Fashion's Power 30 from http://observer.guardian.co.uk/ Sunday February 9, 2003 The Observer Ellen Von Unwerth Born in Germany in the 50s, orphaned and adopted by a hippy commune in Munich, she was a knife-thrower's assistant in a circus and had enjoyed a 10-year career as a model before she began taking photographs with a camera given to her as a present in the 70s. She quickly developed a signature style: a grainy, gritty, low-lit voyeuristic sexiness which references Berlin in the debauched 1920s. With a smattering of pictures in her portfolio, she landed an advertising campaign for Katharine Hamnett, and graduated up through the ranks of both magazine and commercial work effortlessly. 'She just makes women look fantastic,' says Jade Jagger. From her much-debated Hello Boys Wonderbra campaign to the 1994 naked Kylie coffee-table book and contemporary ad campaigns for Prada and Coco Chanel and Chanel No 5, she creates the defining images of the moment.