Dick Page reveals his truest colors
The other side of make-up artist Dick Page
08 12/12 UP
Text:Tiffany Godoy Photo:Courtesy of Jed Root Translation:Miho Matsumoto
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- You've had a long creative relationship with some of the world's top photographers, including Mario Sorrenti, and Juergen Teller. You work a lot with Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Are the creative discussions different from when you first started?
- I worked with Mario years ago. Then we didn't work together for a long time. I worked with him again on the Jill Stuart advertising campaign last year, and he did the Shiseido campaign with me last year. With Juergen it's a lot more constant. He moved to London the year before me. When I first met him he didn't speak any English. His family makes violin parts, bridges etc… and he went into the family business but was allergic to all the chemicals and materials. Then he moved to England and we met and it's been a continual relationship since then. I'll have an idea and call him up and say: "Why don't we do this or that?" -- weird shit for Marc [Jacobs] or W (Magazine). Me and my husband James were in the Marc Jacobs campaign a couple of years ago. I'm 42 and I'm the model!
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- That made a real impact -- it was a portrait of you and James as a couple. It was very risky.
- That was Juergen's idea. It was a mortal embarrassment because James is skinnier than me, but still he's not model size – men's sample sizes are usually a European 50-52 but Marc Jacobs' sample sizes are 46! We went to Marc Jacobs to try the clothes on and I looked like Pee Wee Herman.
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- It's interesting to hear how you work with these people that you've collaborated with for so long.
- Its really random for me. I'm sure there's lots of other people who are much more precise and plan their business strategies. Like Luigi Murenu, for example, who does hair. Luigi wakes up in a sweat every morning thinking about hair, he’d be the first to admit it, it drives him and makes him good at his job, you can just tell. I'm much more like "OK, anything can happen. Today, something's going to happen. We'll make it work".
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- But in Japan it can't happen like that.
- They want it at the meeting with a drawing. "Where are the people going to be? What direction is she facing? What is she wearing? Let's put a picture of the product here."
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- Do most of the best pictures happen when they're not planned?
- Yes, at least I think so. Juergen did the shoot for Marc Jacobs with [child actress] Dakota Fanning a few seasons ago. They made almost the whole collection again for her. We flew to LA to do this. We had this scary hotel. We were down there with all this security and we going to shoot in this very dilapidated ballroom. We get there, then Juergen found a stairwell. There was concrete on the floor, this shabby white wall and the stairwell, and we did it there. And you have no idea where it was -- it could be anywhere -- but we started off in the ballroom and ended up in the stairwell. That's where the good pictures come from. If there's too much of a pre-conceived idea it's not going to happen.
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- What do you do when there isn't a lot of make-up required, as in that shoot?
- We had a list from her management "Dakota will wear this, cannot wear this". But that's right because she's a kid -- we can't put a lot of make up on her. But it's part of working with Juergen and being part of a team and bouncing ideas off each other.
A lot of the time what I do is not about make up and I'm completely happy about that. The bits that you don't do and the spaces you leave become as important as the stuff that you do. I got my first break helping on student fashion shows in Bristol. My very first real fashion show was for Calvin Klein. I'd never done a fashion show before. My agent just lied through her teeth. I ended up working with Calvin Klein and didn't have a clue what I was doing. And all the big models were there -- I started working with Kate Moss when she was 15. For CK it was Kate, and a bunch of young girls, but for Calvin Klein he decided to bring back a load of models from the '70s -- Donna Jordan, Donna Mitchell. It was a baptism of fire.
