#TBT: Antonio Lopez, the Illustrator Who Charmed Andy Warhol & Karl Lagerfeld
Flaws have rarely been as celebrated as they are right now. In an exclusive interview with Yahoo Style earlier this week, Saint Laurent’s Hedi Slimane said, “I also always have this idea that it has to look vaguely wrong to feel right.” But it wasn’t so long ago that we lived for effort, embracing the ultra-glamorous and the super made-up with the passion that made so many of its most famous names fall in love with the industry in the first place. Antonio Lopez, the vibrant illustrator who, in many ways, shaped women like Jerry Hall and Grace Jones, was a man who loved beauty above all else.
Born in Puerto Rico in 1943 and raised in Harlem, Lopez was still a student at FIT when WWD’s John Fairchild tempted him out of school and onto his staff. Though fashion photography exploded in the 1960s, Lopez’s illustrations earned attention from all the right people—the New York Times, Vogue, Andy Warhol’s Interview. His unmatched joie de vivre led him to the wide range of subjects that made his work so appealing to such different people, from working class strangers he’d stop on the street to transgender friends to bonafide models, he drew everyone glamorously. “That is the most important thing to me, that people are sexy and sensual and glamorous,” he once said.
In 1969, Lopez was commissioned by French ELLE, to travel to Paris and sketch the new Chloe collection designed by Karl Lagerfeld. It is hard to imagine now, but the City of Lights was quite provincial at the time; the French were still calling models mannequins, and New York’s raucous nightlife was nowhere to be found. Lopez and his Art Director and business partner Juan Ramos, stood out, wearing Cuban heeled boots, gold jewelry, and blasting Diana Ross in their studio. Smitten, Lagerfeld put them in one of his apartment’s, to which they promptly invited Warhol factory friends Donna Jordan (an aspiring model), make-up artist Corey Tippin and later model, Pat Cleveland to bring New York to Paris. And that’s when the city started to earn its nickname.
Paris was on fire in the ‘70s. Yves Saint Laurent left Christian Dior to start his own label, Lagerfeld took on Fendi, and Le Sept, a hedonistic new nightclub, became the go-to spot. Lopez discovered women like Jessica Lange, Grace Jones, and Jerry Hall, inviting them to his studio where he wouldn’t just draw them, but style and make them up into what became their signature looks; it’s impossible to overstate his influence on the iconic faces of that decade.
When Ramos and Lopez headed back to New York in 1975, they started working with that city’s best designers—Oscar de la Renta, Norma Kamali—and in 1982 Lopez published his first book: Antonio’s Girls. The tome featured the muses mentioned above, as well as women like Tina Chow and Alva Chinn, once again championing multi-ethnic women as the truly universal beauty standard.
“Antonio wanted everybody to be beautiful—himself included,” Lagerfeld said of the illustrator. “This was in the day before a certain kind of ugliness would become a new form of beauty. And, in fact, in his portraits and in his illustrations everybody did look beautiful, sometimes too beautiful. He didn’t want to reproduce his models’ imperfections (as is often the case in photography today). Beauty was the only thing he desired. He lived for beauty.”
De la Renta, meanwhile, said Lopez “invented” clothes for him. “I was sending him a piece of a fabric and he had the imagination to make what I was explaining to him 20 times more beautiful. And it was a challenge to me, because then when I made the dress I have to make it like his drawing. He really was an extraordinary talent.“
Lopez died in Los Angeles in 1987 due to complications with AIDS; he was only 44. But his legacy lives on not just in the thousands of iconic images, fashions, and women he touched from that time but also in the ongoing interest in his life and talent. A comprehensive book was recently released in 2012 of Lopez’s archive, followed by M.A.C cosmetics Antonio Lopez collection in 2013. Paul Caranicas, an artist who manages Lopez and Ramos’s estate, tells Yahoo Style that fans can look forward to an exhibition on the illustrator at Museo del Barrio in New York next spring, as well as a documentary (it’s currently in production).
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