Following the passing of the singer-songwriter, style icon and legendary muse Marianne Faithfull at the age of 78, Vogue reflects on her life and legacy, as captured in the magazine’s pages.

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Julian Broad

It’s David Bailey who shot Marianne Faithfull for her British Vogue debut in the 15 March 1965 issue, with the musician later claiming she fell in love with the enfant terrible of fashion photography that day. The magazine’s pages that month were themed around “le style Anglais” in Swinging London, and Faithfull – a few weeks out from the release of her folk EP Come My Way – posed in “the best [fashions] from Britain’s brainchildren”, including a Mary Quant suit with a retail price of 10 ½ guineas. “Marianne Faithfull, blowin’ in the wind,” reads the intro to the monochrome, Hitchcockian portfolio, whose captions are peculiarly infused with flower-power whimsy. “Cowslip gym-slip,” reads one. “Yellow crepe set for a greengage summer,” declares another.

Within 18 months, Marianne would have left her husband, artist John Dunbar, for Mick Jagger, her name henceforth bound up with the chaos of the Rolling Stones in their heyday (it’s Faithfull, of course, who influenced tracks ranging from “Sympathy for the Devil” to “I Got the Blues”). By 1967, Sussex police had arrested Jagger and Keith Richards for drug use at the latter’s country home of Redlands following a tip-off from the News of the World, and, throughout the ensuing trial, Faithfull found herself the subject of relentlessly lurid, frequently sexist coverage; article after article in the British press painted her as a “ruined” English rose found nude under a fur rug during the bust, a cautionary tale of what happened to those who played around with “Sister Morphine” and her siblings. (“STONES ARRESTED: NUDE GIRL AND TEAPOT” read the faintly hysterical Evening Standard headline the morning after the raid.)

It would be nearly four decades before Faithfull would reappear in Vogue’s pages while she battled various demons, internal and external. She made her magazine comeback in a November 2004 feature titled, pointedly, “Devil Woman”, meant to promote her album Before the Poison, co-written with the likes of PJ Harvey and Nick Cave. At the time, Faithfull had just spent the summer in Andy Warhol’s former Montauk compound with Kate Moss (“we have the same dentist”), and recently been cast by avant-garde director Robert Wilson in a Tom Waits-soundtracked adaptation of William S Burroughs’s The Black Rider. Her leading role? That of Pegleg, a take on Satan incarnate. “I met Bob Wilson at a party for the film director Patrice Chéreau in Paris,” she told her co-star and interviewer for the feature, Richard Strange. “I was wearing this fabulous red Dior dress. Bob said, ‘You would be a perfect Devil for The Black Rider.’ I told John Galliano later that it was the dress that got me the job.”

Faithfull turned out to be utterly bemused by her newfound status as a moodboard fixture during Y2K’s boho chic era (“Marianne Faithfull is not fashion. Marianne Faithfull is a constant. Marianne Faithfull is a design classic, like a Ford Mustang,” she declared), and frankly nonplussed by her tumultuous reputation. “I am not everybody’s cup of tea, but I now have the confidence to know that if people don’t like you, it doesn’t mean you’re no good. I have done most of my failing in public, but I strongly believe it is the right of the artist to fail sometimes.” And while she admitted to nerves around her performance in The Black Rider, she added the caveat: “When I get overwhelmed, I remind myself I am doing it for William [S Burroughs], and how thrilled he would be if he were alive.”

That’s no offhand boast; Faithfull and Burroughs knew each other in the ’60s, and reconnected, via Allen Ginsberg, in the ’80s. It’s easy to see why the two admired each other; neither the “As Tears Go By” songstress nor the Queer author mince their words. In her Vogue profile, Faithfull offered up frank assessments of everything from film-noir legend Robert Mitchum (“A total shit, but give him a Lucky Strike and a martini and watch him go!”) to her 1969 suicide attempt in Australia (“I did one of the rudest things you can do in someone else’s country – I tried to kill myself”) and even her feelings on her notorious exes (“Resentment is an energy – it can be used for good or ill”). As for how she managed to pull herself back from the brink so many times? “I made a choice to get over it,” she insisted while smoking a Marlboro Light and wearing a nicotine patch simultaneously. “I did it like a magic thing – I made myself there again… I did it all again, and I did it by making a choice. Taking smack was a bit of a false call – but I managed to get through it.”

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SWOW SWAG

Before The Poison – Clear

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