Versace Fall / Winter 2004 by Steven Meisel (8 photos)

About Photographer - Steven Meisel (born 1954) is an American photographer, who obtained popular acclaim with his work in US and Italian Vogue and his photographs of friend Madonna in the latter's 1992 book Sex designed by Fabien Baron. He is now considered one of the most successful fashion photographers in the industry, shooting regularly for both US and Italian Vogue and lately W (also edited by Conde Nast).Biography: His fascination for beauty and models started at a young age. At that time Meisel would not play with toys, but would instead draw women all the time. He used to turn to magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as sources of inspiration for his drawings. Meisel dreamt of women from the high society like Gloria Guinness and Babe Paley, who personified to his eyes the ideas of beauty and high society . Other icons were his mother and his sister. As he became obsessed with models such as Twiggy, Veruschka, and Jean Shrimpton, at 12 years old he asked some girlfriends to call model agencies and, by pretending to be secretaries of Richard Avedon, to get pictures of the models. To meet famous model Twiggy, the 12-year-old Meisel stood outside waiting for her at Melvin Sokolsky's studio. He studied at the High School of Art and Design and Parsons School of Design where he attended different courses but, as affirmed in an interview with Ingrid Sischy for Vogue France, he finally majored in fashion illustration.Career: One of Meisel's first jobs was to work for fashion designer Halston as an illustrator. Meisel never thought he could become a photographer. He admired photographers like Jerry Schatzberg, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon and Bert Stern. Later on, while working at Women's Wear Daily as an illustrator, he went to Elite model agency where two girls working there allowed him take pictures of some of their models. He would photograph them in his apartment in Gramercy Park or on the street: on weekdays he would work at Women's Wear Daily and on weekends with the models. One of them was Phoebe Cates. Some of these models took their pictures to Seventeen magazine to show their model books and the people at Seventeen subsequently called Meisel and asked if he wanted to work with them. Meisel currently works for many different fashion magazines, including fashion bibles such as US and Italian Vogue, amongst others. For the latter he has been the only photograper for its cover for almost 15 years; but there's a story behind this. His studio is located in New York at 64 Wooster Street but he often rents the studios at Pier59.