Let’s throw back to 1985. Diana, Princess of Wales, has just danced with John Travolta at the White House, The Power of Love is the bestselling single of the year and, in the UK, a team of editors is preparing to launch a new magazine called ELLE.
The first issue’s cover image of a smiling, fresh-faced 20-year-old Yasmin Le Bon is now a part of fashion history. Photographed by Gilles Tapie, the shoot took place a month before the Oxford-born, half-English, half-Persian model would marry her pop-star beau, Simon Le Bon (she was Yasmin Parvaneh at the time, and was well on her way to becoming a household name on her own).
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The model had already worked extensively on a range of earlier international editions of the magazine. ‘I was a real ELLE girl at that point,’ she says. But the cover of the UK edition, pulled from a beauty shoot meant to run inside on a double-page spread, wasn’t guaranteed. ‘I was so used to doing cover tries and not getting them that I was amazed I got it.’
Looking back on it now, the November 1985 image is a period piece, entirely reflective of the decade, complete with a crushed-velvet look styled by Amanda Cochrane, co-ordinating Dior eyeshadow applied by Lesley Chilkes and buoyantly big hair created by Sam McKnight. But it’s Le Bon’s smile that steals the scene.‘I remember putting out a lot of positive energy – I knew what was needed,’ she adds.
Sam McKnight.
‘Yasmin had the best smile in the business, and she still does,’ says McKnight.‘There was also a big wind machine. ELLE then was all about youth and energy,’ he remembers. ‘There wasn’t another magazine like it in the UK. It had a unique point of view.’
Much might have changed since, but one thing has not: the relationship McKnight and Le Bon cultivated. ‘It was like being in a family; intense and intimate,’ says Le Bon. ‘You were a very, very small team and you developed tight bonds with the people you worked with,’ echoes McKnight. ‘There was a lot of fun had!’
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