The Pages of Steven Klein: Vogue Came to Life at a Book Launch Party in the East Village

Steven Klein, whose beguiling photographs have graced the pages of this magazine for two decades, has cherry-picked his favorites for a forthcoming 256-page chronicle, Steven Klein: Vogue. Ahead of the tome’s December 2 release, Klein was the toast of the town on Monday night.

A cocktail reception hosted at the Brant Foundation’s Art Study Center in the East Village saw some 200 friends, family, and collaborators—including Irina Shayk, Calvin Klein, Karen Elson, Donna Karan, Anna Wintour, Grace Coddington, and Jordan Roth—brave the frigid cold to come out and congratulate him.

Klein’s provocative aesthetic is instantly-recognizable; a wild fusion of glamour, eroticism, and thought-provoking drama. Many of his most renowned editorials and portraits captured from 2000 to 2019—commissioned by Anna Wintour and styled by the likes of Coddington, Phyllis Posnick, Tonne Goodman, and Camilla Nickerson—have been compiled for this book. “It’s been a long process, so I’m glad it’s finished and I feel very good about the results,” Klein told Vogue. “It encapsulates a period of history of Vogue and my time there that will transcend time. As part of the selection process for the book, I chose pictures that are not necessarily considered ‘fashionable,’ but they stand the test of time as images—and I’m happy with that.”

Two levels of the Brant Foundation—originally constructed as a Con Edison substation more than a century ago—were transformed into an exhibit of Klein’s work for the night. On the second floor, guests were enthralled by an enormous 20-foot version of an image hanging from the ceiling, which depicted two human-meets-dolls in animatronic masks from 2012’s Fear of Aging editorial.

Nearby, an image from the December 2007 issue showing a masked woman slicing a chicken in her kitchen had caught Shayk’s attention: “Looking at this picture, I’m like, ‘What?!’ It’s so bizarre, but it’s also real life at the same time.” The Russian supermodel, a longtime friend, is also featured in the book. “That’s what makes Steven a genius and a visionary. He loves storytelling and pushing boundaries. Every time I work with him, I just know it’s going to be an out-of-the-box experience. As a model who has been in this industry for more than a few years, I want to explore and I want people to see me in different ways, and with Steven, it’s guaranteed that it will happen.”

The exhibit, curated by Klein himself, also featured large-scale projections of many of Klein’s most talked-about and subversive work that seeks to question the status quo. Among them was the May 2008 shot of Guinevere van Seenus with overly-injected, puffed-up lips from the Medical Mistakes editorial. Another, showed Karlie Kloss in crazed housewife mode for the October 2011 story Chaos Theory: glamorous, yet disheveled, using a chainsaw-like tool to cut meat.

“I hope everybody has a different point of view when they see the book,” Klein told Vogue, mid-party. “People need to look at the pictures more than once, and I hope it will raise more questions and have less answers. I tag myself as a fictional photographer. I’m not really reporting the truth. And sometimes, I don’t even know the meaning of my work until 10 years on. Sometimes, things that have been staged in my shoots have become actual history and truth. It somehow comes through me in some way.”