The Wintour of Our Content

Anna Wintour will add the newly created role of artistic director of Condé Nast to her existing duties as Vogue editor and editorial director of Teen Vogue, the Times reports.  The position was created in part to keep Ms. Wintour at Condé Nast, and should put an end the persistent (and persistently debunked) speculation that the Obama-supporting editrix could decamp for a plum ambassador gig. Condé is expected to make the announcement today. 

Ms. Wintour, who will celebrate her silver anniversary helming Vogue this summer, will take on some of Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse's former duties. Last fall, the 85-year-old Mr. Newhouse began to yield the reigns he had held at Condé, amid speculation on plans for his successor.

“Si Newhouse leaves a void, inevitably,” Charles H. Townsend, the chief executive of Condé Nast, told the Times. “Anna, without even having to think twice about it, is the most qualified person to pick up that torch and carry it into the future.” 

In addition to Ms. Wintour's role at Vogue and Teen Vogue, she will take on "broader creative duties throughout the company, and having a say in its expanding portfolio of platforms, including the recent development of an entertainment division," the Times reports.

“It is something I do a lot anyway in my role at Vogue,” Ms. Wintour told the Times about her new position, which she said she sees as “almost like being a one-person consulting firm.”

“I advise all sorts of people in the outside world, and really, I see this as an extension of what I am doing, but on a broader scale,” she said.

The New Yorker editor David Remnick said that he has already benefited from Ms. Wintour's input and will continue to do so.

“I don’t expect Anna to be picking the cartoons or directing our war coverage,” Mr. Remnick said. “But I have asked her advice numerous times and always been grateful for it. She’s a great editor. Period.”

On a side note, are we the only ones who want to see Ms. Wintour's taste in New Yorker cartoons?

Photo credit: Vogue.

Remember when Dara-Lynn Weiss wrote about putting her overweight 7-year-old daughter, Bea, on a diet in last April’s issue of Vogue? In the event that you do not, Ms. Weiss provides a handy refresher in her new book The Heavy, which hits shelves this week. “All hell broke loose when the Vogue article came out,” Ms. Weiss writes. “From the reaction in the blogosphere, you would have thought that I maimed my daughter.”

Ms. Weiss thought that the article would generate a little mommy-blog buzz, but of course, Vogue has a slightly wider reach than that. And in this case, the punishment was not just the ire of the Internet, but also a swift book deal with Ballantine. Now, just 10 months later, The Heavy is here in hardcover.

Some of the memoir is devoted to Ms. Weiss’s own struggles with the scale, but it is young Bea who remains the star. A Starbucks hot chocolate gets yanked from the girl’s eager hand and thrown out when the barista adds an unauthorized dollop of whipped cream, and a salade Niçoise that a well-meaning friend offers the still-hungry child is the topic of labored deliberation (all that oil!). Weigh-ins become a morning ritual (pee, clothes off, weigh self, Ms. Weiss tells her daughter) that dictate the Weisses’ day. Ms. Weiss calculates and recalculates Bea’s BMI (if she just grows an inch, then maybe she can lose less weight). French Heritage Day means that la fille a mangé 800 calories—half her day’s intake! French women might not get fat, but overweight New York girls will.

Ms. Weiss forgoes organic treats in her daughter’s lunchbox in favor of low-calorie processed ones, raising eyebrows on the playground. But a scoop of Cool Whip Free only has 7.5 calories. When a friend points out that a substance that lists corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup as the main ingredients can’t be the answer, Ms. Weiss reluctantly gives up the miracle topping.

Along the way, Ms. Weiss, who is a freelance producer, pitches her boss on “a program for people with overweight kids that demonstrates how to make normal, family-friendly recipes that are actually low-calorie!”

The pitch did not go over well.

“As a producer, I would never make a show that used the word diet and children in the same breath,” the producer said. The producer’s normal-person reaction caught Ms. Weiss off-guard.

“The comments stung a little bit, Ms. Weiss writes. “I suddenly lost a bit of confidence in my insistence on owning those terms.”

Ms. Weiss’s confidence may have been shaken, but not for long. When a writer friend suggests that she chronicle her experience, she  jumps at the chance.

“Yes, after six months of helping my daughter lose weight with moderate success, I felt I was ready to share with the world my personal solution to childhood obesity,” writes Ms. Weiss. “The more I talked about it, the more excited I got.”

The writer friend called her agent, and Ms. Weiss whipped up a proposal. The agent helped Ms. Weiss turn the proposal into a memoir and then shared it with a Vogue editor.

“And just like that, the editor suggested I write a piece for the magazine,” Ms. Weiss recounts.

“I had never written an article for a magazine before, but even in my inexperience, I was aware of the considerable irony in writing about weight in a magazine that glorifies an unhealthy standard of female thinness.”

Ms. Weiss ran the article by her young daughter for approval. Bea liked the idea but wasn’t initially sure she wanted to be in the accompanying photo spread. Later, after Ms. Weiss reconsidered the assignment, Bea did an about-face and became wildly enthusiastic. Then Ms. Weiss did what any normal New York mom would do—she sought professional help. A trusted therapist encouraged Ms. Weiss to write the piece, and the then as-yet-unsold book, but told Ms. Weiss that Bea should not be photographed for the story.

But the child was adamant. Ms. Weiss saw it as a reward for shedding the excess pounds, and so she let Bea get all dolled up for the shoot.

She now regrets this decision.

“Whatever excuses I might make in defense of my decision to let Bea pose for Vogue are irrelevant,” she writes. “In retrospect, it was not the right choice.”

Still, Ms. Weiss was unprepared for the maelstrom that ensued.

“I felt physically sick. I had written an unsparingly honest article that I’d thought people could relate to,” she writes. “But apparently I had inadvertently outed myself as a selfish, cruel mother. It wasn’t as if I’d been misrepresented or misquoted. I had written the article myself.”

And now, Ms. Weiss has written the book herself. Someday, young Bea will have a very comprehensive record of her prepubescent struggle with her weight. Should come in handy when it’s time to share it with a (hopefully different) trusted therapist. Now that’s heavy.

Grace Coddington with Anna Wintour.

Although long familiar and widely revered in fashion-industry circles, Grace Coddington, the creative director of Vogue, burst into the wider public consciousness as the cussing, henna-haired breakout star of The September Issue, the 2009 R.J. Cutler documentary about the production of the Sept. 2007 issue of American Vogue. An 840-page monument to pre-recessionary tastes that included a Roman travel diary in which Sienna Miller wore a lot of feathers and a Dolce & Gabbana dress that cost $61,000, it was at the time the largest monthly issue of any American magazine ever published. (The Sept. 2012 Vogue finally eclipsed it in overall page count—but in its number of advertising pages, it has never been surpassed.) The movie made much of the relationship between Ms. Coddington and Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Ms. Wintour is chilly and superior—one of the documentary’s most entertaining moments comes when a startled assistant jumps out of her way like a vole before an owl—while Ms. Coddington is warm and generous to peers and underlings alike. Colleagues shrink and wither under Ms. Wintour’s judgments, but Ms. Coddington challenges the boss like an equal.

After the film came out, Ms. Coddington writes in her new memoir, Grace (Random House, 416 pp., $35), she started getting recognized on the street. Her newfound popular appeal was judged to be such that Random House paid a reported $1.2 million to acquire the memoir. But was this acclaim earned? It is no great task to seem warm-hearted next to Anna Wintour, and the creative director is hardly bold. In one sequence in the film that is, in retrospect, a bit of a reach, the camera lingers as Ms. Coddington surveys the palace of Versailles while sharing insights like, “It’s sort of strange to think how old it is.” Let that $1.2 million sink in.

Grace begins with Ms. Coddington’s childhood in Trearddur Bay, a small town on Holy Island in Wales. The book proceeds chronologically through her successful modeling career, her transition into working as a fashion stylist and her years of inching her way up the mastheads at British and then American Vogue. Anecdotes careen into one another.Ms. Coddington and her co-author, Vanity Fair’s Michael Roberts, jump from a story about powdering Prince Charles’s nose for a British Vogue shoot in 1969 to a discourse on the primacy of Yves Saint Laurent on the Paris couture schedule of the time to a bit about meeting her ex-husband’s new wife and what everybody wore at that gathering. The effect is somewhat like going ’round for tea at the home of a very cultured, enjoyably potty-mouthed aunt who only needs a little prompting to commence holding forth. Only Ms. Coddington’s stories include that one about the time she made out with Mick Jagger in the late 1960s. And, somewhat more darkly, how she had to “escape” from Roman Polanski after he offered her a ride home then drove to his place instead, “and tried dragging me inside.”

Ms. Coddington writes frequently of her shyness, a feeling that she says she can remember from earliest childhood. Her parents ran a hotel in a remote island community in Wales, but were left in financial straits after the war. She hints that her mother was a hoarder; her father died of lung cancer when she was 11. She says she was so paralyzed by the thought of talking to the other girls at her strict, French-influenced convent school that she had to eat lunch off-campus, and even today she avoids any situation that involves public speaking. But even young Grace could be sly: one of the most charming stories in the book’s early chapters concerns her boyfriend Bob, a Royal Air Force pilot, whom she went to visit on base with his best friend. “Halfway there,” she writes, “we realized we quite fancied each other. And that was the end of Bob.”

Ms. Coddington recounts her love affairs with admirable dispassion. I lost count of the fiancés, boyfriends, flings and live-in partners; the men are simply not the point. An entire marriage is dismissed in a sentence, a divorce in a few words. She writes evenly of tragedy—the car accident that ended her modeling career, the miscarriage she suffered in the seventh month of what would be her only pregnancy after some football hooligans picked up the Mini Cooper she was driving and tossed it on its side—and of heartbreak, like the time her fiancé turned out to be carrying on an affair with Catherine Deneuve’s sister. Unlike so many memoirists who seem intent on demonstrating how cool and hip and outrageous the memoirst is (or was, when she was young), Ms. Coddington writes in a bloodless tone. At one point, she says that she lacks Ms. Wintour’s ability to not care what people think of her: “I care whether anyone—from the mailman to the dry cleaner—likes me,” she writes. But it doesn’t come across in her prose.

The meandering quality of the narrative more than occasionally borders on outright sloppiness, however. The book lacks an index. Anecdotes are short on simple temporal markers like dates, leaving the story to unwind in a maddening series of thens and laters and shortly afterwardses. In one unfortunate passage, she imitates her Korean manicurists’ accents: “They love me. ‘Glace! Glace!’ they shout when I walk in.” In another, she writes that her sister, Rosemary, had a child by a man who left her to move to Nepal and then “soon after” died “under mysterious circumstances on the border with Afghanistan.” Nepal does not share a border with Afghanistan.

As a portrait of the fashion industry over the last 50 years, Grace is necessarily incomplete but often enlightening. In particular, the accounts of the author’s close working relationships with two influential countrywomen—Liz Tilberis, who edited British Vogue before her untimely death from cancer, and Anna Wintour—are fascinating. (Especially once Tilberis becomes the editor of Vogue’s main competitor, American Harper’s Bazaar.) Ms. Coddington’s perspective on various photographers’ working styles and personal tics is unparalleled. Who else has been able to observe everyone from Irving Penn to Norman Parkinson to Guy Bourdin to Annie Leibovitz up close over the course of decades? A story about Bourdin wanting the sea dyed bluer for a shoot is worth the price of admission alone.

Dishy, though, Grace is not. Especially in the passages that concern more recent history, Ms. Coddington too often holds back. The biggest critique of Ms. Wintour is that she tends to be chilly with women but flirtatious with men. She loyally slams The Devil Wears Prada. And when she mentions having lunch with the disgraced Christian Dior designer John Galliano shortly after his firing for engaging in a very public racist tirade (he was caught on a cellphone video telling a couple in a Parisian café, “I love Hitler. People like you would be dead.”), it is only to grouse about the fact that pictures of the two of them eating had appeared online before the meal was over. “Modern life!” reflects Ms. Coddington. No confidences were betrayed in the making of this memoir—at least not of anyone powerful.

The chapters of the book that are told thematically, rather than chronologically, stand out as some of the best. Near the end, Ms. Coddington reflects on beauty. In women’s magazines, “beauty” is normally a euphemism for “cosmetics,” but Ms. Coddington ties together stories about influential makeup artists, Botox, plastic surgery and how her own feelings about herself changed after the car accident that entirely severed her left eyelid. It’s refreshingly intimate. And in another chapter, Ms. Coddington tells the story of her life and work through a discussion of her companion animal of choice: cats. Relationships professional and personal, international moves and all of life’s other dislocations are retold as functions of the felines Ms. Coddington has loved, and the results are entertaining and beautiful. (It helps that a cat psychic makes repeated appearances.) This suggests that structuring the book thematically would have done Grace a great service. The chronological approach means that too many related anecdotes—for instance, some insightful recollections of Vogue’slandmark shoots in China and Russia both before and after the Cold War—are spread far and wide across the book. Grouped together, they would have greater resonance. There’s a submerged theme about Ms. Coddington, Ms. Wintour and Tilberis as three British women of the same generation who forever changed fashion, and the fact that the fashion industry is one of the few spaces in media and business in which women wielding significant power is taken as a given. But that thread goes sadly unexplored.

Ms. Coddington, who claims to have “barely read two books in my life that aren’t picture books,” has a winning voice and admirable common sense. Her own book may be frustrating occasionally, but it’s also fun. She is that mischievous girl who will start a car journey with one boyfriend and end it with another. “It’s hard for me to define what is modern, because I am not,” she writes, and for that, she is a walking counter-narrative to the industry in which she works—romantic and backward-looking while fashion pushes relentless innovation, even as it lacks much in the way of real progress. Ms. Coddington is uninterested in any wide-reaching critique of the industry, but who wouldn’t want to spend a few hours in her company anyway?

editorial@observer.com

Don't forget all the blood donors. (Mayors Office)

Mayor Bloomberg just announced that more than 10,000 people have donated more than $32 million to the Mayor's Fund for New York City to help with recovery efforts. There are some interesting, if unsurprising names on the list. Big Real Estate—the Rudins, the Speyers, Brookfield Properties, the Related Companies, Glenwood Management among them—were big backers, even as many of their buildings were buffeted by the storm.Lloyd Blankfein made the list, as an individual, as did his firm Goldman Sachs, which is may be smart given the ire directed at Mr. Blankfein for keeping the lights on at Goldman HQ while power was out everywhere else downtown.

There are plenty of other Wall Street outfits, like Barclays, Evercore Partners, Julian Robertson, Stan Druckenmiller and New York Life. Diane Von Ferstenberg, Ralph Lauren, the CFDA, Sketchers and Vogue all donated money (maybe some warm fur coats, too?) as did casino kingpin Steve Wynn, Ron Perelman, the Giants (but no Jets), News Corp., Microsoft, and more. You can see all the cash donors, as well as the companies, like Walmart, Pepsico, North Face, Hunter Boots, JetBlue, Sullivan Street Bakery and Jamba Juice.

Cash donors:

Allen & Company LLC, American Express, American Securities, ABNY Foundation, Gabrielle and Louis Bacon, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyd C. Blankfein, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Brookfield, Capital One, Cher Charitable Foundation, H. Rodgin Cohen, CFDA/Council of Fashion Designers of America, Entergy Corp., Evercore Partners, Fiona and Stan Druckenmiller, Sima Ghadamian, Geller & Company, Glenwood Management, GLO Jr. Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Gotham Pixel Factory, Marc Haas Foundation, the Halvorson Family Fund, the Schlosstein Hartley Family Foundation, The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust, Hess Corporation, Alice Hoffman and Tom Martin, ING Foundation.

J.C.C. Fund of the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry of New York, Altman Kazickas Foundation, The Ralph and Ricky Lauren Family Foundation, Leon Levy Foundation, Libra Group, The Madison Square Garden Company, Marsh & McLennan, Microsoft, Jamie and David Mitchell, Mitsui, Morrison Foerster, News Corporation, New York Giants, New York Life Insurance Company, New York Road Runners, Paul Nicaj Caterers, Related Companies, Stephen Ross and the Miami Dolphins, Ronald O. Perelman.

Julian Robertson of the Robertson Foundation, Pat and John Rosenwald, Jack and Susan Rudin and the Rudin Family, Skechers, Sotheby’s, Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Sherrill, Stan Shuman, Steven J. Berger, Sidney Garber Jewelers, Societe Generale, the Stiller Foundation, TD Bank Foundation, Time Warner Cable, Time Warner, Inc., Viacom, Tishman Speyer, TransCanada, Travelers Insurance, The Tribeca Film Institute, the United States Tennis Association, Vogue, Diane von Furstenberg and Diller–von Furstenberg Foundation, Stephanie and Harry Wagner and Steve Wynn.

Major water donors:

Anheuser-Busch, the Coca-Cola Company, Fairway, Gristedes, PepsiCo Foundation, and Walmart.

Other in-kind donations:

ADCO Electric, After Hours Project Inc., American Airlines, Applebees, AT&T, BJs, Bloomingdale’s (including vendors North Face Jackets, Hunter Boots, Polo Hosiery-HotSox, Sam's Fine Men's clothing, 2Xist Underware, S.Rothchild Coats, Trina Turk, G-III Andrew Marc Coats, The Levy Group Coats, Herman, Kay Coats, G-III CK Coats, Idra Alta Moda Coats and Fleurette Coats), Colgate Palmolive, Costco, CVS Drug Store, Delta, Diageo, Diapers.com, Duane Reade, Dunkin’ Doughnuts, Everything Entertainment, Frankie’s Restaurant, Fuller & Brush, Great Performances, Holland Hook Terminal,  Home Depot, Hunts Point Market, International Orthodox Christian Charities, Inc. (IOCC), Jamba Juice, JetBlue, Lend Lease, Lowe’s Companies Modell’s Sporting Goods, Navillus Inc., New York Container Company, the New York Mets, New York Public Library, New York Road Runners, OTG Management, RCano Events, Savory & Sweet Bakery, ShopRite, Sprint, Staten Island Advance, Sullivan Street Bakery, Target, Teamsters, Daniel R. Tishman, Tishman Construction, an AECOM Company, Valducci’s Pizza, Verizon, Visy Paper, Waldbaums, and Walmart.

Anna Wintour and Sally Singer: together again.

Sally Singer is heading back to Vogue in the newly created role of digital creative director, The Fix reports.

Ms. Singer left Condé Nast, where she was Vogue’s fashion news and features director,  in 2010 to become the editor in chief of T. But her two-year stint at the Times came to an abrupt end this past in August. WSJ. editor Deborah Needleman assumed the top role at the Times’s luxury mag last month.

In her new role, Ms. Singer will again report to Anna Wintour and collaborate with Caroline Palmer, Vogue.com's editor. Ms. Singer's will return to Vogue on October 29.

Guess some things never go out of style ...

Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour in friendlier times.

Hearst Magazines has named Carine Roitfeld  the global fashion director for Harper’s Bazaar.  This move ramps up the rivalry between the former editrix of French Vogue and Condé Nast. Ms. Roitfeld, who was once seen as a possible successor to Anna Wintour, abruptly left Condé Nast in 2010.

Ms. Roitfeld introduced her new magazine, CR Fashion Book, just last month and will continue to put out the biannual magazine, which is published by Fashion Media Group, the company behind Visionaire and V magazines.

Hearst said her collaboration “may include covers of many of Harper’s Bazaar’s international editions.”

“This collaboration marks the first time anything like this has been done, and we’re very excited about what Carine will bring to Bazaar editions around the world,” said Duncan Edwards, the president and chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, in a statement.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Edwards described Ms. Roitfeld’s new role "as similar to that of a syndicated columnist." Ms. Roitfeld will write stories that are included in multiple international editions of Bazaar but will be  “independent and separate to the rest of the magazine,” Mr. Edwards told the Times.

Tina Brown (Photo: BeastTV)

Newsbeast editor in chief Tina Brown seems to have developed a redemptive streak, at least when it comes to the bad boys and girls of the media world. Her website has recently published several pieces by otherwise disgraced journalists.

On Friday, Ms. Brown brought in Mike Daisey to pen a piece on the first anniversary of the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. You may remember Mr. Daisey as the man who forced the public radio show This American Life to air an extensive mea culpa after he adapted his one-man show about the brutal conditions at Chinese factories that make Apple products for its broadcast, and it was later found to contain, as the subsequent retraction put it, “numerous fabrications.” Though Mr. Daisey included untruths in his story and, in the words of the radio show's team, “misled This American Life during the fact-checking process,” The Daily Beast apparently had no problem giving him over 1,000 words and two accompanying four-minute “BeastTV” videos, in which he “reflects on the last year” in which he “fell from grace” and acknowledges that mistakes were made, but nonetheless credits himself with sparking a wider discussion of Apple’s labor practices.

Mr. Daisey isn’t the only fabulist who has contributed to The Daily Beast in the past few months. In late July, the site brought in disgraced former Timesman Jayson Blair to weigh in after The New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotes in his best-selling pop science book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.

“Nine years ago, I was Jonah Lehrer,” Mr. Blair wrote. That sentence may be the most accurate thing Mr. Blair’s ever written, and it’s why he’s blacklisted throughout the journalism word, except apparently at the Beast, where it increasingly looks like Ms. Brown is running some sort of media rehab facility.

Indeed, just one day before Mr. Blair’s piece ran, Joan Juliet Buck took to the Beast to tell “her side of the story” about a widely reviled puff piece profiling the wife of brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad that she wrote for Vogue in February 2011. Ms. Buck’s story praised Mrs. Assad as “wildly democratic” and “glamorous, young and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.” The story provoked instantaneous ridicule and was eventually scrubbed from Vogue’s website.

The Daily Beast didn’t include an explanation for why it allowed Ms. Buck to make the improbable claim that she “didn’t know” Mr. Assad was “a murderer” when she started working on her story. However, based on the growing rogue’s gallery accumulating bylines at the site, it seems that ethical questions won’t stop the benevolent editor-confessor from opening her pages to the fallen. But not all good deeds go punished, and giving a new platform to wayward scribes may be a speedy route to page-views—if not to critical acclaim. For example, the piece by Ms. Buck was criticized by many other websites, which of course linked to it in conjunction with their critiques.

We reached out to Ms. Brown to ask about her decision to publish these journalistic miscreants and whether we might expect more blighted Beast bylines in the future. As of this writing, she has yet to respond. We imagine she’s probably busy trying to get in touch with Mr. Lehrer.

Update (10/10/12 11:42 a.m.): An earlier version of this story described This American life as an NPR show. It is distributed to public radio stations by PRI, not NPR. 

Diana Vreeland led Vogue from 1963 to 1971, but her present-day counterpart Anna Wintour is not featured in the movie, nor is Andre Leon Talley, the famous Voguester who got his start working with Vreeland at the Met Costume Institute.

"Vogue hasn't touched the movie," director Lisa Immordino Vreeland told THR, noting that Mr. Talley had requested to be interviewed by a specific, unnamed, prestigious "fashion scholar"; he was not even given a comp ticket to the Tribeca Film Festival screening. Anna Wintour, apparently, opts to appear mainly in documentaries about her own tenure at Vogue.

You are looking at a photo of a man in a coffee shop. He is wearing a straw hat, frayed around the edges. His hair is white underneath, and long. His hand is grasping a coffee cup, but he is not looking at it. He is looking at someone out of frame, making a gesture with his free hand: fingers extended, palm pointed slightly diagonal and down. The universal sign for “This is the important part.” In mid-gesture, he is animated. He does not seem to know he is being photographed.

This is how Denis Piel might have posed the scene of himself being interviewed about his latest book, Moments. The photographer with the flair for the cinematic is set to release a coffee table collection later this month with Rizzoli. Moments is a series of images, mainly of models and actresses, that Mr. Piel shot on the set of various advertising and editorial campaigns during his tenure in the ’80s as of one the magazine world’s Big Names.

His more famous works can be seen on the covers of Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ; in 1979 he was handpicked by Condé Nast’s Editorial Director Alexander Liberman, along with Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, as one of the few photographers to ever have a contract with the publishing house. Over the course of his tenure, Mr. Piel shot more than 1,000 editorial spreads in the U.S., German, Italian, French and English versions of Condé Nast titles.

Before Annie Leibovitz draped a sheet over a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus and called it a day; before Terry Richardson made it into Page Six with accusations of masturbating in front of naked models he was shooting, Mr. Piel and his contemporaries were displaying their contributions to the century-old “art-or-pornography” debate on the front pages of magazines and fashion spreads for luxury products.

But besides the transgressive nature of partial nudity in a high-end glossy, the comparisons between Mr. Piel and his contemporaries—which also included Vogue’s preferred cover fashion photog, Helmut Newton—are few and far between.
“They were very, very, very ... and I’ll add another very, different,” former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella recalled of the famous cover photographers in the ’80s. “Helmut—who was superb, had a great sense of style—was always looking for the deepest, not-best story about the women. In other words, he put them in situations that were very uncomfortable, that was this close to being excessively sexy, and almost questionable.”

Mr. Avedon, meanwhile, was “the strongest” in fashion history, according to Ms. Mirabella, with his monochromatic, soul-penetrating portraits. And Mr. Piel? “Would it be superficial of me to say that his were the most attractive?” she wondered.

“He was the best of his moment. He was able to get the allure of the model while still keeping this sense of reality that was missing from a lot of the more posed shoots.”

“He was not the usual type ... if you could consider photographers of this period a type,” Jade Hobson, the creative director of Vogue at the peak of Mr. Piel’s fame, told The Observer. “For example, he had an Australian accent.”

He also had a casualness in both dress and demeanor that put models at ease: “With Denis, he was always looking for that ‘off’ moment. So many photographers at that time were looking for the girls to be ‘on,’ but Denis wanted that awkward moment between a pose. He was looking for something more real.”

“His was the antithesis of a fashion shot,” she concluded.

In truth, Mr. Piel is more interested in models who can act (and vice versa) than ones who just blindly follow direction. He can (and will) proudly claim that he was the first photographer to have actress Uma Thurman sit for a shoot. There she is in Moments, at age 16, pouting and pulling at an oversized wifebeater that looks in danger of falling off at any second.

The photographer admits to being partial to curvier woman (as defined in the realm of modeling, that is), which also made him an outlier of fashion photography. Isabella Rossellini frequently appears in Moments, as do Rosemary McGrotha and the ill-fated Gia Carangi.

“I wasn’t round, but I wasn’t rail-thin,” former model/actress and frequent Piel collaborator Amanda Pays told The Observer. “He was interested in the female body in a more sort of natural form.”

Ms. Pays admitted that she had originally been uncomfortable with the idea of doing a nude photo for Mr. Piel for a personal collection (though she got to keep her hat in the shot, which she used as a fig leaf). “But there was not something not creepy about Denis. It wasn’t so much about being naked as it was getting to know you as a person. Doing a portrait that was just a little bit deeper than a physical picture.”

Perhaps because, like the saying goes, what he really wanted to do was direct.

“With my photos, I really want to do is tell a story. I want to set up a mise-en-scène,” Mr. Piel expounded, dropping some film vocabulary into an explanation of his famous 1983 photo “Video #4.” (The snapshot features Nastassja Kinski on a red couch, holding a phallic-seeming video camera. She is clothed only in fishnets and a black mesh bra.)

“What a picture really does is make you think about what happened right before the photo was taken, or what’s about to happen.”

Mr. Piel cites as inspiration not another photographer, but Stanley Kubrick: the director had planned to write an introduction to Mr. Piel’s book, but passed away before seeing it to fruition.

“What was great about Kubrick was that he never told the same story twice. He didn’t need to brand himself; instead of today, where people make 10 movies and you feel like you’ve just seen one.”

Mr. Piel’s cinematic flourishes define his body of work. Peter Arnell, the creative director for Donna Karan’s seminal ad campaigns in the ’80s, recalled collaborating with Mr. Piel for shoots of hyper-realistic city scenes. This series of photos evolved into a video ad, which follows Ms. Karan as she is driven around New York, trying on clothes and getting ready for a date. Ms. Karan’s inner thoughts are conveyed in a pre-Carrie Bradshaw monologue of soundbites: “I live for luxury, but the real thing ... an afternoon nap”; “Dark glasses are like being behind a waterfall ... safe and daring at the same time,” and “God, why won’t he call?”

“The video was revolutionary,” Mr. Arnell stated as a matter of fact. “That’s because the best way to engage an artist of Denis’s talent is to explore, and not go in with very tight preconceived notions, like this definitely has to be a print, or it has to be television. Denis was so excited to do film, and he was really able to capture the idea of the modern woman on the go, which is what Donna wanted.”

Ms. McGrotha, who met Denis Piel on an Elle shoot in the ’80s, became one of his most frequently photographed subjects. She remembered him as more as a Kubrick-type obsessive, sometimes having her hold poses for hours while setting up the lights for cameras with low shutter speeds.

“He was very intense, very precise. He always wanted you to live a certain role ... there was a lot of role-playing of different characters,” Ms. McGrotha sighed. “But sometimes he’d want your personality, which was a lot harder.”

Mr. Piel saw the idea of models “playing themselves” somewhat differently. “Sometimes I would go on shoots, and I’d take my own pictures first. Like the Vogue story we did on Amanda [Pays], I took her picture first, before the shoot. I like to get as raw as I can, as much of the personality in the model before they are all made up and artificial.” An odd word choice for a fashion photographer.

He explained: “When Andie MacDowell was chosen to do Sex, Lies and Videotape, the director was very clever. He cast her to not act. She was herself, she was playing herself. And that’s why she was so great in that film.”

Ms. MacDowell was a former model of Mr. Piel, posing for him in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in 1985.

“He shot me in my early 20s, when I had just finished wrapping St. Elmo’s Fire,” the Southern-twanged actress told The Observer over the phone. “But I wasn’t a star by any means. I was an introvert, so it was good for me to work with someone like Denis, because he worked like a director. He always came up with some kind of ideas or concepts of a character you’d be playing. He was getting people to play out these roles, and it gave them an opportunity to be bolder than a model normally would.”

Eventually Mr. Piel did become a director: In 1995, he directed his own feature, Love is Blind. The documentary chronicles the first year of marriage between two blind people. Mr. Piel refers to it as “the beginning of reality television.”

After Condé Nast, Mr. Piel found himself as something of artistic futurist. He formed several creative collectives, like the Umbershoot, a virtual “ideasbank” where independent filmmakers could share their work and cross-pollinate techniques and theories. It went belly-up in the dot-com bust. Still ... no regrets.

“Our idea was to have films distributed online; today that’s a reality,” Mr. Piel said. So he was right after all.

Of course, he is best remembered for his photographs. Hence Moments, which he hopes will re-establish him in the art world.
“I was planning to do a book for years, but never got around to it. And then I looked around, and saw that my position within my peers had been lost,” Mr. Piel lamented.

Today, Mr. Piel is excited about a new project—one that takes his latest obsession and combines it with photography—turning the 17th century chateau in the South of France where he currently resides into a “sustainable hotel environment”-slash-“utopian Eden.”

“We’re really into permaculture right now,” Mr. Piel said. “I want to take pictures of this fantasy of a tomorrow where the world has collapsed. People have to think, ‘Well, how am I going to eat? How am I going to live?’ They’ll have to figure out their relationship to the Earth.”

He plans on portraying this fantasy future with a photographic series where semi-nude women interact with nature.

And why wouldn’t they be clothed?

“Well, because we won’t need clothes,” Mr. Piel replied. Ever the pragmatist, he quickly added, “Or maybe we do. Maybe it’s just minimum clothes.”