Melanie Ward, the stylist who died of cancer this week, was one of the most influential fashion figures many people have never heard of.
More than a fashion editor or a brand consultant or a designer’s muse — though at different times in her career she was officially all of the above — Ms. Ward was the red thread that ran through the 1990s and early 2000s. She connected grunge to heroin chic to minimalism (a word she famously disavowed; she preferred “modernism”); Helmut Lang to Jil Sander to Calvin Klein; The Face to i-D to Barneys New York.
Ms. Ward was behind many of the defining images of the decade, including the July 1990 cover of The Face shot by Corinne Day that introduced to the world a laughing Kate Moss wearing a feather headdress and romping on a British beach. She styled Nigel Shafran’s portfolio of weedy British youth in track suits in a shopping center that ran in the magazine i-D and later became a book called “Teenage Precinct Shoppers.” And she helped conceive the Helmut Lang ads photographed by David Sims against a white background that reduced bodies and clothes to their constituent parts without any discernible artifice.
Ms. Ward’s photos with Ms. Day and Mr. Sims, and her work with Mr. Lang, “were really what made me decide to start my own brand,” Raf Simons, a creative director at Prada, said. “It was the first time I felt I could connect to an idea about fashion. It felt like the young people I found inspiring in the streets. I think we all thought: ‘This is it. This is what we love. This is what we are or want to be.’”
As a result, when we memorialize 1990s fashion, a big part of what we’re really heralding is Ms. Ward’s work. “If you had to point the finger at the one person who was central to creating that look, I think it was Melanie,” the model Linda Evangelista said. “There were all these different photographers and designers who were part of this phenomenon, but she was in the background of all of them.”
“It wouldn’t have happened without her,” Mr. Sims said.
Th designer Kim Jones said that every picture he ripped from a magazine and stuck onto his wall when he was a teenager dreaming of becoming a designer had been styled by Ms. Ward. “She was a lot of people’s secret weapon,” he said.
Ms. Ward, who was born in 1966, did not start out to make fashion — she studied language and politics — but Fridays spent haunting the secondhand markets of Portobello Road in London and customizing clothes for herself led to one job, and then another.
She was part of a generation of British talent that emerged at the end of the 1980s and the British recession and that rejected the bourgeois maximalism that defined the 1980s in favor of a gritty D.I.Y. realism. Her circle included the photographers Corrine Day and Mr. Sims, the makeup artist Dick Page, the hair stylist Guido Palau and the models Ms. Moss and Rosemary Ferguson, as well as musicians and artists.
She reveled in mixing high and low, sourced clothes from sex shops and designer brands and was one of the first stylists to embrace street casting, often including Black models in her shoots at a time when diversity was rarely mentioned in fashion. She brought back Birkenstocks, paired trouser suits and beat-up old Converse sneakers and Dunkin’ Donuts T-shirts, and layered parkas over evening gowns. It’s hard to estimate how impactful that was at a time of big hair and big shoulders and big glitz.
“She threw away everything we knew,” Ms. Evangelista said. “You threw away the powder. You threw away the poses. I had to learn to walk in flats on the runway because of her.”
The way Katie Grand, the stylist and former editor of the magazines Pop and Love, put it: “She made bad taste cool, and then it became good taste.” Looking at her photo shoots was, Mr. Jones said, “like looking at freedom.”
Calvin Klein, who worked with Ms. Ward to create many of his indelible early images of Ms. Moss in her Calvins and at his runway shows, said: “I was always looking for something different and new. That was it.”
In 1992, Ms. Ward’s work attracted the attention of Helmut Lang, the Austrian designer whose clothes were beginning to disrupt the fashion status quo, and for the next 13 years she was his closest collaborator.
“She went to the school uniform department at John Lewis, the department store on Oxford Street in London, and bought a pair of boy’s flat-front black trousers for Helmut to recut,” said Sarah Mower, the chief critic of Vogue Runway, who worked with Ms. Ward at Harper’s Bazaar starting in 1995. (Ms. Ward was a senior fashion editor until 2009.)
“Essentially, that’s why ‘boy-tailored pants’ became not just a mainstay of all Helmut Lang’s shows, but a uniform for all of us who were running around New York and London and wanted to look like cool businesspeople — a contradiction in terms until then,” Ms. Mower said.
Mr. Palau, the hair stylist who worked with Ms. Ward on Mr. Lang’s shows as well as on numerous photo shoots, said he remembered watching her backstage at a show spray-painting cowboy boots blue.
She loved harnesses, but “were they holsters, S&M kit or the frames for feathery angel wings?” Ms. Mower asked.
Mr. Klein remembered working with her on a collection in which they layered tank tops one atop another so colors were “just sneaking out between hemlines.” Her work skirted the line between elegance and perversion while remaining obsessively simple.
“It was clothes distilled to their purest essence,” said Edward Enninful, the founder of the creative company EE72 and former editor of British Vogue. Because of that, Ms. Evangelista said, the look seemed attainable. Ms. Grand, the editor and stylist, said she bought a “gnarly bouclé” Jean Paul Gaultier sweater for herself after seeing it in a picture styled by Ms. Ward.
She thought as much like a designer as a stylist, Mr. Klein said, and he used to bring her in at the beginning of a collection to work on fabrics and cuts. She later became creative director of Karl Lagerfeld’s namesake line and briefly flirted with having her own label before she turned back to styling, working at Louis Vuitton men’s wear, Dior Men and Fendi with Mr. Jones, as well as at Hermès and Versace.
The irony is that while Ms. Ward had an inherent dislike of nostalgia — “You can’t build the future by looking back,” she said in an interview with System magazine — the decade she helped define is now on everyone’s mood board. It is celebrated as the last great explosion of creativity before the corporatization of fashion, and endless image filters, led to the elevation of perfection and control over authenticity.
That means that Ms. Ward’s way of looking has become a reference point not just for designers, but for a host of social media influencers and people just looking for inspiration about how to get dressed in the morning. Whether they know it or not.
“She was so impactful,” said Valerie Steele, the fashion historian and curator. “She is still impacting us three decades later.”
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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