Spanning the first twenty years of the 21st century, from 2000 to 2019, the book features images commissioned by Vogue’s global editorial director, Anna Wintour, and styled by magazine stalwarts such as Posnick, Grace Coddington, Tonne Goodman, and Camilla Nickerson. Klein’s subjects, too, are nothing short of fashion legends—among them supermodels Gisele Bündchen, Karen Elson, Linda Evangelista, Karlie Kloss, Angela Lindvall, Carolyn Murphy, Joan Smalls, Lara Stone, Caroline Trentini, Christy Turlington, Amber Valletta, and Daria Werbowy—with pop-culture giants like Nicki Minaj and Dita von Teese stirred in for good measure.
“I remember early on, people didn’t quite know what to do with my work,” Klein writes in the book’s introduction. “It didn’t fit into the polished, high-gloss fantasy that fashion magazines typically sell. My work had blood in it. Bruises. Power games. Isolation. It had the feel of surveillance footage or a scene from a film you weren’t supposed to watch. Anna Wintour got it. She understood that fashion, at its best, should disturb the surface. It should challenge the way we see, the way we define taste.”
As Wintour herself puts it in Steven Klein: Vogue, “With Steven Klein, you’ll give him a dress, and he’ll give you a girl with a dress with a robot in a garden. It’s clever, conceptual, and ultimately lyrical.”
Herewith, ahead of the book’s release, a selection of the undeniable photographs that make up Steven Klein: Vogue.