Catwalking: 40 years of London fashion week

This September, the British Fashion Council continues its 40th anniversary celebrations, so we’ve taken the opportunity to revisit the last four decades at London fashion week through the lens of the original catwalk photographer, Chris Moore. As fashion week begins, Mr Moore, who turns 90 this year, won’t be squashed into the photographers’ pen at the end of the runway, but he will probably feel the twitch of his shutter finger as the season’s shows get under way. Covid was the natural opportunity for Moore to hang up his camera bag, though he still continued with some longstanding clients, including CSM degree shows, Simone Rocha and Christopher Kane, until last year. Moore will most likely be at home in Northumberland with his longtime partner, Maxine Millar (herself a photographer who has run the studio since they met in the late 80s), and their beloved cats, enjoying a long walk in the countryside.
In a way, the catwalk shows took over Moore’s life. ‘I did other jobs,’ he said over a Zoom call, recalling his early days working for Vogue. He started there in 1954 assisting the studio manager on the princely salary of £6 per week. ‘I eventually got pigeonholed as a catwalk photographer.’ According to the journalist Alex Fury in the introduction to Catwalking (also the name of Moore’s business, trademarking the word in 1996), a hefty tome published by Laurence King in 2017, documenting 50 years of his career, he is the ‘man who invented the notion of the catwalk photographer in the 1960s, when catwalk shows as we know them had only just begun.’ Moore was in the right place at the right time to, in Fury’s words, ‘see more fashion that perhaps anyone else on earth.’
Catwalking was quite an operation. He ran a studio in a warehouse on Farringdon Road, London, just down the road from the Guardian’s and Observer’s old offices, where fashion editors and their assistants would pore over plastic sheets of slides, fresh from the processing lab, bent over a lightbox with a lupe to magnify the images in search of the right look, the right model, whatever the latest trend for hours at a time. As a fashion assistant in the early 90s at the Independent newspaper, I spent days of my life in that studio, selecting images for the week’s fashion pages. It was always exciting seeing what was going on, hearing the gossip from the assistant photographers who were passing through on their way to the next round of shows, the cardboard boxes crammed with pictures. Moore supplied images for many newspapers and supplements, including the Guardian and Observer, and for more than 25 years, the fashion editor everyone in the industry read, Suzy Menkes for the International Herald Tribune.
Even before the days of digital, covering the shows involved long days. But no matter how many pictures they sold a season, it was never big business. ‘How can I put it, nobody paid our fare to go anywhere, nobody paid our hotel bills or anything else,’ says Moore. ‘We did it all ourselves. Hence, that’s why we can say that we kept the copyright. The Herald Tribune only paid me by the pictures they used. There were no expenses at all. It was all my own expenses and, of course, I had a team, and paid for them, all the fares… So I never became rich.’
In 1984, when the newly formed British Fashion Council pulled together London’s fashion talent under one umbrella and most importantly one tent, originally pitched outside the Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park (now the Design Museum), it was the start of a new era for British fashion. In October 1984, there were 24 catwalk shows over three days, with designers including Betty Jackson, Jasper Conran, Jean Muir, Vivienne Westwood, Bruce Oldfield (who opened his own shop that year) and the new kids just starting out – Bodymap and Richmond Cornejo. John Galliano had just graduated from St Martins alongside his classmate John Flett. Joe Casely-Hayford officially launched his brand, and that spring, Katharine Hamnett had worn her ‘58% Don’t Want Pershing’ T-shirt to meet Margaret Thatcher at Downing Street. Some have moved on or changed direction in the years since. Galliano, Maria Cornejo and Pam Hogg are all still producing collections and shows, but as Moore has witnessed, fashion moves on at a pace and many are left behind. ‘It’s a hard business,’ he says.
At the tents in the Duke of York barracks on Kings Road and then outside the Natural History Museum, Moore would set up next to the catwalk and fix his lens on one spot so he could make sure the model was in focus when she reached it. ‘I had a box which I sat on next to the catwalk. And I would rise as the model came forward, take the photograph, and then plonk back down on the box. But, of course, the journalists didn’t like it because they couldn’t always see very well from the front row.’ Towards the late 80s, the photographers were made to stand together at the end of the catwalk. ‘They wanted us, but at the same time, they sort of hated us. So things changed gradually and we were forced to shoot from the podium at the bottom of the catwalk, which meant we weren’t in the way of the journalists.’
Between the 1980s and 2000s, the number of shows grew five-fold. Moore was covering eight different show schedules between London Milan, New York and Paris. Twice a year. ‘We were solidly shooting from the beginning of January through to the end of March with no days off, a whopping 90 days unbroken, 7am until midnight.’ And he would do it all over again for the spring shows in June and July and September/October.
In the 80s and 90s, newspapers would publish show reports sometimes a week after the events. But once digital took over in the late 90s, the pace was frenzied with editors filing stories within an hour of the show ending. According to Millar who accompanied Moore on this annual fashion marathon, ‘the biggest sacrifice in the working day was the loss of camaraderie through group get togethers with photographers and editors sharing the day’s gossip and news over relaxed dinners in foreign cities while we all waited for the analogue celluloid film to come back from the processing labs.’ No wonder the industry seems to have become an unfathomable blur of fleeting images and instant criticism and take-downs. ‘There was this time where people had to wait to see images. They weren’t instant but, of course, once digital came in, well then they were instant. And everybody wants them quick, quick, quick.’
Moore has taken more than 1m pictures, currently kept in Northumberland, boxes and boxes of slides waiting to be digitised so they are searchable and useful as a resource. What are they planning to do with it all? ‘Are we going to dig a big hole?’ laughs Moore. ‘There must be an answer. But at the moment, we’re not totally sure.’
This unique record of 20th and 21st fashion history needs to be preserved. Perhaps the fashion houses and million-dollar conglomerates who have benefited from Moore’s work over the decades might fund a study centre or the Catwalking library. It’s quite a legacy. ‘You look back more than forward,’ says Moore. ‘I don’t think you start off thinking I am going to record history. I think you need to make a thumbprint. This is what I tell my son, that he has to leave a thumbprint on life, to leave something behind you when you go – to make a mark.’