September sees the British Fashion Council continue its 40th anniversary celebrations, so we took the opportunity to revisit the last four decades of London Fashion Week through the lens of its original catwalk photographer, Chris Moore. As fashion week gets underway, Mr Moore, who turns 90 this year, won’t be squashed in the photographer’s pen at the end of the catwalk, but he will likely be feeling the twitching of his shutter finger as the season’s shows get underway. Covid was a natural opportunity for Moore to hang up his camera bag, but until last year he continued to work with some long-standing clients, including CSM degree shows, Simone Rocha and Christopher Kane. Moore will most likely be enjoying a long walk in the countryside at his 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 his beloved cats.
In a sense, catwalk shows took over Moore’s life. “I did other jobs,” she said on a Zoom call, recalling her early days working for Vogue. She started there in 1954 as an assistant to the studio manager for a modest £6 a week. “I ended up being classified as a catwalk photographer,” she says in the introduction to journalist Alex Fury. Podium walk (also the name of Moore’s business, he trademarked the word in 1996) is a thick book published in 2017 by Laurence King, documenting 50 years of his career; he is the man who “invented the concept of the catwalk photographer in the 1960s, when catwalk shows as we know them were just beginning.” In Fury’s words, Moore was in the right place at the right time to “see more fashion than perhaps anyone else in the world.”
Catwalking was a big business. She ran a studio in a warehouse on London’s Farringdon Road, just down the road from the old offices of the Guardian and the Observer. Here, fashion editors and their assistants would pore over plastic sheets of slides fresh from the processing lab, bending over a light box with a loupe to magnify the images for hours to find the right look, the right model, the latest trend. In the early 1990s, as a fashion assistant at the Independent, I spent days of my life in that studio, choosing the images for the week’s fashion pages. It was always exciting to see what was going on, to hear the gossip of the assistant photographers passing by on their way to the next round of shows, to see the cardboard boxes crammed full of images. Moore provided images for a number of newspapers and supplements, including the Guardian and the Observer, and for more than 25 years, the fashion editor everyone in the industry read was Suzy Menkes for the International Herald Tribune.
Even in the pre-digital days, it took long days to put on shows. But no matter how many pictures they sold in a season, it was never a big deal. “We did everything ourselves, no one paid our fares, no one paid our hotel bills or anything,” Moore says. “We did it all ourselves. So we could say we kept the copyright. The Herald Tribune only paid me for the pictures they used. There were no expenses. It was all my own expense, and of course I had a crew and paid all the fees for them . . . I never got rich from it.”
In 1984, when the newly formed British Fashion Council brought together London’s fashion talents under one roof and, crucially, under one tent, initially based outside the Commonwealth Institute (now the Design Museum) in Holland Park, it was the start of a new era for British fashion. Over three days in October 1984, 24 catwalk shows were staged, featuring designers such as Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran, Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood, Bruce Oldfield (who opened her own shop that year) and upstarts Bodymap and Richmond Cornejo. John Galliano had just graduated from St Martins with classmate John Flett. Joe Casely-Hayford officially launched the brand, and that spring, Katharine Hamnett wore a ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’ T-shirt to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. Some have since moved on or changed direction in the years since. Galliano, Maria Cornejo and Pam Hogg are still putting out collections and shows, but as Moore has witnessed, fashion moves quickly and many are left behind. “It’s hard work,” she says.
In the marquees at the Duke of York Barracks on the Kings Road and then outside the Natural History Museum, Moore would set up next to the podium and fix his lens on one point to make sure the model was in focus. ‘I had a box next to the podium that I sat in. When the model came forward I would stand up, take the shot and then sit back down on the box. But of course the journalists didn’t like that because they couldn’t always see very well from the front row.’ By the late ’80s photographers were forced to stand together at the end of the podium. ‘They wanted us but they hated us at the same time. So things gradually changed and we had to shoot from the podium below the podium, which meant we were out of the way of the journalists.’
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Michiko Koshino, Fall Winter 1985 and Bodymap, Spring Summer 1986
Between the 1980s and 2000s, the number of shows increased fivefold. Moore covered eight different show schedules between London, Milan, New York and Paris. Twice a year. ‘We were shooting solidly from 7am to midnight, with no days off, from the beginning of January to the end of March.’ And he would do it again for the spring shows in June, July and September/October.
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Naomi Campbell modeling for Jasper Conran, Fall Winter 1987 and John Richmond and Maria Cornejo. Spring Summer 1988
In the ’80s and ’90s, newspapers would sometimes publish show reports a week after the event. But when digital came along in the late ’90s, the pace became frenetic, with editors filing stories an hour after the show had ended. According to Millar, who accompanied Moore on this annual fashion marathon, “the biggest sacrifice in the workday was the group meetings where photographers and editors would share the gossip and news of the day over relaxed dinners in foreign cities, and the loss of camaraderie while waiting for the analog celluloid film to come back from the processing labs.” It’s no wonder that the industry seems to have become an incomprehensible blur of fleeting images and instant criticism and takedowns. “There was a time when people had to wait to see the images. They weren’t instant, but of course when digital came along, they were instant. And everyone wants it 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 a million photographs, currently stored in Northumberland, boxes of slides waiting to be digitised so they can be searched and used as references. So what do they plan to do with them? ‘Are we going to dig a big hole?’ laughs Moore. ‘There’s got to be an answer. But at the moment, we’re not entirely sure.’
This unique record of 20th- and 21st-century fashion history needs to be preserved. Perhaps the fashion houses and multimillion-dollar corporations that have benefited from Moore’s work over the decades could fund a study center or a Catwalking library. It’s quite a legacy. “You look back more than you look forward,” Moore says. “I don’t think you start out thinking you’re going to record history. I think you have to leave a fingerprint. That’s what I tell my son, to leave a fingerprint in life, to leave something behind when you’re gone – to leave a mark.”
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Karen Elson for Giles, Fall Winter 2004 and Christopher Bailey for Burberry Prorsum, Spring Summer 2011