had created something special. Opposite a page announcing the “Femme de Siecle,” the magazine featured “A Cover in the Making,” showing behind-the-scenes pictures of the shoot, as Lindbergh snapped away and was lovingly embraced by the models. It was history in the making.
As a 31-year veteran of Condé Nast—20 of those years spent as photography director of US Vogue and now overseeing our US archive for the past seven years—I thought it would be the perfect time to have another look at some of my very favorite supermodel images from the pages of the British and US editions. For not only did models like Cindy, Christy, Linda, and Naomi become household names, the photographers who created their images became stars themselves.
