Inside Grace: Now, Grace Coddington’s Latest Chapter in Fashion Storytelling

At 85, Grace Coddington’s visual world continues to unfold. Her decades-long career has shaped a generation’s imagination, cementing her work and that of her contemporaries in fashion history. Now, Coddington surveys that decorated world in her latest monograph, Grace: Now, capturing it as it stands today: richly layered, sartorially textured, and fresh as ever.

Published by Phaidon, the book is the third installment in her monograph series, turning its attention to the decade since she stepped away from her full-time role at American Vogue in 2016. Across more than 200 photographs, her collaborations with photographers including Steven Meisel, Rafael Pavarotti, and Craig McDean reveal an imagination that continues to find new company and new directions.

 

“I keep looking, keep working, keep trying to make the next picture better than the last,” Coddington says in the book’s press release. It’s a simple explanation for a body of work that has made fashion feel expansive, transporting readers into stories that linger well beyond the clothes.

Much of that staying power comes from her understanding of fashion as a way into a character’s life. A gesture, an unlikely setting, or the relationship between figures can suggest a story already underway, leaving the viewer to imagine what happened before and what might follow. The clothes help tell us who these people are, what they long for, and how they want to be seen. For generations of readers, these images taught us to look, showing how a fashion photograph could carry the emotional pull of a film still or a passage of fiction.

 

“To me, Grace Coddington is the greatest stylist who has ever lived,” writes Edward Enninful, former British Vogue editor-in-chief and founder and editor-in-chief of EE72. “These weren’t just fashion stories; they were moments of history, scenes that will be remembered for generations to come.”

Those scenes share space with 40 of Coddington’s own drawings, alongside personal anecdotes and reflections from collaborators including Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, among other fashion and culture figureheads. The book opens with a handwritten tribute to her late friend and frequent collaborator Michael Roberts, whose original cover concept has been reimagined to reflect her cropped hairstyle, a personal detail that speaks to the raw vulnerability at the heart of her work.

 

 

Together, these contributions offer an intimate portrait of a creative force still in motion, one whose singular perspective continues to shape fashion’s visual language.

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Grace: Now is available now through Phaidon⁠ and select booksellers worldwide.