Indianapolis — The Rolling Stones music echoed as men and women walked side by side on the runway from speakers at the Ritz Nightclub on East 11th Street in Manhattan. Over 1,500 spectators radiated sweat from their necks in a tightly packed space, increasing the size of their work in the dark under strobe lights.
But the show didn’t take place last week, last year, or even the last decade. It was the debut of designer Stephen Sprouse’s sophomore collection in May 1984, 38 years ago.
Rock legend Debbie Harry, 77, who shared a bathroom and kitchen with Sprouse in a loft in the East Village in the mid-1970s for several years, said in a recent telephone interview that “he was far timeless.” rice field. ..
Sprouse, who died in 2004 in the 1980s, made a name for himself as a designer with a Day-Glo ensemble that mixes graffiti and cashmere, bringing punk rock sensibilities to luxury apparel. He created the iconic looks of Harry, Axl Rose and Billy Idol, and his subsequent collections featured art by friends such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.
The designer’s eclectic aesthetics are on display at the new exhibition.Stephen Spruce: Rock, Art, FashionOpened this month at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the state where Sprouse grew up.
The biggest study of Sprouse’s work to date, the show shows his passion for punk couture, including many ensembles that haven’t been seen since his debut on the runway in the late 1990s. Harry wore an asymmetric silver dress in Blondie’s 1979 “Heart of Glass” music video, and polyester and metal worn by supermodel Kate Moss in a 1996 MTV “Selection or Loss” election education campaign commercial. Button dress.
Niloo Paydar, curator of textiles and fashion art at the museum, said:
Also included are two portraits of Sprouse by designer’s best friend Warhol, which is part of an archive of more than 10,000 items donated to the museum by Sprouse’s mother Joan and his brother Bradford. .. 2018.
“Mom really wanted to give it to IMA because they took good care of it and knew that many would have the opportunity to see it,” Bradford Sprouse said. He talked about the collection in a telephone interview.
“That is, look at Warhol,” he added, referring to the decision to open the Andy Warhol Museum in 1994 in the artist’s hometown of Pittsburgh.
During a recent tour of the collection, museum curator assistant Lauren Polien pointed out another show stealer: an image of Mars taken by the NASA Pathfinder mission (Audience on the Sprouse Runway) was printed. Fall 1999 show through neon nylon and spandex blouse 3D glasses); Two leather jackets in Sprouse, hand-painted by Italian artist Stefano Castro Novo in the mid-1980s, depicting young Warhol and Harry. A 1988 silk velvet bubble dress featuring Harling’s famous dance wavy lines. Two graffiti lace handbags from the Louis Vuitton collection in the spring of 2001. Polyene said he was initially confused by the curator because he couldn’t tell if it was for men or women.
“He designed for both,” she said. In addition to the visionary incompatibility of his work, which ignored the gender binary, the collaboration between Sprouse and Teri Toye made him one of the first designers to use transgender models.
When Sprouse grew up in Columbus, Indiana, about 45 miles southeast of Indianapolis, his parents initially didn’t know if he was a genius or just crazy about him. The fledgling designer has been sketching the spring and autumn collections in detail every year since he was 10 years old. Bradford Sprouse remembered.
He took him to New York when his father was 12 years old, met designers Bill Brass, Geoffrey Beene and Norman Norell, and then started his career in New York in 1972 as an assistant to fellow Indiana fellow Holston. ..
“We had a very strange life,” said Dennis Christopher, 79, a friend and former Holston assistant, in a telephone interview. “We went to Diana Vreeland’s house for dinner in a limousine, then we stood on the platform to count the money and see if there was enough change to take the subway home.”
In 1975, Sprouse moved to East Village and began designing clothes for his downstairs neighbor, Harry. He then started his business in 1983 with a $ 1.4 million loan from his parents. Sprouse had an intimidating look, but he was known for his head. -Black ensemble to toes, nail polish, dirty black dinell wig-He was sweet and shy, his friend said.
“He made his design speak for him,” said Candy Pratts-Price, 73, a friend of Sprouse, a former neighbor and a former creative director at Vogue.com.
He had a refrigerator-sized color Xerox machine in his apartment. So he magnified the images of rock star and newspaper headlines until they were distorted, and then painted them onto canvas. His bedroom shimmered in Day-Glo blue under black lighting (one of his favorite sayings was “Does it shine?”, Remembered by his longtime assistant Jamie Boud. rice field).
He had many quirks that frustrated his friends and were affectionate. He provided a measuring cup to guest Bloody Mary. He didn’t have glasses. He wrote his phone number and address on his arm with a felt-tip pen in his pocket. , And often wore his friend’s shoes.
“Seeing him draw was like seeing a Japanese artist doing calligraphy with a brush,” Harry said. “It had the beauty of its flow and movement. One of my favorites was just sitting and watching Steve sit and casually scribble on a piece of paper.”
The use of velcro, deigro color, mirror sequins and high-tech fabrics helped him stay ahead of his time and promote his design on the Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar pages.
But commercial success avoided him. According to Christopher, his quality efforts faced financial problems because he was unable to process orders because he preferred expensive materials and ignored revenue during his tenure at Halston. He filed for bankruptcy in 1985.
He made a comeback in the early 2000s in the spring of 2001 with Louis Vuitton’s Marc Jacobs, scribbling the logo. bag. (Harper’s Bazaar once had a collection “We have launched a waiting list of 1000.”).
Then, in 2004, after smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for years, Sprouse, who was secretly fighting lung cancer, died of heart failure at the age of fifty. He was buried in an Eddie Kosofsky T-shirt, and after the funeral, the mourner wrote him a message on his wooden casket with a pen and a marker.
“It’s a shame we lost him right away,” said Pratt Price. “He would have enjoyed designing for today’s world.”
At the Indianapolis exhibition, faithful to Sprouse’s love for all of punk, the atmosphere is that of a rock concert.Visitors to the exhibition will hear playlist The musical sprouse used at the runway show incorporates his bold colors and bold graphic prints.
Bradford Sprouse, who watched a preview of the exhibition in Indianapolis this month and attended a punk concert hosted by the museum to celebrate its opening, hoped to serve as an introduction to his brother’s work for the Midwestern people. He said he was.Realize the designer who spent The last 33 years of his life in Manhattan were from Indiana.
“I hope they can go there and get an education, appreciation, and understanding of who he is and what he did,” he said. “They are happy to return to the Indian artists.”