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The type of shoes and jackets you wore were important, too, if only to identify your country of origin. Most of the Paris-based photographers wore a French brand of leather shoe called Paraboots, which were smart-looking as well as rugged. I bought myself a pair of sturdy black ones that I loved, even though on me they just looked big and clunky. As for outerwear, anything in black or tan with large pockets was acceptable. The British photographers had footwear and outerwear that, in typical British fashion, divided them into their respective classes. The working-class guys tended to wear Doc Martens or Clarks, while their Oxbridge-educated colleagues favoured the more expensive Timberlands, imported from America, or a well-worn pair of Church's for less strenuous terrain like 10 Downing Street. The guys with the Doc Martens could wear any type of cool jacket imaginable, while the Oxbridge guys wore one jacket and one jacket only: a green Barbour, the kind usually worn with a pair of green wellies during the hunting season back home. The Americans - along with the Japanese, who were always trying to be just like the Americans - liked any jacket and/or vest manufactured by Banana Republic, which they wore with either Timberlands or with sneakers, the latter getting them teased mercilessly by the French. The Germans had ugly jackets with decals and boxy, utilitarian shoes made by companies like Birkenstock, and the Soviets, if they ever made it out of their country, wore nylon windbreakers and those hideous grey fake-leather loafers from the central Soviet shoe factory.

A photographer's pants, on the other hand, told you nothing. Everyone, to a person, wore Levi's.

Deborah Copaken Kogan - Shutterbabe