In time, a retrospective glow may well surround the young Americans who in the early 70s, like the Lost Generation of legend before them, decided to move to Paris. Antonio Lopez, the fashion illustrator known professionally as simply Antonio, was among them, as was a group of girls who either followed him to Paris or who were attracted to him soon after they arrived.They differed from the earlier Lost Generation in one crucial waycoming later, they were drawn to Paris not by the prestige of art but by the glamor of old movies and, more particularly, fashion.
Fashion and art, as everyone knows, have always been closely allied in Paris, but in the early 70s, for anyone who was there, fashion had the cutting edge. Antonio and his girls only inherited this situation but, once there, they exploited it resourcefully, participating in a world that combined, in a particularly Parisian paradox, snobbism and social fluidity By night, the Club Sept was the center of this world-the meeting ground for the monde and the demi-monde. After evenings at the Sept, no one could ever get enough sleep in seedy hotels, several with names redolent of the New World like the Montana and La Louisiane. Pat Cleveland learned French from the vegetable vendors outside her window at the Louisiane who awakened her every morning with their cries. Days were spent in cafés still associated with earlier expatriates, with names like the Flore and La Coupole.
Jerry Hall met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at La Coupole, a spontaneous event that could have occurred only in Paris. Unfortunately, neither a tape-recorder nor a fly on the wall was present.The Americans were intoxicated by France and the French, perhaps to an even greater degree, were intoxicated by the Americans. "Le kitsch" was on all fashionable lips; "le Style Pop" was a conundrum that troubled eminent philosophers. Andy Warhol, who shares with Antonio a certain mask of passivity, certain dandified notions about the artist's life as a work of art, and many of the same friends, was often there at the same time. It is unclear who first started using the Polaroid camera, but both admired the flat,"dumb" quality of the resulting pictures which arrested instantaneously the evanescence of their lives. "I couldn't believe what a wonderful time we were having," Antonio now says, "and I wanted a record of it. The Polaroids were like a proof of time." The Polaroids included here-some taken by Antonio and others by his partner of twenty years and alter ego, Juan Ramos-represent something of an aberration in Antonio's work. Unlike most modern fashion illustrators who, following in Warhol's wake, work from photographs, Antonio has always worked only from life, a practice dating from his childhood in Spanish Harlem when he would draw his mother in dresses he had made for her. The erotic tension of his mother bestowing _or withholding-her approval, he says, remains with him when he works. Similarly, his ideal of feminine beauty was formed by his mother's exotic looks. With her arching cheekbones, even Jessica Lange-"the only white woman of my girls," as he affectionately calls her-reminded him of his mother. The girls, none of whom was a cheerleader, now seem to have been destined for careers in fashion, no less than he with his stereotypically "sissy" preoccupations as a child. For him, their attraction to each other derives from primitive psychology. "I was looking for a mother," he says, "and they were looking for fathers. It's ridiculous and obvious but that's what people do all their lives. We all carry our pasts around with us on our backs."Like everyone's, Antonio's ideal of glamor was also formed in his childhood. The"transformations" of the female form into shoes that he continues to draw for his own amusement derive from his earliest memory, predating his family's move to New York.His vocation, he feels, was determined when a rich Spanish aunt arrived in Puerto Rico, in the summer, wearing a fur coat-and alligator shoes."The whole thing about animals... alligators made into shoes!" he says. "That's what did it to me. It had something to do with extremities."