Juergen Teller: Fashion's provocative photographer reveals all

He got Charlotte Rampling to cuddle up, Victoria Beckham to climb into a carrier bag and Kate Moss to play guitar. How does he do it? Susannah Frankel meets Juergen Teller, the snapper the stars trust.

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It is the stuff of fashion folklore that the photographer developed a taste for hot pants while shooting the spring/summer 2004 Marc Jacobs campaign with the actress Charlotte Rampling. "I was thinking, Charlotte Rampling, she has to have a grand environment," Teller says. "And I knew she wouldn't be interested in just doing merchandising for a fashion house. I had to come up with something that went beyond that, something that would interest her, otherwise she would turn it down."

To complicate matters – and fortuitously, as it turns out – Teller, a busy man by anyone's standards, had been briefed to shoot both a womenswear and menswear campaign for the designer in question. Why not combine the two? And why not – or "fuck, why not?" as he puts it – cast himself in the male role?

"I was very selfishly thinking: I'm going to be the man. I want to be with Charlotte Rampling." What guy wouldn't, after all?

"Then, I got to Paris," – having agreed on a suitably grand location, a suite at the Hotel Crillon – "and to my complete horror I couldn't fit into any of the clothes. I was too fat."

His eyes widen. "I was really stressed out about it," he says. "I thought, oh God, what am I going to do now? My desire to be with Charlotte, that drive, had overtaken me to the point where I had overlooked that problem completely and it just wasn't going to work." Salvation came in the form of a pair of silver satin pants – "they are quite like these ones", he says, pointing at his shorts, "they were the only thing I could get into". Rumour has it, he wore them religiously from that day forward.

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