All this was calculated to entrance the grave, well-mannered, and preternaturally poised young girls that Dodgson cherished, so ambiguously to modern eyes. First among these was Alice Liddell, the middle daughter of Dodgson’s dean at Christ Church; Alice is her story.
Today, the Alice fantasies, available in dozens of editions, are the most translated and quoted books after the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Since their original publication, countless artists (from Arthur Rackham to Salvador Dalí and Ralph Steadman) and filmmakers and directors (from Walt Disney to Jonathan Miller) have risen to the considerable challenge of improving upon Dodgson’s imagination and John Tenniel’s brilliant woodcut illustrations. Now VOGUE joins this illustrious roster, with Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of a cast drawn from fashion’s own often fantastical universe.
VOGUE’S Alice is 21-year-old Natalia Vodianova, whose heartbreaking blue-eyed beauty made her the inevitable choice to play the poignant and spirited heroine. “Alice is my dream girl, and so is Natalia,” says Grace Coddington, VOGUE’S creative director. “She’s a rare, rare model.” Vodianova’s unique trajectory—this self-proclaimed “poor little Russian girl” helped to support her family as a teenager, selling crates of fruit in far-flung Nizhniy Novgorod—is part of what made her ideal for the role. In 2002, Vodianova made a fairy-tale marriage to the Honorable Justin Portman, the dashing scion of a patrician English family; she gave birth to the adorable flaxen-haired Lucas; and she now has multimillion-dollar contracts with Calvin Klein and L’Oréal. Her trip has been every bit as fantastical as Alice’s fall down the rabbit-hole.
Leibovitz cast the poetic Olivier Theyskens, a photographer himself, as Dodgson the cameraman. Like Leibovitz, Theyskens is a great admirer of Dodgson and his contemporaries. “I love the timeless beauty and freshness of those girls,” says Theyskens. “They are so lovely, like little cats.” Standing next to an elaborate antique camera apparatus for his portrait, Theyskens felt transported in time. “It took so long to take pictures back then that little children were almost sleeping,” Theyskens says. “And Annie said to Natalia, ’You’re entering a dreamland!’ and she was nearly asleep, too!”
“I loved Alice’s innocence and her discovery of a world that doesn’t exist,” says Jean Paul Gaultier, who played the Cheshire Cat. “It is fascinating and scary, and truly surrealistic—the sense that everything is possible, that you can open your doors and go and invent a new world.” English milliner Stephen Jones loved the books, too: “I always thought it was terribly normal,” he says. “Wonderland was the reality, and in a way it still is!” Jones, naturally enough, played VOGUE’S Mad Hatter, whom he describes as his profession’s “patron saint.”