Book Review: Grace. A Memoir, by Grace Coddington
If you have seen The September Issue or are an avid Vogue fan, you will already be familiar with Grace Coddington, the pale, ginger, lion-maned creative director of American Vogue. Born in Wales in 1941, Coddington was obsessed with fashion from a young age, particularly with Vogue magazine, which she used to order and receive three months late from the local newsagent’s in her native Holy Island. She started her career when she won a modelling competition organised by British Vogue, steadily worked her way up, first as a Junior Editor at the British edition of the magazine, then as Anna Wintour’s creative director at American Vogue, which she joined in 1988 after a brief stint as design director at Calvin Klein.
Her autobiography, Grace: A Memoir was published by Random House at the end of 2012 (here’s an excerpt). I’ve had it in my bookshelf for at least a year and a half (I have a tendency to accumulate books and only read them much later, once I’m in the mood). Grace is not that dense (although Grace might be…see below), but it took me a couple of months to finish since it is a bit more like a collection of random themes and episodes, which lets you put it down and pick it up however many times you want.
Coddington seems more than a little full of herself – “Oh, how I hate celebrity, but here I am being so good at it even though I’m shit at it”, “Oh I hated the September issue but it ended up making me famous”, “Oh I didn’t get that job but I wasn’t even trying”, “I must be the only fashion editor who still works with the model instead of giving it to an assistant” et cetera ad nauseam. You get the idea – her personality is pretty annoying. What made Grace worth the read for me were Coddington’s insights into the work of fashion photographers. I find the creative process absolutely fascinating (doesn’t everyone?) – after watching a movie, I’ll watch the director’s commentary, I’ll pour over preparatory sketches of paintings, and I recently fell in love with a book containing a collection of Helmut Newton’s Polaroids that he used to determine what the final photograph would look like. It’s a delight for a brief moment to become a fly on the wall and observe the greats in action, and Grace gives you plenty of that.
By the last one hundred pages though I started getting impatient for the book to end. Not necessarily because it was poorly written, more because the narrative style was so monotonous – Coddington jumps form one event to another with little respect for chronological order, never addressing a particular topic or issue over more than a few pages (apart from her cherished cats that get a whole chapter), resulting in a sort of anecdotal story-telling style that drones on and on, interspersing amusing little gems with multiple successive short bits on something much more boring. One critic described her writing style as ‘bloodless‘ and I wouldn’t disagree. Would I recommend reading it? Sure, if you like fashion and photography, and light celebrity gossip. Will I be surprised if you don’t have the patience to finish it? Absolutely not.
Bonvivante rating: ★★★☆☆ May make it to Karl Lagerfeld’s coffee table, but not the one he uses
Grace: A Memoir is available for €23.51 from Amazon.
If you really really like her and are ready to pay a little extra, check out a few other books with Coddington’s name on them:
Grace: The American Vogue Years (published in 2016, available on Amazon for €165)
Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue (published in 2015, available on Amazon for €165) and
The Catwalk Cats (co-authored with her partner, fashion hairdresser Didier Malige and published in 2008, out of print but available on Amazon).
Cover Photo by Patrick McMullan
