Chasing Andy
Pop! There goes Andy Warhol. Fashion types--designers, magazine editors, window dressers and photographers--just can’t seem to get the Campbell’s soup king off their minds. And why would they? In a culture hopped up on celebrities, where “the democratization of fashion” is a catch phrase, the original mix master of high and low, mass and class, is a natural point of reference.
Stephen Sprouse pays homage to his former mentor in a photo spread he shot for the July issue of Interview magazine. Using Warholian repetition, it features items from Sprouse’s Americaland collection of graffiti-spattered tank tops, skateboards and swimsuits for discount retailer Target.
“If Andy were alive today, he’d totally be doing stuff for Target,” muses Sprouse, who is himself living the high-low legacy, selling his signature scribble on $800 Louis Vuitton logo bags just last spring and then mass marketing it at Target this summer (99 cents for a beach ball to $29.99 for a woman’s swimsuit).
“So much of what Warhol did has been assimilated into the culture. The ‘heroin chic’ fashion photography of the 1990s looked like it could be straight out of his film ‘Trash,’ ” says Sprouse. “Warhol even predicted with his Brillo boxes the kind of repetition which has made Target’s ads so popular.”
The current Warhol retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art focuses mostly on his work as a painter. But he, like director, author and artist Jean Cocteau, had a multifaceted career. Warhol was also a photographer, a filmmaker, a window dresser, a fashion designer and model, and the creator of two fashion-related cable TV interview shows long before the Style network even existed.
Warhol started out in New York as a commercial artist in the 1950s. He was an illustrator for several magazines, including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and his enlargements of comic book images graced window displays of department stores Bonwit Teller and I. Miller. Unlike contemporaries Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who both designed windows under pseudonyms, Warhol was not ashamed to take credit for what some might have deemed “low art.”
“He’s the patron saint of window dressers,” says Simon Doonan, who put the windows of Barneys New York on the style map. “And the great thing was that he wasn’t so serious about being an artist, which is why he was able to do windows.... There was no pomposity about his achievements, which made it almost easier to enjoy them because they weren’t jammed down your throat.”
Warhol didn’t value a painting over a TV show or a dress. “It’s that kind of freedom to cross what might be perceived as boundaries into different creative endeavors that Warhol contributed,” says Margery King, who co-curated “The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion,” an exhibition organized by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 1997 that traveled to several venues, though not to Los Angeles.
Sprouse recalls his last night with Warhol, who died 15 years ago, at a punk rock club on the West Side Highway in New York. “It was July and super sweaty and hot, with a lot of slam-dancing going on,” he remembers. “So, in between bands we would go out and sit on the curb to cool off across from the river. A car full of kids drove by and asked if he was Andy Warhol. We thought they were going to beat us up, but instead they jumped out and asked him to draw a soup can. Andy did it and they got a signed soup can.”
Sprouse and Doonan are just two of a generation of style cognoscenti Warhol inspired. He hired Vogue magazine editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley for his first fashion gig and encouraged celebrity photographer Patrick McMullan to begin documenting nightlife, giving him his first pocket camera. He also hosted the opening party for Paraphernalia in 1966, the first store owned by fashion designer Betsey Johnson, who still says, “Andy is in my blood.” (Johnson married a member of the band the Velvet Underground, which performed at Paraphernalia, and Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick was one of her models.)
As for Talley, he had just moved to New York from Durham, N.C., when he walked into the offices of Interview magazine, without an appointment and dressed in an Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche suit, to ask for a job. “I feel indebted to him,” says Talley, who was the fashion editor there from 1974 to 1975 and is now Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour’s right-hand man. “He gave me the confidence to be who I was. And coming to New York from the South, I had not been myself to that degree.”
McMullan got to know Warhol hanging out at Studio 54, the center of disco culture in the 1970s. “I used to try to walk in with my 35mm camera and Andy said, ‘You can’t bring that to a party. You need a pocket camera. Because once you get inside, people don’t care if you take pictures, but if they see you at the door with a big camera, they might not let you in.’ ” When the photographer told Warhol he couldn’t afford a pocket camera, he sent him one as a gift.
McMullan began snapping pictures of New York’s downtown nightlife for Interview. Today, he still shoots parties for the magazine, as well as for Vanity Fair and other publications, making his living off the cult of celebrity he says Warhol helped to create.
Warhol himself was an obsessive shutterbug who delighted in photographing fashion shows and parties. “He was a silent observer photographing, filming and recording everything,” says fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, who saw him at least three times a week at parties in the 1970s.
He also surrounded himself with talented lens men. Fashion photographer Richard Avedon was a documentarian of the Factory, and he borrowed from the aesthetic there when he shot the controversial cK Calvin Klein fragrance ads in 1990s, criticized for promoting “heroin chic.” Now-famous photographers Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, David LaChapelle and Herb Ritts worked regularly for Interview, first published in 1969 as an underground film magazine.
“It’s kind of a joke that he [Warhol] started it to get tickets to the New York Film Festival,” says Glenn O’Brien, who was editor-in-chief until 1974. Interview morphed into a fanzine in the 1970s--an ink and paper version of one of Warhol’s legendary parties that included interviews with such characters as fashion designer Halston, transvestite Candy Darling and model Iman.
“Back then, the Q&A; thing wasn’t really a part of journalism,” says O’Brien, now a filmmaker. “We turned it into an interesting format, having celebs interview other celebs, or a group thing that was several people having a conversation,” he says, adding that he believes the formula helped spawn People magazine, InStyle and other celebrity interview-fueled titles popular today.
Still, for all the disciplines and personalities Warhol influenced, his silk-screens may indeed have had the most far-reaching implications on the world of style. Like Sprouse’s graffiti, Warhol’s fantastically colored images of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, flowers, Elvises, Maos and Marilyns have become style icons--and commodities--in their own right.
He knew the power of his own images when he incorporated Brillo boxes into a dress and S&H; green stamps into a chic blazer in the 1960s. Then, in the late 1980s, perhaps inspired by Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, he began putting his images on T-shirts and tote bags and collaborated with Sprouse to design a line of clothing based on his “Camouflage” series of paintings.
Fashion designers such as Anna Sui and Vivienne Tam played with Warhol’s images during the artist’s lifetime. Gianni Versace paid homage to his Marilyns in a gown for his 1991 spring collection and Donatella Versace used the “Flowers” series in a print in this year’s spring line. (Plenty of licensees are cashing in too. Just take a look at the lines to get into MOCA’s gift shop on the weekends.)
“I adore Warhol,” Donatella says. “I met him so many times with Gianni. Two weeks before Warhol died, he came to Milan, and we joined him for lunch. He asked for a special leather jacket, and we gave it to him. What a revolutionary person. He changed everything.”
