This September, the British Fashion Council celebrates its 40th anniversary, so we took the opportunity to revisit the past four decades of London Fashion Week through the lens of original catwalk photographer, Chris Moore. As Fashion Week begins, Mr Moore, who turns 90 this year, won't be crammed into the photographer's cage at the end of the runway, but he will likely feel the trembling of his shutter finger as the season's shows begin. Covid has been the natural opportunity for Moore to hang up his camera bag, although he continued to work with a number of regular clients up until last year, including CSM Diploma shows, Simone Rocha and Christopher Kane. Moore will most likely be at 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 their beloved cats, enjoying a long walk in the countryside.
In a way, the catwalk shows took over Moore's life. "I had other jobs," he said during a Zoom call, recalling his early days at Vogue, where he started out as an assistant to the studio manager for the princely salary of £6 a week in 1954. "Eventually I was pigeonholed as a catwalk photographer," journalist Alex Fury wrote in the introduction to Walking the catwalk (also the name of Moore's company, which he trademarked in 1996), a hefty book published in 2017 by Laurence King that chronicles 50 years of his career, he is "the man who coined the term catwalk photographer in the 1960s, when catwalk shows as we know them were just beginning." Moore was in the right place at the right time to, in Fury's words, "see more fashion than anyone else on the planet."
Catwalking was a big business. He ran a studio in a warehouse on Farringdon Road in London, just around the corner from the old offices of the Guardian and Observer, where fashion editors and their assistants would spend hours poring over sheets of plastic slides fresh from the development lab, hunched over a light box with a lupe, magnifying the images in search of the right look, the right model, whatever the latest trend. As a fashion assistant at the Independent newspaper in the early 1990s, I would spend days of my life in that studio, selecting 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 as they passed by on their way to the next round of shows, the cardboard boxes crammed with pictures. Moore supplied images for many newspapers and supplements, including the Guardian and Observer, and for more than 25 years the fashion editor everyone in the industry read, Suzy Menkes for the International Herald Tribune.
Even before the digital age, the shows were long hours. But no matter how many pictures they sold each season, it was never big business. "How can I say, nobody paid for our travel to go anywhere, nobody paid our hotel bills or anything," Moore says. "We did it all ourselves. That's why we can say we kept the copyright. The Herald Tribune only paid me for the pictures they used. There were no fees at all. It was all my own expenses and of course I had a crew and paid for them, all the travel. . . . So I never got rich."
In 1984, when the newly formed British Fashion Council brought London's fashion talent together under one umbrella and, more importantly, one tent, originally set up outside the Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park (now the Design Museum), it was the beginning of a new era for British fashion. In October 1984, there were 24 catwalk shows over three days, featuring designers including Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran, Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood, Bruce Oldfield (who opened his own shop that year) and the new boys just starting out - Bodymap and Richmond Cornejo. John Galliano had just graduated from St Martins, along with his classmate John Flett. Joe Casely-Hayford officially launched his brand and that spring Katharine Hamnett wore her '58% Don't Want Pershing' T-shirt to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. Some have moved on or changed direction in the years since. Galliano, Maria Cornejo and Pam Hogg all still produce collections and shows, but as Moore has seen, fashion moves on at breakneck speed and many are left behind. 'It's a tough business,' he says.
At the tents in the Duke of York Barracks on the Kings Road and then outside the Natural History Museum, Moore would position himself next to the catwalk and focus his lens on one spot, so he could make sure the model was in focus when she got there. 'I had a box that I would sit on next to the catwalk. And I would stand up as the model came forward, take the picture and then flop down on the box. But of course the journalists didn't like that because they couldn't always see properly from the front row.' By the late 1980s, the photographers were having to stand together at the end of the catwalk. 'They wanted us, but at the same time they hated us a bit. So things gradually changed and we were forced to shoot from the stage at the bottom of the catwalk, which meant we were out of the journalists' way.'
Between the 1980s and 2000s, the number of shows grew fivefold. Moore covered eight different show schedules between London, Milan, New York and Paris. Twice a year. 'We filmed solidly from the beginning of January to the end of March with no days off, 90 days straight, from 7am to midnight.' And he would do it all again for the spring shows in June and July and September/October.
Naomi Campbell modeled for Jasper Conran, Fall/Winter 1987, and John Richmond and Maria Cornejo, Spring/Summer 1988
In the 1980s and 1990s, newspapers would sometimes publish a report on a show a week after it had happened. But when digital took over in the late 1990s, the pace became breakneck, with editors having to file stories within an hour of the show. According to Millar, who accompanied Moore on this annual fashion marathon, "the biggest sacrifice during the workday was the loss of camaraderie in group meetings with photographers and editors sharing the gossip and news of the day over relaxed dinners in foreign cities, while we all waited for the analogue celluloid film to come back from the processing labs." No wonder the industry seems to have become an impenetrable blur of fleeting images and instant criticism and takedowns. "There was a time when people had to wait to see images. They weren't instant, but when digital came along, well, they were instant. And everyone wants them fast, fast, fast."
Yasmin Le Bon for John Rocha, Spring Summer 1994, and Kylie Minogue for Antonio Berardi, Spring Summer 1996, from an October 1995 show
Moore has taken over 1 million photographs, which are currently stored in Northumberland, boxes and boxes of slides waiting to be digitized so they are searchable and usable as a resource. What do they plan to do with them? "Do we dig a big hole?" Moore laughs. "There has 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 conglomerates that have profited from Moore's work over the decades could fund a study center or the Catwalking Library. It's quite a legacy. "You look back more than you look forward," Moore says. "I don't think you initially think I'm going to record history. I think you have to make a fingerprint. That's what I tell my son, that he has to leave a fingerprint on life, that he has to leave something behind when you go away - to make a mark."
Karen Elson for Giles, Fall/Winter 2004, and Christopher Bailey for Burberry Prorsum, Spring/Summer 2011