by This September, the British Fashion Council continues its 40th anniversary, so we took the opportunity to revisit the past four decades at London fashion week through the lens of original catwalk photographer Chris Moore. As fashion week begins, Mr. Moore, who turns 90 this year, won’t be pressed into the photographers’ pen at the end of the runway, but he’ll probably feel his shutter finger and shows off the seasons going on. Covid was the natural opportunity for Moore to hang up his camera bag, although he continued with some long-standing clients, including CSM degree shows, Simone Rocha and Christopher Kane, until last year. Moore is most likely to be at home in Northumberland with his long-term partner, Maxine Millar (herself a photographer who has run the studio since they met in the late 80s), and their beloved cats, enjoying a long walk in the countryside.
In a way, the catwalk shows took over Moore’s life. ‘I’ve done other jobs,’ he said on a Zoom call, recalling his early days working for Vogue. He started there in 1954 assisting the studio manager on a princely salary of £6 a week. ‘I finally got punched as a catwalk photographer.’ According to the journalist Alex Fury in the introduction that Cattle (also Moore’s business name, trademarking the word in 1996), a large book published by Laurence King in 2017, describing 50 years of his career, he is the man who invented the notion of the catwalk photographer in the 1960s, when a Catwalk shows as we know them had just begun.’ Moore was in the right place at the right time to, in Fury’s words, ‘see more fashion than perhaps anyone else in the world.’
The catwalk was quite an operation. He ran a studio in a warehouse on Farringdon Road, London, just down the road from the old offices of the Guardian’s and Observer, where fashion editors and their assistants would pore over sheets of plastic slides, fresh from the processing lab, bent over a light box with lupe to enlarge the images in search of the right look, the right model, whatever the latest trend is for hours at a time. As a fashion assistant in the early 90s at the Independent newspaper, I spent days of my life in that studio, choosing images for the week’s fashion pages. It was always very exciting to see what was going on, hearing gestures from the assistant photographers passing by on their way to the next round of shows, the cardboard boxes full of pictures. Moore supplied images to many newspapers and supplements, including the Guardian and Observer, and for more than 25 years, read everyone’s fashion editor in the industry, Suzy Menkes for the International Herald Tribune.
Even before the digital day, covering the shows involved long days. But no matter how many pictures they sold a season, it was never a big business. ‘How can I put it, nobody paid our fare to go anywhere, nobody paid our hotel bills or anything else,’ says Moore. ‘We did it all to ourselves. So that’s why we can say we kept the copyright. The Herald Tribune only paid me for the pictures they used. There were no costs. It was my own expenses and, of course, I had a team, and I paid for them, all the fees… So I never got rich.’
In 1984, when the newly formed British Fashion Council brought together London’s fashion talent under one umbrella and more importantly one tent, initially set up outside the Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park (now the Design Museum), the beginning of a new era for Wales. fashion. In October 1984, 24 catwalk shows were held over three days, with designers including Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran, Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood, Bruce Oldfield (who opened his own shop that year) and the children were just starting out – Bodymap and Richmond. Cornejo. John Galliano had just graduated from St Martins with his colleague John Flett. Joe Casely-Hayford officially launched his brand, and that spring, Katharine Hamnett wore her ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’ T-shirt to meet Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street. Some have moved on or changed direction in the years since. Galliano, Maria Cornejo and Pam Hogg are still producing collections and shows, but as Moore observed, fashion is moving at a fast pace and many have been left behind. ‘It’s a tough business,’ he says.
At the tents in the Duke of York barracks on the Kings Road and then outside the Natural History Museum, Moore would set up next to the pile and fix his lens on one spot so he could make sure the model was in focus when she arrived. it. ‘I had a box that I sat on next to the catwalk. And I would raise as the model came forward, take the photo, and then pick back down on the box. But, of course, the journalists didn’t like it because they couldn’t always see very well from the front row.’ Towards the late 80s, the photographers were made to stand together at the end of the catwalk. ‘They wanted us, but at the same time, they hated us. So things gradually changed and we had to shoot from the podium at the bottom of the catwalk, which meant we were in no way with the journalists.’
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Michiko Koshino, Autumn Winter 1985, and Bodymap, Spring Summer 1986
Between the 1980s and 2000s, the number of shows increased fivefold. Moore was covering eight different show schedules between London, Milan, New York and Paris. Twice a year. ‘We were shooting solidly from the beginning of January to the end of March with no days off, 90 days straight, 7am to midnight.’ And he would do it again for the spring shows in June and July and September/October.
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Naomi Campbell modeled for Jasper Conran, Autumn Winter 1987, and John Richmond and Maria Cornejo. Spring summer 1988
In the 80s and 90s, newspapers would publish show reports sometimes a week after the events. But when digital programming came into play in the late ’90s, the pace was extreme with editors filing stories within an hour of the show ending. According to Millar who accompanied Moore on this annual fashion marathon, ‘The biggest sacrifice in the working day was the loss of camaraderie through group gatherings with photographers and editors sharing stories and news of the day over relaxed dinners in cities loan while we all wait. the analog celluloid film to come back from the processing labs.’ It’s no wonder the industry seems to be reeling from the fleeting images and immediate criticism and bad judgments. ‘There was this time when people had to wait to see images. They weren’t instant but, of course, when digital came in, well they were instant. And everyone wants them fast, fast, fast.’
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Yasmin Le Bon for John Rocha, Spring Summer 1994, and Kylie Minogue for Antonio Berardi, Spring Summer 1996, from a show in October 1995
Moore took more than 1m pictures, which are currently stored in Northumberland, boxes and boxes of slides waiting to be digitized to make them searchable and useful as a resource. What do they plan to do with it all? ‘Are we going to dig a big hole?’ laughed Moore. ‘There must be an answer. But right now, we’re not entirely sure.’
This unique record of 20th and 21st century fashion history must be preserved. Perhaps the fashion houses and multi-million dollar conglomerates that have benefited from Moore’s work over the years could fund a Catwalking study center or library. It’s quite a legacy. ‘You’re looking backwards more than forwards,’ says Moore. ‘I don’t think you start thinking I’m going to record history. I think you have to do a thumbs up. This is what I tell my son, that he has to leave a thumb on life, leave something behind when you go – to make a mark.’
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Karen Elson for Giles, Autumn Winter 2004, and Christopher Bailey for Burberry Prorsum, Spring Summer 2011
