Melanie Ward Invented The Modern Stylist.
Melanie Ward, photo by Inez and Vinoodh
Melanie Ward invented the idea of the modern stylist. The one that picked bits up from everywhere, not just taking a ‘look’ from a fashion show. It’s no surprise she studied fashion design at St Martins – how she put clothes together, with a bit of a zip from here and a bit of a cut-up T-shirt from there, was groundbreaking. She successfully combined her fashion background with bits and bobs, mixing a Gaultier skinny rib with some Levi’s that she’d taken apart to dye one leg a different colour from the other before sewing them back together again.
She also certainly gave style magazines a leg-up, making them relevant in fashion circles, and making world-renowned fashion designers and their circles look at them and take notice. I wonder if The Face and i-D would have ever been as globally influential without Melanie’s talent? And Dazed would never have taken the path it did without Melanie’s influence on me – I was there until about 1997, while we were still figuring out ‘how to do fashion’.
I was working at the Katharine Hammett press office when I first met Melanie Ward. I was lucky enough to be given an internship at the press office for a couple of weeks (with Romaine Lillie – who I met when she was wearing Pucci and gave me tickets to see Prince, but that’s another story). It was the summer of 1990 – just before I went to St Martins.
I didn’t really know what a stylist was, but seeing Melanie’s ‘Summer of Love’ story in The Face made me realise I wanted to be just like her. Me and my friends in Birmingham had spent the summer recreating that shoot – with various denim skirts, Birkenstock sandals and tight small vintage T-shirts, coupled with no hair and make-up, which was in stark contrast to our previous months trying to look like Lady Miss Kier.
I wanted to get bags of charity-shop clothes and mix them with high fashion. As time went on I realised that I was never going to be one of those stylists that desperately needed look 21 from wherever. I was quite happy putting stuff together like Melanie did (I have never been anywhere near as good as her, but boy, it’s been fun trying). Her cast was just everything I wanted to be: sexy girls looking like sexy boys, sexy boys looking like sexy girls. The ‘right’ pair of silver pants, the right polo neck. She showed that you just needed to ‘look for good clothes’ – it didn’t matter where they were from. She made it OK to wear a work suit with sneakers – for the whole of 1992 I wore a second-hand grey pinstripe suit with a Hanro or Muji vest and sneakers. Her styling was classless, or perhaps just showed that it wasn’t where you came from but how you presented yourself that mattered.
That first time I met her, I still remember her walking into the studio wearing Adidas tracksuit bottoms and god, she was so cool. I met Laurence Passera, who was working as Ray Petri’s assistant then, the same day. Another time not so long after I was in the office of her agent Debbie Walters and heard Debbie on the phone saying, ‘Yeah, but she needs Concorde – she will never make the meeting unless she’s on the Concorde.’ Obviously she was referring to a meeting between Melanie and Calvin Klein – Melanie was making waves in the international fashion arena.
I always loved her work with Helmut Lang. It was just so ‘clever’: the pants over the face, the bouncy orange thing, her self-portraits. She’s the reason I bought Helmut Lang! And Gaultier too – when I could afford it. The fact that a British stylist with a seemingly ‘normal’ background who made her name putting her friends in second-hand clothes became fashion director for Harper’s Bazaar US for 14 years? She changed the way we all look at fashion, in a truly international way.
I met her properly years later at the famously very late Marc Jacobs ‘backwards’ show where we went and got incredibly drunk at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and I went on and on about how she had changed my life and I would never have ended up ‘doing this’ without her incredible inspiration. I was reminded late last night as people exchanged their Melanie stories that every time she was in a room I would go up to her and say how her work had changed my life, and she was always a bit bashful and surprised.
I saw her again earlier this year at Kim Jones’ final Dior men’s show. This week has seen awful losses to the fashion industry: Louie Chaban also passed away this week. Both Melanie and Louie shaped my career further than probably either of them would ever know. They were both brilliant, talented and had great vision, and both pretty uncompromising which made them so iconic, special and the best.
Written by a superfan.
- Katie Grand
