Fashion photographer Roxanne Lowit dies at 80

By

Chenu Alexis

Published
Sep 25, 2022

Grace Jones, Yves Saint Laurent, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Madonna, David Bowie, Jerry Hall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, but also Robert de Niro and Mickey Rourke; these are just some of the celebrities that photographer Roxanne Lowit had captured.

After graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, she first embarked on a career as a textile designer, where she collaborated with brands Donna Karan, Jean Muir and Scott Barrie. The first shots of her own collections caught the eye of the editor Annie Flanders of SoHo News magazine, who sent her to cover her first fashion week. 
 
In the early 1970s, she became the star photographer of the Studio 54-era; Jerry Hall's close friend; and Yves Saint Laurent's favorite, who gave her access to his runway shows and private parties. A regular in Details, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle and GQ magazines, Roxanne Lowit made a place for herself in the fashion industry, especially in a male-dominated photography scene, becoming known for her numerous behind-the-scenes, backstage, cocktail party and more intimate hotel shots.

"I used to see her as this black cat in a corner of the backstage, like staring at everything with bright eyes and jumping on the best scene at the right moment," the designer Giambattista Valli said in Roxanne Lowit Magic Moments, a 2015 documentary. 

Her most famous photos have been exhibited in many museums around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, as well as the photo made famous in 1990 with Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista in a hotel bathtub.
 
Claimed by luxury houses, she shot the advertising campaigns of many houses as well as Dior, Vivienne Westwood, Barney's NY and the champagne house Veuve Clicquot and signed several books of photographs, including the latest, Yves Saint Laurent, prefaced by Pierre Bergé in 2014.
 
Born in 1942 in Manhattan, she died of a stroke at the age of 80.