TOTALThrowback
st. john BY CHARLES MANNING When did you first start modeling for your family’s brand, St. John? I was 15, and my parents were looking to move the photo shoots from New York to California. They needed a body to test the photographer, and then the pictures ended up in Town & Country. It was my first shoot! How did you go from modeling in campaigns as a teen to becoming company president in 1996? I actually started at age 12, at the reception desk. I went off to college, and was floundering miserably—partying and gaining the Freshman 15. I called my dad and said, “This really isn’t for me.” So I went back to work, and they gave me collages to make. I decided to put together an ad budget. We were shooting in California, and I thought we should be shooting in New York, because the California photographers were really slow. I put this FA S H I O N W E E K D A I LY. C O M
confidential book together—Arthur Elgort, Neil Kirk, Peter Lindbergh, Francesco Scavullo—and the company funded my shoot in New York! We had three days. Me and another girl lugged the clothes around in 25 suitcases. We got to New York and, sadly, the photographer we’d booked had had a heart attack and nobody called us, so we got out my black book and started cold-calling people. Somebody volunteered to shoot at night. We came back with beautiful photographs, and on budget. That’s how I got my start in advertising. When we started advertising, we had one page every other month in Town & Country and when I left [in 2005], we were doing more than 200 pages in the U.S. The St. John ads in the late ’90s were so unusual and intriguing. What was the concept? The ads were meant to be provocative. Our line was absolutely not. We were conservative, and we dressed lawyers and politician’s wives, but that isn’t very aspirational or fun to look at. So we created this fantasy; the idea was, if you wore St. John, you could be like me and have five men following you around the world. How involved were you in producing these shoots? Neil Kirk was our photographer for 15 years or more. He was my creator, and I was his muse. We’d start with locations. I was chief merchant and creative director for the company, so I’d be midway through developing a collection, and we would think about where we were going to shoot. Then I’d go back to designing, and we’d
make sure we had great clothing to photograph in these magnificent locations. How much were you spending on these shoots? Surprisingly, not very much. We used a lot of airline points. It wasn’t known to be great pay, but everyone wanted to be on St. John shoots. Neil and I would pick a location, get there a day early to scout, and hope for the best. Tell us about the male models. You were always surrounded by men in those ads. Neil never liked for me to get too close or to talk to them. He always wanted to use them positionally and didn’t want a lot of interaction. On one shoot, in Scotland, I actually ended up dating one of the models. I remember seeing him on that first day and saying to Neil, “I don’t like him. You keep him away from me.” Sure enough, by the next day, I couldn’t stay away from him. We dated for about six months, but that was the first, last, and only time. You worked with a lot of exotic animals, too. There was that enormous white tiger... Oh, God, yes! That shoot took place in Nevada, where literally everything is legal—even things that shouldn’t be. There’s a famous photo of me in a white dress holding a tiger by a chain. I asked Neil, “Can we get somebody else to hold this stupid chain, and just Photoshop it?” He said, “Oh, darling. There are some things that simply cannot be Photoshopped!” So he made me hold the tiger’s chain, and the tiger was really like this giant, playful kitten; it
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Kelly Gray was the soul of St. John for years, designing collections and starring in ad campaigns for the brand. In 2005, when the company was at its most profitable, she and her family were pushed out. Gray spills about that crazy time—and much more.
