Amazing Body of Water
September 2nd, 2010
We interrupt our regularly scheduled Casting Call blog posts to bring you one of our recent PRODn productions: a gorgeous underwater shot of Polly Mellen shot by Steven Meisel for Interview Magazine. (Ed. Note: Can we talk about that amazing body?!) We’d describe Polly Mellen as a legendary stylist, but don’t think that even hits the tip of the iceberg. Maybe it’s best if we leave it up to the magazine to outline her full biography, a veritable list of fashion legends:
In a career that spanned more than half a century, Polly Mellen helped create some of the most indelible imagery in the history of fashion. Her work as a stylist and editor, first under the legendary Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar, and later under both Vreeland and Grace Mirabella at Vogue, helped define a new, more modern ethos about clothes and how women wore them. With an almost playful daring, it brimmed with a kind of strong, smart, unabashedly celebratory feminine independence—as well as an artful element of provocation and extravagance—that Mellen herself embodied and drew upon in her collaborations with photographers such as Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, and later Steven Meisel (who took the pictures that accompany this story), Mario Testino, Patrick Demarchelier, and Steven Klein. In Avedon, in particular, she found a lifelong fashion-world partner-in-crime. When the late photographer was first introduced to her, he didn’t want to work with her because he thought she was “too noisy.” But the spectacular and wide-ranging body of images they ended up producing together—including iconic pictures of up-and-coming models such as Penelope Tree, Patti Hansen, and Lauren Hutton, and their now-famous 1981 nude of actress Nastassja Kinski wearing nothing save an ivory Patricia von Musulin bracelet and elegantly wrapped by a boa constrictor—is not only a testament to the kind of creative chemistry they had, but also to their ability to visually and innovatively capture something singular about fashion, people, politics, history, and the white-lightning essence of a moment in their work.
Read the full bio, including an interview by Nicholas Ghesquire at the link below: