Annabel Tollman: The Calm Amid Fashion’s Storm

The core code of conduct governing fashion can sometimes be characterized as jungle law. According to the unspoken rules of the business, the person you had dinner with last night might, if it is expedient, cut you dead at a fashion show the following morning. Somehow this ugly reality is found usual and acceptable.

 “Everyone in this industry loves to hate,” Joe Zee, the creative director of Elle magazine, said Tuesday. “Everyone is critical: ‘Oh, it’s fashion week again! I hate that collection! I hate that designer!’ Everything is built up to encourage dislike.”

Mr. Zee’s remarks were prompted by news of the death last week of an industry fixture, the stylist Annabel Tollman, a woman who by her nature proved an exception to the rule. Almost immediately after Ms. Tollman’s death was reported by The Huffington Post, for which she was a contributor, social media were flooded with an outpouring of grief for a woman barely known beyond the industry.

Most remarkable about the commentary was its depiction of Ms. Tollman, who was 39, as a beacon in a harsh business, a woman the artist Lola Montes Schnabel characterized as a “wonderful sparkling angel” in a Facebook post.

“I think the reason on social media you’re seeing so many people claiming to be her close friends is that Annabel was an anomaly in the industry,” Mr. Zee said. “Everything other people complain about, she was grateful for.”

By that he meant the distinctly unglamorous twice-yearly, six-week slogs through four different cities; the routine 16-hour days; the designer apple-polishing; the appointments, scheduled on the half-hour during show season, with shoe manufacturers; and the inevitable front-row sniping.

“There are people in the industry who, when the boss isn’t around, are really friendly and chatty and, when the boss shows up, they flip a switch and look right through you,” said Anne Slowey, the fashion news director of Elle. “With Annabel you never got any of the negative fallout you get from people who are striving in an unkind, competitive fashion, the kind who, the minute they feel threatened, go psycho.”

Ms. Tollman’s approach to both the business sphere she occupied and life itself, said Mickey Boardman, the editorial director of Paper magazine was: “It’s all a movie. Come up with a dream and turn yourself into it.” Or, as Ms. Tollman once said in The New York Times, “Make a fairy tale and go and live in it.”

To an impressive degree, Ms. Tollman had done so. Born in Belgium, one of two daughters of an aeronautical engineer and his wife, she spent her early childhood in Buffalo, returned to England at 13 and was educated in public schools in Guildford, 27 miles outside London. She later obtained a degree in fashion journalism from Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design; almost immediately after graduation, she found work with a fledgling lifestyle magazine called Wallpaper.

Ms. Tollman went on to work at Maxim UK and, at 26, became senior fashion editor at Interview, a job she held until branching out as a consultant for eBay, among others, and developing a name as a celebrity stylist with clients like Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway.

As a stylist, Ms. Tollman’s idiom leaned toward vintage styles and form-fitting silhouettes, a look derived from her tastes and appearance. Unlike the cliché fashion editor (a dour stick figure sitting pretzel-legged in a front row), Ms. Tollman was a voluptuous blond throwback whose brand of femininity owed less to current beauty ideals than to that of ripe British bombshells like Diana Dors.

Slyly subverting Ms. Johansson’s own sexpot aura, Ms. Tollman dressed her client, then 18, for the New York premiere of “Lost in Translation” in a boyish white Dolce & Gabbana pantsuit. “That was uniquely Annabel,” Mr. Zee said. “It was sexy and cool-girl.”

Ms. Tollman’s rollicking sense of fun, friends said, was more loopy and “AbFab” than cutthroat “Project Runway.”

“There was an ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ episode where Edina tries to give herself a mind-body-spirit makeover,” said Christian Langbein, vice president for public relations at Prada. Groggily emerging from her bedroom, Edina, the character played by Jennifer Saunders, announced her plan for the day: “Get up, kick butt,” she said, or words to that effect.

“That was Annabel’s mantra as well.” In contrast to the chill that certain colleagues of Ms. Tollman cast over the landscape, Ms. Tollman was, said Joanna Della Valle, a former fashion director of Interview, consistently a source of merriness. “She was funny and silly and sincere.”

During long rounds of appointments in Milan, Ms. Della Valle recalled, Ms. Tollman and Ingrid Sischy, then Interview’s editor, often sat in the back seat of the chauffeured van, belting out Broadway show tunes. When Malcolm Carfrae, global communications director at Calvin Klein, met Ms. Tollman in 1990s London, she would, he wrote in an e-mail, “come to my apartment on Sundays, cook a roast chicken and we’d down a few bottles of wine and dance on my sofa.”

For the designer Peter Som, the public displays of grief after Ms. Tollman’s death were easily explained. Outside the industry, he said, it’s hard for people to understand the crazy nuances of a business where jungle law renders decency and kindness suspect. “Nice is not interesting, nice is boring,” Mr. Som added. “But Annabel was enveloped in this sort of fairy dust of genuine niceness. She proved that you could have this great personal identity and not have to wrap it up in cattiness.”

The many tweets and Facebook posts, Mr. Zee said, reflected the reality that: “Annabel was a real ray of light in an industry that can be a sea of black. I don’t remember ever leaving a conversation with her that didn’t end with a laugh.”      


The article is from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/fashion/annabel-tollman-the-calm-amid-fashions-storm.html?_r=0