As a raucous new documentary about the illustrator screens at London Film Festival, we speak to its director about the Lopez'south animal magnetism and his boggling coterie of 'girls'
Some gilt Sunday. Probably 1967. Although no ane remembers the appointment, models Donna Jordan and Jane Forth recall with perfect clarity the Technicolor moment they met Antonio Lopez at Key Park'south Bethesda Fountain. They were teenagers. Lopez, the Puerto Rican-born, Harlem-raised manner genius, would have been well-nigh 24.
"Those were wild, hippie times when everybody gathered [at the fountain]," says Jordan in James Crump's new film, Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex, Mode & Disco. "There was this vision in cerise that was coming downwardly the primary steps: top hat, ruddy conform, ruby-red pants, cane in hand, and it was Antonio."
Forth recalls Lopez looked "almost similar a pimp". He wanted to draw her. She was non in the addiction of going habitation with strange men, merely "he had such bright eyes and I just agreed". Forth and Jordan shortly became his muses. Lopez drew them both on repeat, kickoff in New York, and so in Paris, where they moved in 1969, and became a major source of inspiration to Karl Lagerfeld.
Filmmaker James Crump is an art historian whose previous documentary subjects include Robert Mapplethorpe. "Antonio was incredibly intuitive," he tells Another. "He was free. In his way of working and moving through the world he was completely open to the possibilities."
Lopez was still in college when hired by Women's Wear Daily; commissions soon piled upward from the New York Times, Interview, British Vogue and French Elle, bringing manner illustration back from the dead. His fantasy fashion-scapes of the 70s pulse with the energy of his favourite Paris nightspot Club Sept, populated by Antonio's girls (a phrase coined past Jean-Paul Goude). In Paris the gang included Pat Cleveland, Carol LaBrie, Grace Jones, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall. They were uninhibited, exotic, and above all erotic – they seem to trip the light fantastic right off the page.
"Yous can meet information technology clearly in the way they move… and I find that very exciting," says Lopez in a rare piece of archival interview footage. Crump has mainly relied on stills, Lopez' art, and new interviews to tell his story. Some primal characters (Hall, Jones, Karl Lagerfeld) are conspicuous in their absence, but Lange, Bill Cunningham in one of his last ever interviews, and the ebullient Cleveland make up for it. "Anybody was in dear with Antonio," giggles Cleveland in the movie.
Crump makes much of Lopez'due south supposed sex addiction. When he met a transfixing Texan dazzler with Rapunzel hair and legs up to her chin he invited her into his bed as well as his studio, and Crump has unearthed footage of Lopez and Hall larking about on 1975 shoot in Jamaica, telling anybody they were engaged.
Lopez's partner Juan Ramos eventually moved on – falling in love with an artist he'd met in Society Sept, Paul Caranicas – but the pair remained deeply entwined. "Juan is integral to Antonio's output," says Crump. "He is the fine art manager, but he is also the intellectual component."
Their cartoon sessions were yard productions, involving total hair, make-upwardly and styling, and either conducted in an electrified silence or to a thumping R&B beat. When supplied clothes didn't please Lopez, he'd become his friends to make new ones and apply those instead. They were making fashion happen in real time.
The old order was fragmenting, as youth, daring and talent became new currencies. Says Crump: "The early 1970s is when everything that had seemed possible in the tardily 1960s comes to fruition, before a darker end to that decade came with AIDs, serious drug utilize and self-destruction."
Lopez died in 1987, Ramos in 1995, both from AIDS-related affliction. It's this grim finality that closes the film, but for the most function it rolls along joyously, never digging likewise deep, glistening, sweat-slicked but oddly innocent. "Looking back, it'due south such a bygone, classic period," says Crump, who cruel under its spell from afar as a kid growing up in rural Indiana. "I never knew Antonio, just I was fascinated [by what I saw in] Interview magazine. Through those printed materials I got actually turned on; emotionally, intellectually, physically, sexually, by the energy and Antonio and his whole crazy milieu."
In the tardily 90s, Crump was introduced to Caranicas, who directs the Estate of Antonio Lopez & Juan Ramos. "We started editing over x,000 Instamatics [prints], thousands of drawings and Super 8 films… I got sucked in," he says. "I really regretted that I was born besides late. At i point nosotros were going to publish a book of the Instamatic collection." It never happened. "[Merely] Antonio was ever there, in the back of my mind."
Like his discipline, Crump has a canny knack for picking his moment. "I started this picture well before the election cycle, simply I call up this is a story that deserves to be told right now. It addresses aspects of culture that are being attacked or undermined by political forces. Antonio was enormously influential, merely I call up he is to some extent forgotten, and I promise this picture will bring him back to life."
Antonio Lopez 1970, Sex, Fashion & Disco premieres at the BFI London, October 12, 2017.
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