After a successful modeling career, Grace Coddington became a fashion editor at British Vogue in 1968. In 1987 Coddington moved to New York to become the design director at Calvin Klein. In 1988 she joined American Vogue with Anna Wintour, where she was the magazine's creative director until 2016, when she went freelance.

She is the author of the Phaidon titles Grace: Thirty Years of Fashion at Vogue (2015/2018) and Grace: The American Vogue Years (2016/2026), Marc Jacobs Illustrated (2019), and Grace: Now (2026), as well as Grace: A Memoir (Random House, 2012), The Catwalk Cats with her partner Didier Malige (Steidl, 2006), and is the muse for the three-book GingerNutz series, created by her close and frequent collaborator, the late Michael Roberts.

She lives in New York City and Long Island, New York, with Malige and their three cats, Blondie, Jimi, and Blanket.