Grace Coddington to step down as creative director of American Vogue

One of the fashion industry’s most revered creative directors, Grace Coddington, has stepped down from her position at US Vogue after 28 years.

The 74-year-old will not be leaving the magazine altogether – instead taking up a more fluid position of creative director at large – but many have interpreted the move as a watershed moment for fashion publishing, marking a shift away from the lush, baroque photo shoots Coddington is famous for and towards a more commercially minded digital future.

Coddington, from Anglesey in Wales, entered the fashion world as a model, winning a Vogue contest in her late teens. She was immediately embraced by some of the biggest names of the swinging sixtes, including Norman Parkinson, David Bailey and Vidal Sassoon. The latter chose Coddington to popularise his five point haircut, the style credited with liberating women from setting lotion and rollers.

She remained a significant presence in front of the camera even after losing her left eyelid in a car accident and having a series of reconstructive operations and skin grafts.

Since taking up the role of creative director at Vogue in the 1980s, Coddington has overseen some of the most iconic fashion photography of the past three decades, working with models such as Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington and photographers including Bruce Weber, Peter Lindbergh and Mario Testino.

Typically dressed in androgynous black suits or, at a push, silky blue pyjamas on the Met Ball red carpet, Coddington is an understated industry treasure, her halo of ginger hair so recognisable that it recently became the star of its own Cousin It-style portrait by Tim Walker.

She is loved for taking an old-fashioned approach to fashion, creating iconic images that further the premise that fashion is more art form than cold, hard commerce.

She became something of a celebrity in the wider world in 2009 with the release of the behind-the-scenes Vogue documentary The September Issue. The film presented Coddington, with her tendency to prioritise artistry and romance over pedestrian concerns of budgets and logistics, as the foil to US Vogue’s strict and business savvy editor, Anna Wintour. The pair’s clashes over clothes and pagination became highlights of the documentary.

By 2013, Coddington was deemed to have sufficient mass market appeal to appear alongside Tracey Emin and Katie Piper in a Marks & Spencer Leading Ladies advertising campaign.

The move will allow Coddington to work on other projects for the first time since the 80s, including a fragrance collaboration with Japanese label Comme des Garçons.

“I’m not running away from Vogue, because it has opened so many doors” she said. “But it will be nice to collaborate, and nice to go out [and] give talks to people. It’s just another approach. I’m certainly not going into retirement. I don’t want to sit around.”