This morning’s news that Grace Coddington was stepping down from her role as creative director of American Vogue has become the talk of the industry and beyond.

Coddington is not saying goodbye to fashion – effective immediately, she is the magazine’s creative director at large and will continue to style shoots while pursuing additional opportunities outside of Conde Nast.

To those with a lifelong passion for this industry (myself included), Coddington has been a constant presence who provided a thread through fashion history with her imaginative and inspiring fashion stories. She started out as a model, and became a fashion editor at British Vogue, working with the world’s best photographers and sometimes appearing, Hitchcock-style, in her own stories—as in the memorable 1973 Helmut Newton spread with Coddington coolly peeking out of a pool.

In 1987, she moved to New York to work for Calvin Klein but Anna Wintour, on her first day as editor-in-chief of American Vogue, brought her back to the magazine world.

In 2002, Coddington, who loves cats, received a CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award — an honor she shared that year with Karl Lagerfeld. To tip our hats off to this remarkable career – one that is sure to keep surprising and inspiring all  – CFDA.com decided to republish a tribute penned by equally legendary photographer Bruce Weber for the 2002 CFDA Fashion Awards Journal:

“Purr-fection! It was a wine-filled evening that was almost as perfect as a short story about a cat by Colette. Four friends; Grace Coddington, Liz Tilberis, Nan Bush, and myself, sitting on the floor in Grace’s flat on Fulham Road in 1982, just drinking cheap French wine and talking about fashion. Both Grace and Liz spoke at the same time about different sittings. “What clothes. What models. What locations?” they both asked this bewildered photographer. Liz kept asking me how we were going to find some handsome clammers on Long Island, and Grace kept asking me and Nan about finding a pet kangaroo in Kalgoorlie, Australia. We made a promise that night – almost like a boy scout pledge – to always be there for each other, to endure the tough love and drama of fashion, and to always our sense of humor.

I asked Grace, since she was a true survivor of the swinging scene in London during the 1960s, about girls called The Shrimp, The Twig and The Tree, and photographers called Parkinson, Lategan, and Bailey. We gossiped and looked at prints of Grace’s modeling days, all stuffed in a taped-up box with a Conde Nast Hanover Square label. Liz and I teased her, and Nan told her how beautiful she looked. Once, Grace and I were photographing the painter Andrew Wyeth in Maine and during the morning, he asked if he could paint her that afternoon, and she said, “No, thank you. I have to work.” After the crew yelled at her, she ate four lobster dinners and almost cried.

When Grace came to NYC to work with Calvin Klein and became the Fashion Director of American Vogue, she was also the official photographer and stylist of our Golden Retrievers, Rowdy and Little Bear. She would dress them up in “sporty clothes” and get them to pose like Naomi, Linda and Christy.

I take a chance with our friendship in writing all this down, because Grace is so shy. I’m sure she’d rather I just photographed her garden, or just talked about the time we did a sitting with Georgia O’Keefe and Nelson Mandela.

That night we all wanted to be brave and throw our clothes off and dive into the sea. You did, Grace, and are still swimming freestyle. So, forgive me for writing this, but we all want a chance to celebrate you in our lives. Please, please, don’t stop calling me and asking me to hang out with you after school, in some skateboard park of dog run, to just play and open my eyes and see the familiar anew. To quote Martha Graham: “There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and, because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it…”