Photographer Gavin Bond Offers an Insider’s Perspective on the Supermodel Era

Could Gavin Bond take these same photographs today? His answer, without hesitation, is no. The photographer—English by birth, a New Yorker by choice—knows that the era he captured in his book Being There is gone forever. Stella Tennant has died, as have Karl Lagerfeld and Vivienne Westwood. His photographic playground, the backstage of the catwalks of fashion shows, is no longer the place it was in 1993. Bond describes it as once having been an intimate and private zone, much like the “backstage of a theater,” reserved for models and the teams of assistants preparing them to walk the runway. It was a closed and secret space. Today, the 53-year-old photographer explains, “there are a lot of cameras with access to the dressing rooms and the models themselves are on their cell phones. Everything is on display, but there is less spontaneity.”

In 1993, however, Bond was the one of the few to take his camera into this intriguing world. As a young student at London’s prestigious Saint Martin’s School of Art, he started shooting the fashion shows of his fellow students, including John Galliano. He eventually got to know a producer, John Wolford, who acted as a liaison between the students and fashion professionals. Bond learned that Wolford was close to Vivienne Westwood and the photographer took a chance and sent the designer some photos he’d taken of dancers in the dressing rooms at the Lido de Paris. Westwood was impressed and offered Bond access to her Anglomania show in Paris in March 1993, a chance to be up close and personal with her team and the models. Christy Turlington remembers: “Gavin appeared one day and it was as if he’d always been there.”

Bond used a compact film camera on his backstage outings, a Bronica ETR-Si, small and discreet enough not to disturb his subjects. His photos from this period came to define his style: in place of staged fashion shots, he produced photo-reportage, bringing a journalistic approach that was reminiscent of the work of Frank Horvat. “The great photographers of the time were invited to fashion shows by the brands,” Bond recalls. “They only had access to the top models within a very defined framework and they had to produce something beautiful. I was free of all those constraints.” The photographs in Being There shine a light on the world of fashion at work: the subjects are vulnerable—some concentrating intensely and others joyfully euphoric. They often appear unaware that they are being watched by Bond’s lens. “There’s nothing worse than having a camera pointed at you to destroy a mood while you’re chatting or smoking between costume changes and alterations,” says Turlington. “In those days, before backstage was open to cameras, few observers were welcome.”

The photos of the Vivienne Westwood fashion show attracted the interest of all the leading couturiers of the day. Bond would infiltrate the fashion houses of his friend John Galliano, then the head of Dior, as well as Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, and Jean-Paul Gaultier. His shots, first in black-and-white and later in color, captured the golden age of supermodels from a unique angle. This period, now practically wrapped in legend, when Naomi Campbell, Tennant, Claudia Schiffer, and Christy Turlington were emerging, seems wonderfully intimate and familiar in Bond’s photos. “You had to be there,” as the photographer says.

Being There, by Gavin Bond, is published by IDEA. Many of the photos in Being There were originally exhibited at Hamiltons Gallery in London, which continues to represent Gavin Bond. This gallery originally appeared in Vanity Fair France. It was translated by John Newton.