26 October 2009

The Glass House takes backseat to fashion


October's Vogue Magazine has a feature on Phoebe Philo's first collection for Céline, which Annie Liebovitz photographed at Philip Johnson's Glass House. Wonder if that's a first for the Glass House, being bumped from subject to mere background of a shoot? – GF

3 comments:

TA said...

I bet it was easy to get bumped to the background for the nice fee Vogue must have paid.

christy maclear said...

Thought I would add to this as the ED of the Glass House. We have fielded hundreds of calls for the Glass House to be a site for such shots. We have only approved 3 - none of which paid. All three had the acceptance criteria that the content relate to supporting the talent of new designers -- in 2007 the article and photos featured Ron Radziner, Jeurgen Reim, Matthias Hollowich, the architects of asemptote - even john blacklee and port draper. This vogue issue was dedicated to the talent of phoebe philo which we believed was terrific in support of a young designer. It should be noted that even Annie Liebovitz commented on the difficulty of shooting at the site "because the architecture is a major player in the dialogue - it is not submissive or passive - it has an active voice in the picture" One can see that as the clothes in the two pictures shown are not even really discernable. So -- this is unusual for us - yes - but something others (see W mag where MoMA and Dia are pictured) are finding helps bring Modern into the more collective conscious. And - we all know that recognition (strategic recognition) of our great modern assets will create greater awareness and value to the preservation of those assets. Hope that helps the dialogue
Christy MacLear, Executive Director of the Glass House

Tom Andersen said...

Very interesting. Thanks, Christy!