June 1, 2011 |
FROM THE VOLT (WINTER 2010)
LIZ TILBERIS: EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, HARPER’S BAZAAR (1992-1999)
Our favourite Liz moment? When she socked that guard at the Jean Paul Gaultier show. He wouldn’t let her into the show, so he got what was coming. And come on, who hasn’t dreamed of punching the bejesus out of one those French security men?
She got her start by winning runner-up in the British Vogue talent contest, and once she had her foot in the door there, it stayed firmly under the table for the next 22 years, while she steadily climbed her way up that greasy pole known as fashion and eventually achieved her lifelong dream of becoming its editor-in-chief. It wasn’t long, though, before she was poached by American Harper’s Bazaar, where her star really shone.
Her dream was simple: more than restore the fusty publication to its Carmel Snow heyday, she quite simply wanted to create the most beautiful fashion magazine in the world, which arguably she did. She hired Fabien Baron as creative director and lured away from Vogue both Patrick Demarchelier and Peter Lindbergh.
“She had an elegance, energy and simplicity that just wasn’t done in any other magazine,” says Harper’s Bazaar publisher Jeannette Chang. Her mandate was simple, it was one she had borrowed from Alexey Brodovitch: “astonish me”.
And astonish everyone who worked for her, she did. Apparently, the first issue even had, according to Tilberis, “that sort of smell of the Bazaar covers of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Very elegant, very clean, very stark”. As Paul Cavaco said, what she created was “gentle, understated, chic”. The era of elegance had well and truly begun.
by Natalie Dembinska
