Antonio Lopez – ACROSS THE BORED

The original enfant terrible and darling of couture royalty, Puerto Rican born Antonio Lopez was a graduate of FIT in New York and parlayed a talent for dazzling illustration into a lucrative career and heady lifestyle. Incorporating the current trends in art into his depiction of fashion in the late 60s, he was not averse to mixing media within the same piece sometimes using a combination of pencil, pen and ink, charcoal and watercolour to achieve the desired emphasis on detail. His life in Paris in the 70s was the gateway to the beautiful people and served as inspiration for much of his work – credited with having discovered Jerry Hall, Grace Jones and Tina Chow, when he wasn’t drawing he was a more than willing participant in the riotous extravagance that was the dawn of the disco era.

Gowns for Anna Piaggi Vanity

Lauded during the 1980s as one of the foremost fashion illustrators, Antonio’s highly stylized work integrated echoes of iconic artistic genres, a vibrant palette and sculptural dimension – capable of pushing the envelope in terms of acceptable sexuality, he captured the heroic attitude and excess of the times in his models’ proportions and poses while maintaining an aura of accessibility that drew the viewer into the fantasy. Adept at tailoring graphic styles for individual designer’s campaigns, the prolific Lopez counted Norma Kamali, Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino, Missoni and Versace among his clients.

It is twenty-five years since Lopez passed away from complications related to Kaposi’s Sarcoma during the height of the AIDS epidemic and fitting that both a retrospective exhibition, “Antonio’s World”, at Suzanne Geiss Company in Soho and a book by Rizzoli, “Antonio: Fashion, Art, Sex, & Disco”, are presenting his work to the generation that had forgotten of his existence and those who never knew of his incredible legacy to the art of illustration in the fashion world.

For more on this illustrator visit:

Antonio Lopez
Slideshow: Antonio Lopez Opening

we were young – heartache to heartache we stood
antonio lopez for missoni

In another lifetime every living breathing minute was devoted to fashion, art and the pursuit of activities that were somehow design related – it was the 1980s and everyone we knew, or at least the ones we admitted into the sphere filled with such rarified air one walked at least a foot above the ground, was oh-so-cool and doing something big, bold, shocking and usually public. It was the beginning of the glorification of brands, of celebrities becoming the poster children for trends and the public developing an unsatiable appetite for the latest thing that has brought our credit-dependent economy to where it flails about bloated and helpless today.

We’ve had some discussions recently with the Ghost and Miss Z about how much of what they see, hear, wear and take for granted comes out of the 80s – not to say that this was the most fabulous era, for many of us there are great chunks of it missing from our memories, but it was one in which extremely creative people thrived and produced and influenced others without the bonus of readily available internet. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that we ever got so much done…

Print media was huge and we spent more than our fair share on glossy publications from Europe and the States to feed our cravings. Loaded with enough inspiration for a hundred lifetimes, these magazines also made us fall in love with those who were capturing the essence of the era. Antonio Lopez, a prolific artist with an unfortunately brief but meteoric career, was one such object of adulation: he changed the way the world saw art, design and clothing as inextricably intertwined and some say, singlehandedly revived the art of fashion illustration.

More on the work of Antonio Lopez next week.