Vogue Editor Lengthy Nguyen Has Died

The Vietnamese-born stylist and critic, a longtime staple of style’s entrance rows, handed away on Thursday after an extended sickness. He was 59.

For about twenty years beginning in 1998, Nguyen was the co-founder and elegance director at unbiased style journal Flaunt, identified for its provocative and impressive editorials. In its heyday, the journal featured unconventional fashions and avant-garde ideas, akin to aged girls in high-fashion ready-to-wear, shot by Taryn Simon, or fashions in a disease-induced apocalypse, shot by David LaChapelle. Nguyen introduced his exit from Flaunt in 2019 when a former assistant sued the journal’s CEO Luis Barajas for office harassment, based on WWD. (The swimsuit was later dropped). At the moment, Barajas mentioned Nguyen’s function had been terminated 4 years earlier.

Earlier than co-founding Flaunt in 1998, Nguyen was the fashion director at Detour journal, when its imagery was central to the “heroin-chic” fashion that dominated the mid-to-late Nineteen Nineties. The journal revealed images of gloomy fashions shot by Davide Sorrenti that precipitated an uproar exterior style, seen by many as glamourising drug use.

“If pictures is to reflect life — irrespective of how, or beneath what circumstances we stay — then this mirror has many faces,” Nguyen wrote in Detour in 1997, responding to the backlash. “Some of these style footage scrutinize our cultural, social and even political barometers — they ask questions as an alternative of simply requiring readers to take a look at garments.”

Nguyen started his profession in style within the late Nineteen Eighties, when an opportunity assembly with Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana at a restaurant led to a job. He opened the primary US workplace for the Italian luxurious model in 1988, establishing relationships with the likes of Madonna and different celebrities.

In newer years, Nguyen revealed runway evaluations for The Impression and Fashionista. On the time of his demise, he was engaged on a ebook in regards to the “golden age of style” from 1994 to 1999.

He graduated from Princeton College in 1984 with a level in historical past.