From Madonna’s ‘Sex’ book and Kate Moss’ Calvin Klein campaign: Fabien Baron on 40 years in fashion
- The sought-after art director’s new book looks back on a four-decade career
- Baron says glossy magazines are in decline as brands now create their own content; as for influencers, they’re too generic and not luxury enough, he says
French-born art director Fabien Baron may not be a household name outside fashion circles, but his greater visual oeuvre may be familiar – remember those heroin-chic Kate Moss Calvin Klein ads from the 1990s? Then there was Madonna’s 1992 photo book, Sex, which, however tame it may seem today, in that innocent world before the Kardashians and their a** implants, was shocking. The iconic covers of Andy Warhol-founded Interview magazine? And the countless Vogue pages involved in any four-decade career in luxury fashion.
Inside the Manhattan headquarters of his creative agency, Baron & Baron, the now 60-year-old discusses his recently published career retrospective, Fabien Baron: Works 1983-2019 (Phaidon).
“It was time to turn the page and look at all the work I’ve done so far and say, ‘Now what? What’s next?’” he says during New York Fashion Week in September. “It’s like putting a period at the end of a sentence. There are all these changes: magazines are falling apart, digital is taking over, and I am changing, getting older, so it’s drawing a line in the sand.”
Ask any creative director from international glossies such as Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, and edgier indies like V Magazine or Dazed, and they will have been inspired, in one way or another, by Baron’s creative direction in various mediums.
The son of a newspaper art director, Baron moved to New York in his early 20s to try his luck as an image-maker but also to move out of his father’s shadow, a strong figure who has loomed large.