“Artists aren’t supposed to dress up and I’ll never look right anyway,” Andy Warhol utters in Bob Colacello’s fantastic biographical Holy Terror book. It’s ironic, given that when anyone talks about men having a sartorial uniform, I always think of Warhol.
Specifically, the blazer, shirt, tie and jeans era. He often also had a plastic carrier bag in hand, with copies of his magazine Interview inside to give out to potential advertisers. Warhol was never not working. He was his art.
Warhol’s dedication to jeans is also something of a personal obsession; I recently bought three pairs of vintage Levi’s — his favorite denim brand. Arguably, one of the best denim-related stories is of Warhol keeping his Levi’s 501s on under his tuxedo suit — he was going to the White House for the first time — because the trousers were itchy. Then there is the picture of him skating in jeans and a blazer, or a roll neck with New Balance trainers, Basquiat in the foreground, topless and weight-training.
Photo: AP
As Tate Modern is about to open a new Warhol show, attention to his style seems more pertinent 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 (on until April) in blazer, striped tie, clear-framed glasses and the infamous silvery grey wig.
He has also worn Comme des Garcons, had a shoe last named after him at Berluti and was photographed by Helmut Newton in 1974, lying down in a black leather trench. Most recently, Uniqlo has sold Warhol T-shirts and Saint Laurent are collaborating with Everlast on a boxing capsule collection inspired by Michael Halsband’s photographs of Warhol and Basquiat in Everlast.
Throughout his career, Warhol had a strong connection to fashion: as a young man in the 50s, he created illustrations for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Later he made friends with, and portraits of, designers including Diane von Furstenberg, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Halston and Yves Saint Laurent. He hung out with legendary Vogue fashion editor Diana Vreeland, briefly managed cult band Velvet Underground, and was quick to understand the zeitgeist — see his support for newcomers such as Keith Haring and Basquiat.
Photo: Reuters
Warhol was not, however, just a trailblazing artist; he was also a star with an image to match.
“He really understood the idea of having a public persona,” says Fiontan Moran, assistant curator at Tate Modern. “Pop art was made from familiar objects, it was accessible and a winning combination with his distinctive visual identity.”
Colacello, who worked at Interview for years and was among Warhol’s inner circle, says his 60s look of “silvery white wig, dark wraparound sunglasses, black turtleneck under black leather jacket, black boots and, yes, blue jeans — was calculated to create a cool, hip, rebellious, even a bit sinister image. And it succeeded,” Fiontan says.
By the time Colacello met him in 1970, only the jeans remained. The rest had been replaced with Oxford shirts, conservative ties, clear-framed glasses and cord jackets.
“The suit-jacket-and-jeans look became the Factory look, preppy and businesslike but more edgy than corporate,” he says. “We all found this combination comfortable because we could go from an uptown dinner party to a downtown loft party and fit in, while also being a bit different.”
There are more than 100 artworks in the Tate show, which looks at Warhol’s work from many perspectives. Moran says the significance of him being the son of immigrant parents from present-day Slovakia and how that might have affected his view of America, his upbringing in the
Byzantine Ruthenian Catholic church, his fascination with celebrity and obsession with death, as well as looking at the work from a queer perspective.
“He had a very open approach to creativity. He was working before homosexuality was legalized, and the Factory was inhabited by counterculture figures,” Moran says. “He capitalizes on that, but was always interested in the new, which is essentially the business of fashion.”
“Andy Warhol and fashion were made for each other,” says Alex Bilmes, editor-in-chief of British Esquire. “Celebrity, shopping, money, novelty, surfaces, color, black and white, mass production, inauthenticity, youth, nightclubs, boredom, movies, Eurotrash, dropouts, pop, the future: all the things he celebrated and satirized and fetishized and derided are the same things fashion obsesses over, fantasizes about, rips off. He didn’t so much predict the future as create it. Warhol was fashion, but Warhol was bigger and better than fashion: in his surface was his depth.”
Not that Warhol ever knowingly played up his depth — cue one of his all-time greatest statements: “I am a deeply superficial person.”
His ideas have often been seen on catwalks. At Calvin Klein in 2017, Raf Simons put Warhol artworks in ad campaigns and on clothing, using the artist as a prism through which to explore American culture. In the 80s, Stephen Sprouse was inspired by the Camouflage paintings, while
Jean-Charles de Castelbajac’s SS84 collection included a Campbell’s soup can dress.
Versace’s super-splashy 1991 Pop collection featured Warholian nods aplenty, including Naomi Campbell’s Marilyn gown. Gianni’s portrait was done by Warhol and Donatella revisited Pop pieces in 2018 for an anniversary collection dedicated to Gianni.
Meanwhile Jeremy Scott’s Moschino fizzes with Warholisms — see the AW 2014 show, whose riff on McDonald’s included a bag with the burger chain’s M logo on its front. And when Karl Lagerfeld turned the Grand Palais into a Chanel supermarket, also in 2014, it reeked of Warhol.
Warhol himself was a fan of a fashion show, going to see runway happenings by the likes of Halston and Saint Laurent. Colacello recalls that the artist would turn to him and say the same thing each time: “Gee, Bob, we should make this into a play.” He laughs. “Warhol came out of the world of fashion, and he never really left it.”
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