Paris in the early Nineties – a time of continued tradition, when the dedication to pushing fashion beyond a singular white and skinny aesthetic had not yet started to brew properly. The likes of Claudia Van Ryssen, Ines de la Fressange and Isabelle Adjani covered French Vogue. Elsewhere, a 16-year-old Kate Moss was settling into her domination of British fashion magazines, and Bella Hadid was yet to be born and become Carla Bruni’s doppelganger. It was a time when a more natural beauty look was at the forefront of the industry. And any aspiring model with, say, dyed traffic-light-red hair was seen as unbookable – something that the model Sibyl Buck discovered early on.
Buck’s is a face that the fashion world would come to wear like a punk badge for most of the Nineties. Born in Versailles, France, she grew up in Virginia after her parents moved to the US when she was just a few weeks old. In 1992, aged 20, she moved to Paris to become a model; it was, she says, her way of getting out of “the ghetto” and “ahead in the world”. When she arrived in the French capital, she took the advice of her agents and stopped dyeing her hair to adopt that more natural look and meld into the casting expectations of the time.
“[But] I suddenly realised that the essence of what I was doing was selling things to people by making them feel bad about how they looked. And that seemed really depressing,” Buck says. “I dyed [my hair] blonde so that I could be ‘a model’. I thought that was ridiculous. I’m in an industry that’s about beauty and I’m not even representing how I feel the most beautiful.”
The coloured hair came back – and the jobs came in. She recalls a story of walking away from a casting while in Paris because the queue of models waiting to be seen led down a spiral staircase and out into the street. But a friend stopped her and told her she should stick around, as both the designer and the show were likely to become part of fashion legend. It was Jean Paul Gaultier, one of the first big names to cast Buck, and the show was AW93’s Chic Rabbis. Soon afterwards Buck’s face and look were picked up by Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood, Chanel, Alexander McQueen and more, until she left the world of modelling in 1997. Buck’s life then switched from fashion to motherhood: her daughter, Puma Rose, was born the following year and would go on, two decades later, to embrace the red hair and appear on the fashion capitals’ catwalks. Sibyl segued into music in the interim, playing bass and singing in a band with Sergio Vega and Chris Traynor. Then there was also an acting stint, during which she starred in the 1997 film The Fifth Element.
Recently Buck returned to the catwalk in London – one of her favourite fashion cities – opening the AW23 show of Dilara Findikoglu, the Turkish-British designer known for her eerie theatrics and penchant for tying collections to events beyond fashion. Buck slunk around the heavy limestone pillars of the Heritage & Arts Centre, a restored church, in east London’s Bow, dressed in a black, softly corseted dress and black gloves that almost reached her shoulders.
“The thing I love most about London Fashion Week, and I think it’s largely because of Central Saint Martins college, but also just in general, is that I feel that England is good at simultaneously stimulating people’s intellect and creativity,” she says. “More so than in America, or even from what I can see in other cities that have fashion weeks, is that there’s often a theme that has gravity. It’s not just an aesthetic theme, but it’s a theme that actually relates to something that’s going on in the world.”
Being part of this show made its mark on Buck, and not just because of the clothes. “I was blown away by [Dilara’s] level of finishing what she did. I’ve walked for big shows where things were unfinished going out on the runway, but with Dilara, every single piece was exquisitely finished,” she says. “Meanwhile her show was an homage to the women in Iran who are fighting for their lives and liberties right now [and it was also drawing attention to] the fact that thousands of people died and are homeless, starving and freezing in winter in Turkey and Syria. So she put out a sheet of paper with a QR code on so all her guests could donate money to the earthquake appeal. When someone is weaving fashion into the relevant fabric of our social construct, that’s actually what fashion is about.”
Buck’s return to the AW23 catwalks didn’t stop there. In London she also walked for Richard Quinn and in New York for Helmut Lang, while in Paris she appeared in the first Vivienne Westwood show since the designer’s death in December. This casting was particularly special for Buck, not only because she commends being booked as a 50-year-old woman in a world that focuses on the aesthetic of youth, but because it marked 30 years since her first Vivienne Westwood show. And as Buck reflects on her relationship with the punk icon, she believes that the two were connected not only creatively but also in their outlook on life and fashion.
“I went to art school, but I didn’t study fashion, so it took me a while to actually get who Vivienne was and what she was standing for,” Buck says. “It was probably a couple of years before I realised how much our missions were in alignment. And I think she did, too, because at that point she started asking me to show up to things with her and to do her campaign to be more connected with her. And not just in modelling, but kind of like an associated persona. At that point I think we really did get each other.”
Westwood was emblematic of fashion that went headfirst against the grain. She took everything that was traditional or safe and gutted it, inserting sex, punk and symbols of British heritage in their place. It was likely Buck’s similar approach to turning the tide on convention that brought them together.
“I think as feminists we saw eye to eye about things that needed to be said in this world, and I loved that about her,” Buck says, recalling a conversation where the designer told her how much she would have loved the job at either Givenchy or Dior that Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, respectively, were given in the late Nineties. “Vivienne and Gaultier were reaching to me in my younger culture with the piercings and the tattoos, and were allowing me the space to have red hair. But also both of those people undyingly referenced historical fashion, events, writing, poetry and art. As someone who was under-educated in culture, I was welcomed into a world of culture that was much broader than I ever thought I was interested in.”
It was names like Westwood and McQueen that pulled fashion into the 21st century, purifying the ties between culture and clothes and creating a symbiotic relationship between the two. But Westwood also forced audiences and the wider industry to start demanding answers about the clothes we wear: where are they from? Who made them? Why were they made? The discourse around sustainability was no longer happening only in the outside world, it was being sent down the runway. And, as testament to Buck and Westwood’s relationship, the model has picked up the baton and is questioning the very nature of fashion.
“There’s this battle in fashion between the people who want to see it become more inclusive and see it as a sort of spectrum in terms of, ‘What’s in this season? Well, what do you feel like wearing?’ Whereas fashion as an industry relies on trends that say, ‘OK, we’re going to make skinny pants because everybody wants skinny pants this season. We’re sure we’re going to sell them because we’ve got somebody at Vogue who’s going to put skinny pants in all their editorials.’ Those are two really different influences,” Buck says. “That is always going to be in direct opposition to this other energy. So when you say, ‘Where is fashion now?’ Well, the soul of fashion is being battled for, between industry and art, art and commerce. That’s the special zone that fashion lives in. So there’s no static place for it to be.”
Buck has moved with fashion, and fashion has moved with Buck. And the spirit of change and progress that designers like Westwood, McQueen and Gaultier instilled and continue to emit into the world lives on through the stories of people who moved intimately in those spaces. With Buck’s reflection on the industry informing her projection of the future, the “soul of fashion” will always be tied to the reverence for authenticity, honesty and self-expression she holds.
