& # 39; Hip, rebellious, even a little sinister & # 39;: how Andy Warhol made pop art fashion | Fashion

Artists are not supposed to dress up and I never look good anyway, Andy Warhol gives a fantastic biography in Bob Colacellos Sacred terror delivered. It is ironic, given that when someone talks about men wearing dress uniforms, I always think of Warhol. Specifically, the era blazer, shirt, tie and jeans. He often also had a plastic carrying bag in his hand, with copies of his Interview magazine inside to distribute to potential advertisers. Warhol never worked. It was his art.

Warhols' dedication to jeans is also something of a personal obsession; I recently bought three pairs of vintage Levis his favorite denim brand. One could say that one of the best stories related to denim is that of Warhol keeping his Levis 501 under his tuxedo, he was going to the White House for the first time because the pants itched. Then there is the photo of him skating in jeans and a blazer, or a turtleneck with New Balance sneakers, Basquiat in the foreground, topless and bodybuilding.

As the Tate Modern is about to open a new Warhol show, the attention to its style seems more relevant than ever. During Milan Men's Fashion Week last month, I spotted a photograph of Warhol by Antonio Lopez in an exhibition at 10 Corso Como (until April) in blazer, striped tie, clear rim glasses and the infamous silver gray wig.

He also wore Comme des Garons, had a shoe bearing his last name at Berluti and was photographed by Helmut Newton in 1974, lying in a black leather trench. More recently, Uniqlo has sold Warhol T-shirts and Saint Laurent is collaborating with Everlast on a boxing capsule collection inspired by Michael Halsbands photographs by Warhol and Basquiat in Everlast.

Throughout his career, Warhol had a strong connection with fashion: a young man from the 1950s, he created illustrations for Vogue and Harpers Bazaar. Later, he became friends with portraits of designers like Diane von Furstenberg, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Halston and Yves Saint Laurent. He spent time with legendary Vogue fashion editor Diana Vreeland, briefly led cult band Velvet Underground, and quickly realized that the zeitgeist saw his support for newcomers such as Keith Haring and Basquiat.

Warhol was not only a pioneer artist, however; he was also a star with a picture to match. He really understood the idea of ​​having a public figure, says Fiontan Moran, assistant curator at Tate Modern. Pop art was made from familiar objects, it was accessible and a winning combination with its distinctive visual identity.

Colacello, who worked at Interview for years and was part of the inner circle of Warhols, says his 60s look is a silver white wig, dark wraparound sunglasses, a black turtleneck under a black leather jacket, black boots and, yes, blue jeans were calculated to create a cool, hip, rebellious image, even a little sinister. And it worked. By the time Colacello met him in 1970, only the jeans were left. The rest had been replaced by Oxford shirts, conservative ties, clear-rimmed glasses and drawstring jackets. The suit-jacket-and-jean look has become the Factory, preppy and businesslike look but more edgy than corporate, he says. We all found this combination comfortable because we could go from a dinner in town to a loft in the center and adapt, while being a little different.

There are over 100 works of art in the Tate exhibit, which examines Warhols' work from many angles, says Moran: the importance of him as the son of immigrant parents from the Current Slovakia and how it could have affected her vision of America, her education in the Ruthenian Byzantine Catholic Church, her fascination with celebrity and the obsession with death, as well as to look at work from a queer perspective. He had a very open approach to creativity. He worked before homosexuality was legalized and the factory was inhabited by figures from the counter-culture, says Moran. He capitalizes on it, but is always interested in the new, which is essentially the fashion profession.

Andy Warhol and fashion were made for each other, says Alex Bilmes, editor of British Esquire. Celebrity, shopping, money, novelty, surfaces, color, black and white, mass production, inauthenticity, youth, discos, boredom, cinema, Eurotrash, give up, pop, the future: all the things that it a celebrated and satirized and fetishized and ridiculed are the same things as obsessive, fantasy, snatch fashion. He was not predicting the future so much as creating it. Warhol was fashion, but Warhol was bigger and better than fashion: in its surface was its depth.

Not that Warhol ever knowingly played his depth index, one of his biggest claims of all time: I am a deeply superficial person.

His ideas have often been seen on catwalks. At Calvin Klein in 2017, Raf Simons put Warhol's artwork in advertising campaigns and on clothing, using the artist as a prism through which to explore American culture. In the 1980s, Stephen Sprouse was inspired by the Camouflage paints, while Jean-Charles de Castelbajacs The SS84 collection included a Campbells soup can.

Versaces' super splashing 1991 Pop collection featured many Warholian nods, including Naomi Campbells Marilyn dress. The portrait of Giannis was created by Warhol and Donatella revisited of Pop pieces in 2018 for an anniversary collection dedicated to Gianni. Meanwhile, Jeremy Scotts Moschino sparkles with Warholisms to see the 2014 AW show, whose riff on McDonalds included a bag with the logo of the M hamburger chains on the front. And when Karl Lagerfeld transformed the Grand Palais into a Chanel supermarket, also in 2014, it smelled of Warhol.

Warhol himself was a fan of a fashion show, going to see runway events by likes of Halston and Saint Laurent. Colacello remembers that the artist turned to him and said the same thing every time: Gee, Bob, we should make it a play. He's laughing. Warhol came out of the fashion world and he never really left it.

Andy Warhol is at Tate Modern, London SE1, from March 12 to September 6.