Content apart, what made his images stand out was their unusual form. Roversi was the first to make use – for mainstream fashion – of 8×10 Polaroid film, the peculiar tones and unpredictable colour balance giving impressionistic results, which was again out of tune with the times. By their very nature “one-offs”, the stillness was due to the long exposure times that Roversi preferred. As he considers his fashion pictures as, in essence if not in practice, portraits, this allowed them to be “more touching and more human”.
The instantaneous nature of Polaroid film led to a completely new way of working, certainly for his fashion editors. As Grace Coddington recalled, “When I first started working with him I was more than a little intimidated. Not only did I have to be quick to react to the Polaroids, I realised that if I didn’t speak up immediately there could be no excuse later… It’s a brave and confrontational way of working.” When Polaroid discontinued its large-format instant film, he bought up as much of the existing stock as he could afford and then turned to digital.
Apart from its labour-intensive preproduction, the Polaroid process was expensive and Vogue didn’t encourage other photographers to work in this way. But Roversi, widely imitated, left his copyists behind, for – as something of a magician – his simple fashion pictures turned by their very nature into unique, miniature works of art. Roversi, whose most recent outing for British Vogue was its April 2025 cover story, is now 77 and, as it turns out, exactly the same age as Polaroid film itself.
Paolo Roversi (Thames & Hudson, £50) is published on 15 May
