"Fashion started in Paradise and went to Hell," illustrator Gladys Perint Palmer wittily comments under her first drawing featured in her recently published volume and showing a sensual Adam and Eve. If you didn't know Perint Palmer's work, that first illustration would already be enough to make you instantly fall in love with her.
The current Executive Director of the School of Fashion at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, Gladys Perint Palmer has been a force in fashion illustration for the last thirty years or so. Her new book Adam & Yves (FireFall Media) is a tongue-in-cheek illustrated history of fashion, with short hand-written texts in chronological order combined with drawings that follow no particular order.
Perint Palmer opens the book with the story of her career, a tale of ups and downs, unfair failures and brilliant triumphs: sniggered at by a frustrated art director when she was a student at Parsons, she got her revenge by starting to work for American Harper's Bazaar and British Vogue. After a period of time in Hong Kong and the first exhibitions, she became a fashion editor for the San Francisco Examiner and an international journalist.
After meeting the late Anna Piaggi (dressed, as she remembers, in a green foam Statue of Liberty headdress and choker of piano keys), Perint Palmer started working for Italian Vogue and L'Espresso Più (quite famous at the time for its hard porn covers that scandalised Gladys' mother...), and also had an exhibition in Milan.
Her illustrations started appearing on L'Officiel, Vogue, The New Yorker, Elle, Punch, Grazia and Burda among the others and she also did the drawings for famous fashion designers (she illustrated the 1995 book Do Not Disturb about Gianni Versace's houses and domestic life). More recently her drawings appeared in the banners for Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week and The Fashion Book (Phaidon Press) selected her as one of five hundred people of influence in fashion.
Despite her achievements, Perint Palmer is extremely humble, a rare quality in the fashion industry: in the introduction she claims that she was "supremely unqualified" to head the School of Fashion at the Academy of Art Univesity in San Francisco. Her illustrations and witticisms show instead she is perfectly qualified for that job and that she has also got a clever eye and an irresistible humour, two qualities that are missing in today's fashion industry and in particular in illustration, a realm that has been first partially abandoned and more recently embraced again, though in a much more sanitised version just in case irony and satire end up offending any fashion house or designer.
Perint Palmer's tract is simple yet effective, and the quotes, aphorisms, and tales that she includes show that she knows her history and her fashion history pretty well. The author doesn't indeed mention historical characters such as Marie Antoinette, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, Empress Eugénie of France, Madame de Pompadour, Queen Elizabeth II or Beau Brummell to namesdrop them, but she juxtaposes a fashion drawing to a quote creating time lapses that end up proving how, in fashion, there are actually no time gaps, but specific trends (think of corsets) are mixed in a big cauldron or tend to come back after a few years.
The author juxtaposes for example Queen Victoria's love of Scotland to Vivienne Westwood's tartan collection (Westwood the activist is also employed for a clever comparison with Theodora, the Byzantine empress who passed laws prohibiting prostitution, instituting the death penalty for rape and enabling women to own property); a quote from classic authors such as Plautus' "Purple belongs to shady years, jewels to ugly women, a pretty girl is prettier undressed than dressed in purple" is matched with an illustration of a model with nipples dipped in purple paint from Tom Ford's Spring/Summer 2003 collection for Yves Saint Laurent; William Blake's quote "Imitation is criticism" inspires Palmer instead a comparison between Balenciaga who moved from Velázquez and Ghesquière who referenced Star Wars.
Under an illustration portraying Franca Sozzani, Anna Wintour and ex-French Vogue Editor Carine Roitfeld measuring each other's waists, Palmer comments "Catherine de Medici had a 16" waist and imposed a maximum of 18" on her ladies-in-waiting. Regal editors at Condé Nast Vogues are equally waistline conscious"; a space age design by Mugler is accompanied by a text stating, "In 1752 the lightning rod was invented by Benjamin Franklin; Thierry Mugler F/W 1991/92 Haute Couture was lightening rod for scandal".
Fashion fans won't be disappointed as the volume includes all the major fashion houses, from Alaïa and Dior to Chanel, Alexander McQueen, Gaultier, Moschino, Krizia, Lagerfeld, Fendi, Romeo Gigli, Comme des Garçons and even the youngest generation of designers like Iris Van Herpen.
Thinking of getting the next Lauren Weisberger's book? Get this instead, it's much more entertaining and fun and also proves that, as Perint Palmer herself states, "wisdom is the bridge between costume and fashion".
Note for Gladys Perint Palmer's fans: the illustrator will be having book signings in New York in September, with a special signing during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week. Stay tuned to know more about it.
Note for Gladys Perint Palmer: if you're ever reading this, please release a "Fashion started in Paradise and went to Hell" T-shirt with one of your illustrations - that would genuinely be the ultimate "must have" item for both fashion fans and people working in the industry.
Adam & Yves is available through FireFall Media.
All images in this post courtesy of Gladys Perint Palmer.
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