Defining the Pose

“A Study of Pose is an homage to all the muses who have inspired artists to create,” says model Coco Rocha of her new book, shot by photographer Steven Sebring and out today from Harper Collins. The weighty tome features the model in a thousand different poses, all shot in a dome that Sebring—who has contributed to W, L’uomo Vogue, and Vanity Fair—built in his Chelsea studio. Rocha—a frequent cover girl and muse to Jean Paul Gaultier, who wrote the forward—stood inside a ring of 100 cameras designed to capture her movements from every angle. Her husband, James Conran, also got in on the action. “Steven and I laid on the ground under the stage Coco was on, yelling out inspirations that ranged from Boticelli to Charlie Chaplin that she would then riff on to create her poses,” he says. In terms of styling, the goal, says Rocha, was to keep it simple. “I did my own makeup and hair and chose the leotard. We wanted it to be timeless. If we styled it, it would become dated. It’s a study of pose and the form of the body, not a study of fashion.” While the shoot only took three days to complete, the book required two years to produce. “It takes a lot of effort to make a book these days,” says Rocha. “Every publisher told us it couldn’t be done—that there was no way we could make a 1,000-page book that would sell for under 300 dollars. But we didn’t want to make something inaccessible. It was important we priced it as a reference book, as a dictionary.” Guess it’s only fair that the catwalk crew should have their own version of Merriam-Webster.