Supermodels Attend a Party for the Photographer Steven Meisel

At a cocktail bash in Reduce Manhattan on Friday to rejoice a new assortment of apparel and extras developed by the style photographer Steven Meisel for Zara, basically the only boldface title who didn’t demonstrate up was Steven Meisel.

“I would have been shocked if he experienced arrive,” reported Edward Enninful, the editor in main of British Vogue, standing outdoors the event space on Howard Avenue as the design Kaia Gerber walked by. “He’s shy. He lets the function talk for by itself.”

If Mr. Meisel have been a movie star, mentioned an additional guest, the author James Reginato, he’d be Greta Garbo.

Mr. Meisel’s image spreads are recognised for their ingenious and often satirical narratives. In “Makeover Madness,” a 2005 attribute for Italian Vogue, Linda Evangelista posed as a couture-clad socialite with a plastic medical procedures addiction.

Ms. Evangelista was just one of several styles at the bash, alongside with a quantity of editors, stylists and other style-earth men and women who have labored with Mr. Meisel.

He appears to be to be getting a second. In addition to the Zara collaboration, Phaidon is publishing a e book this thirty day period, “Linda Evangelista Photographed by Steven Meisel.” On Oct. 6, Christie’s is holding an auction titled “Madonna x Meisel — the Sex Photographs” of far more than 40 shots from Madonna’s 1992 espresso table book, “Sex.”

Mr. Meisel, who shot the deal with for Madonna’s 1984 album, “Like a Virgin,” was her chief collaborator for “Sex.” She has credited him with training her to address each individual image shoot as “a compact film” and to completely transform in each into a new character. “He was the to start with man or woman to introduce me to the strategy of reinvention,” Madonna when reported in an job interview with Vogue.

Quite a few types at the get together spoke of how Mr. Meisel experienced both found signature appears to be like for them or adjusted their appearances in approaches they experienced not imagined.

Karen Elson, who created her name with a goth princess search, was decked out in a black trench coat that Mr. Meisel experienced designed for Zara. She said that when she met Mr. Meisel in 1996, she was “a mousy strawberry blond.” On their 2nd shoot jointly, for Italian Vogue, Mr. Meisel tried something new.

“They shaved my eyebrows off and coloured my hair red,” Ms. Elson mentioned. “It was the first time I saw myself, if that tends to make perception. Steven has this uncanny capacity to make his topics experience witnessed. It was like I had been remodeled into who I am, and which is a thing magical he possesses. They connect with him a Svengali for a explanation.”

The product Joan Smalls recalled functioning with Mr. Meisel on a Moschino advert campaign in which he spoofed a Tv set series from the ’80s the place “all the gals hate each other.”

If only she could try to remember the name of the demonstrate.

“‘Dynasty’?” a reporter asked.

“Yes, that’s it. Exactly,” she claimed. “It was just so substantially exciting.”

Mr. Meisel prolonged in the past stopped going to gatherings the place he could possibly be photographed. But everybody in vogue appreciates his appear: androgynous, with long black hair and all black apparel, with a punk edge. His styles for Zara were being of a piece with that. “It’s his uniform,” the design Karolina Kurkova said as she picked out a black leather-based biker cap from the racks.

A couple of ft away, the hairstylist Julien d’Ys was trying on a faux-fur winter season hat that prompt a mash-up of Dr. Zhivago and Rick Owens. Mr. d’Ys described how Mr. Meisel experienced introduced him to New York in the early ’80s to meet up with the designer Stephen Sprouse.

Mr. Sprouse and Mr. Meisel experienced labored collectively in the ’70s, below the designer Halston. Mr. Sprouse, who died in 2004, was the studio manager. Mr. Meisel, a gifted illustrator, was accountable for giving the Halston seamstresses with drawings that served as blueprints. But he did not get alongside with the boss, who derisively nicknamed him “Pocahontas,” Mr. Meisel instructed Vogue in a scarce interview in 2009.

Following some time at Women’s Don Daily, Mr. Meisel was brought to Condé Nast by its editorial director, Alexander Liberman, and began shooting for a lot of of its publications. Prada, Calvin Klein, Louis Vuitton and Versace started contacting on him for ad strategies. In these times, Mr. Meisel went everywhere you go — Mudd Club, Space, Marc Jacobs demonstrates. The reclusive part, Mr. d’Ys stated, came later on.

In 2009, when the Intercontinental Center of Photography staged an exhibition that includes Mr. Meisel’s operate, the Vogue editor Anna Wintour assigned a profile of Mr. Meisel. The outcome was an article suggesting that a doable reason for his reclusiveness was insecurity about his weight.

Soon after that, Mr. Meisel shot for American Vogue only sporadically. Requested about the evident deterioration of the magazine’s romance with Mr. Meisel, Ms. Wintour said in an e mail, “Steven is an totally amazing photographer, another person whose work defines our era and Vogue’s record, and I admire him so significantly.”

At a minimal previous 6 p.m., Tonne Goodman, a previous style director at Vogue, produced a beeline to Ms. Evangelista, who was decked out in a black oversize Meisel for Zara blazer alongside with her personal billowing black skirt and a pair of Meisel-made biker boots.

“Aren’t they great?” she stated.

Mr. d’Ys gave Ms. Evangelista a kiss good day, which turned into a very long embrace.

“He gave me my initial haircut!” Ms. Evangelista claimed, recalling a shoot from early in her occupation, when Mr. Meisel was powering the digital camera and Mr. d’Ys styled her hair. “He’s the a person who manufactured me cry.”

As Ms. Evangelista told it, she was not well prepared at the starting to alter her seem so substantially. But that is what it was like operating with Mr. Meisel.

A reporter requested her why he appeared to be having a resurgence.

“But is it a resurgence?” Ms. Evangelista claimed. “I never know. I consider he’s carried out a couple of points all at the exact same time, and there is this more youthful generation that is coming to enjoy him now and discover him, I guess.”

“He’s famous,” she ongoing. “We all go into our quieter times and then resurface. It’s not like he at any time went absent. Not like me.”