The Godfather of Catwalk Photography Presents His Life’s Work

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/fashion/chris-moore-photography-catwalking.html

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PARIS — If Bill Cunningham is widely credited as the inventor of modern street-style photography, then Chris Moore is seen by many in the fashion industry as the godfather of the runway images shot and published today.

A small, bearded and bespectacled Englishman, Mr. Moore at 83 can still be seen wielding his camera at the front of the photographers’ pit during fashion weeks in New York, London, Paris and Milan. He still fights his way through the scrum of sharp elbows and big egos and stakes his territory, standing for hours waiting for his shots and lugging his equipment from venue to venue.

Indeed, he claims to have attended every ready-to-wear show, in every major fashion city, for the last 50 years, doggedly continuing to hone a trade he first began as an assistant at British Vogue, working for such names as Cecil Beaton.

He is planning to retire — although he won’t say exactly when. And of the millions of photographs that Mr. Moore has taken over the course of his six-decade career, slightly more than 500 have made it into “Catwalking,” a coffee table-style book published in November that chronologically presents his archives, notes and memories on the evolution of the contemporary fashion industry, effectively opening his world to the public for the first time.

Sharing its name with Catwalking.com, the subscription photo website Mr. Moore founded in 1999, the book begins with descriptions of the 1950s couture salon presentations of Dior and Balmain, where photographers were not welcome for fear their pictures would lead to thefts of designs. Then, it captures the birth of ready-to-wear and runway shows in the 1960s and 1970s, masterminded by designers like Sonia Rykiel, Karl Lagerfeld and Pierre Cardin, and the growth of fashion into a global, mass-manufactured, multibillion-dollar business.

And as well as charting the emergence of the supermodel phenomenon in the 1990s (remember Linda, Cindy, Naomi and Christy in minidresses at Versace in 1991); the transition from black and white film to the technicolor digital world; and the rise of live-streamed entertainment spectacles, the book presents an array of priceless fashion moments.

Highlights include John Galliano’s Central St. Martins graduation show in 1984, named “Les Incroyables,” after a band of aristocratic rebels in Revolutionary France; “Plato’s Atlantis,” Alexander McQueen’s final extravaganza before his death in 2010; and Mr. Lagerfeld’s debut for Chanel, held in Paris in 1983 and reliably full of the tweeds, pearls and two-tone shoes that still populate his collections for the house today.

“Fashion gets in your blood,” Mr. Moore has said, on why he has stayed in the business for so long. His book is a transfusion, of sorts.