Last night was Nylon‘s 13th anniversary party which of course brought out the young and beautiful. It also gives me a good excuse to wax poetic about what a great editor Marvin Jarrett is. Marvin and I met in an elevator going down from Marek‘s agency in NY a few months before he launched Nylon, just after he sold his first two music magazines (Bikini was one of them, we read it in high school). Marvin has a knack for being more than a few steps ahead of the crowd and a few years later he and his then Creative Director Lina Kutsovskaya, who went on to launch Teen Vogue, were amongst the first to publish my fashion shoots which I photographed while working as a stylist & fashion director for other magazines. Marvin is a rebel like no other and thank god for that because the coolest roads are paved by the most rebellious souls. At last night’s party they were flashing old covers on the big screen one of which included the “I Heart Berlin” issue from 2001 which was my first big shoot for Nylon in April of that year. I asked Kusum Lynn to style it and that was when she first met Marvin, on that trip to Berlin, with Adria Petty covering films and Crystal Meers who was still working as Marvin’s assistant (serious fashion history on the books). Kusum, who had been styling shoots for me at Russian Harper’s Bazaar for the year prior to that while she was working at W as an accessories market assistant, went on to become Marvin’s fashion editor at the magazine six months later before going over to Jane Magazine as their fashion editor. It was a pretty epic trip to say the least. Our shoot for the June/July 2001 issue of Nylon is below. One more side note about that trip. On my return flight, the customs agents in Berlin were hassling me about all the film I was lugging back to the states and Stephen Gan was behind me in line (I can’t recall what he told me he was doing in Berlin at the time, I think just taking a small vacation after the Milan/Paris shows which is where I knew his face from) and he helped me sort out the drama and actually carried that bag of film through the xray machine for me. Touched by an angel as they say. And yes, god bless Marvin & Lina because they really did run that first picture below that I took of the historic Berlin wall portrait of Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German leader Erich Honecker kissing in 1979 as the opener of the fashion shoot. I don’t have a single image from that shoot scanned (again the epic boxes of negatives in my NY apartment haunt me…) so scans of the tear sheets will have to do. Also one of my favorite photos is missing, the Marc Jacobs look we shot in an alley. I’ll find it next time I am home in NY…
