Rebel Stylist celebrates the work of the maverick British fashion editor Caroline Baker in a new book.
She has had a prolific career, but thoseeditorials really are quite incredible, particularly the ones with Helmut Newton: I am thinking of the image with the model with the eye mask and ice pack—and smoking a cigarette. Or the ones with Hans Feurer, where she used army surplus…. Caroline approached things differently… she wanted her stories to have some kind of comment on society. [For one story] she had some swimsuits and decided to take them out onto the streets.
She used fashion to make a statement, in a political way. It was very much about her and her generation not wanting to look like their parents, not wanting to lead this very, ‘OK, this is who you are, and this is the life you must live.’ One of the things she said to me, she mentioned quite a few times, is how much she envied men and their clothes because they had pockets. Something as simple as that; to be able to run around and do what you wanted to do.
It’s hard to imagine now, because fashion was really such a small closed world back in the ’60s and to an extent the ’70s….