"It is a pity, but today there are no more fashion illustrators," Yves Saint Laurent stated in 2007, adding, "For however much I admire photographers, I have to admit that their work is done to the detriment of the design...In the case of an illustration...the design is well and truly present and alive."
Saint Laurent's words perfectly summarised the state of fashion illustration at the beginning of the noughties. While it is undeniable that fashion illustration is enjoying a renaissance in our days - maybe as a reaction to all the digital and quite often heavily retouched images we are surrounded by on a daily basis - the '40s and the '50s were the heydays of fashion illustration, an art characterised in those decades by a glamorous and elegant style.
More resources were put into photography in the '60s, but there were a few selected artists who injected back some magic into the world of fashion illustration, in the following decades. One of them was Tony Viramontes, currently celebrated in a volume by Dean Rhys Morgan recently published by Laurence King.
Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1956 from first generation Mexican immigrants, Frank Anthony Viramontes showed a strong artistic streak from a very young age. From drawing his brothers playing football, he soon passed to portraying marching bands, cheerleaders and bullfights, performances that inspired him to focus on the details such as the brightly coloured uniforms of the matadors, though women soon started dominating his illustrations.
A fan of Antonio Lopez who became his mentor when Viramontes moved to New York, the young illustrator first studied with Jack Potter, heavily influenced by classic styles and by figures such as Renés Bouché and René Gruau, and then with Steven Meisel at Parsons. The parts of the book mentioning Meisel's energetic classes are particularly inspiring as they shed light on Viramontes' electric and contagious creativity, visual wit and ability to make simple, extremely modern and instantly recognisable shapes in boldly outlined drawings.
Viramontes had his first big break when he met Hanae Mori in New York and she convinced him to move to Paris in 1982. In the French capital Viramontes had his first important commissions, started collaborating with famous fashion magazines and designers and opened a studio that soon became a sort of new version of Andy Warhol's Factory. In his studio he created beautiful images working from life with fully dressed models with the correct hairstyles and make-up posing in front of him.
The volume is divided in sections – Fashion, Women and Men. The first focuses on fashion drawings with illustrations of designs by Chanel, Dior, Givenchy, Hanae Mori, Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Halston, Jean Paul Gaultier (who also wrote the foreword to this volume), Yves Saint Laurent, Claude Montana and Stephen Jones, among the others. This part also includes many drawings Viramontes produced for Valentino Garavani's silver jubilee that reinterpret in a modern key the most classic styles by the Italian designer.
The sections dedicated to men and women juxtapose Viramontes' Polaroids to his drawings, trying to find correspondences and contrasts between photographs and drawings.
Viramontes favoured female models - Paloma Picasso, Lisa Rosen, Scarlett Napoleon Bordello, Leslie Winer, Teri Toye and Violeta Sanchez, to mention a few - with marked features such as strong noses, since he thought that pretty women couldn't wear hats. Male models like Mike Hill, Cyril Brulé, Ray Petri, Tanel Bedrossiantz, and Greg Thompson gave him instead the chance to create drawings of muscular and sculpted bodies and to come up with collages that combined photography with illustration.
The volume also touches upon the collaborations with the music industry: Viramontes created indeed the artwork for Arcadia's album "So Red The Rose", drawing portraits of all the band members and of model Violeta Sanchez for the sleeve art (there are quite a few rare images included in the book taken from Nick Rhodes' personal archive and collection) and for Janet Jackson's "Control".
Viramontes' existence was unfortunately too short: after living a hectic lifestyle moving and working during the '80s between the States, France, Italy and Japan, he prematurely died of AIDS in May 1988, leaving behind a series of sophisticated and strong portraits, drawings, sketches and illustrations characterised by a dynamic energy and intensity, an archive of graphic work that perfectly defines the decade in which he lived.
Tony Viramontes - Bold, Beautiful and Damned by Dean Rhys Morgan is out now on Laurence King Publishing.
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