If you’re backstage at a runway show in 2026, you’re bound to be dodging ring lights and iPhone cameras. Everyone knows their angles; every model is posing for an audience of rapt followers. But when Cleo Glyde wielded her Hi8 video camera at Paris Fashion Week in the 1980s, it was a much less self-conscious time. The former model’s tapes reveal what she calls a “vanished world” of fashion, where designers ruled their ateliers like kings, cycling through casts of anonymous (often teenage) models. Turning the camera on that dynamic was her way of taking back power. Glyde “aged out” of modeling at 23, but her story only begins there—it’s one of the most fascinating I’ve heard, and I’m thrilled to be able to tell it in ELLE.
—Véronique Hyland, fashion features director
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