The Vogue Magazine Photoshoot

Vogue Magazine's Alice is 21-year-old Natalia Vodianova, whose heartbreaking blue-eyed beauty made her the inevitable choice to play the poignant and spirited heroine. "Alice is my dream girl, and so is Natalia," says Grace Coddington, Vogue's creative director. "She's a rare, rare model." In 2002, Vodianova made a fairy-tale marriage to the Honorable Justin Portman, the dashing scion of a patrician English family; she gave birth to the adorable flaxen-haired Lucas; and she now has multimillion-dollar contracts with Calvin Klein and L'Oréal. Her trip has been every bit as fantastical as Alice's fall down the rabbit-hole.    Leibovitz cast the poetic Olivier Theyskens, a photographer himself, as Dodgson the cameraman. Like Leibovitz, Theyskens is a great admirer of Dodgson and his contemporaries. Standing next to an elaborate antique camera apparatus for his portrait, Theyskens felt transported in time. "It took so long to take pictures back then that little children were almost sleeping," Theyskens says. "And Annie said to Natalia, 'You're entering a dreamland!' and she was nearly asleep, too!"    "I loved Alice's innocence and her discovery of a world that doesn't exist," says Jean Paul Gaultier, who played the Cheshire Cat. "It is fascinating and scary, and truly surrealistic—the sense that everything is possible, that you can open your doors and go and invent a new world." English milliner Stephen Jones loved the books, too: "I always thought it was terribly normal," he says. "Wonderland was the reality, and in a way it still is!" Jones, naturally enough, played Vogue's Mad Hatter, whom he describes as his profession's "patron saint."    The cast members each had an opportunity to realize the Alice gown of their childhood dreams. Coddington's only injunction was to create something in Alice's signature blue. The results ran the gamut from Versace's sea-foam gown with a thousand ruffles to Lagerfeld's Chanel couture "dress of a very young girl from the 1870s, in a kind of baby color, with a twenty-first-century mood with the boots," to Marc Jacobs's waifish mini.    A Louis XVI folly garden beloved of the Surrealists was the setting. "It's a beautiful place," Gaultier says, "very much a Jean Cocteau place—with its tower in a wood, it could have been a setting for La Belle et la Bête. I feel very chosen," Vodianova says, "by Vogue but also by the book, which is very precious. It's just amazing that people would give it up for a great idea—forget their own egos, give up their personalities—and become something different for a second. Alice is a very special little girl."

Thanks to AMBER GOSS for sending in news of this item. The full article, along with more photographs appeared in the December 2003 edition of VOGUE magazine. There is also an online version which you can see by  CLICKING HERE    back to the HOME PAGE