Seeing the Antonio Lopez show at The Suzanne Geiss Company in SoHo is like stepping back into the city in the early 80’s. More accurately, it’s like stepping into the fantasy of that place I had as a high school student in suburban Connecticut, one that I cobbled together from issues of Details and Interview. In this world, I believed, people hung out at CBGB’s and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, wore asymmetrical Japanese clothing, and survived on coke and champagne. One gallery wall at Geiss is covered with Polaroid portraits of the Lopez’ glamorous lady friends including Grace Jones, Paloma Picasso and Grace Coddington, women who weren’t natural beauties but brittle, self-styled divas. The gallery itself has been painted a dazzling white and decorated with lush potted plants and a neon light, like the interior of contemporary Richard Meier house.

I’d always thought of Lopez as a fashion world character, but this exhibit shows what a skilled and versatile illustrator he was. He handled a broad range of materials comfortably: watercolors, pencil, pastel, ink, photography and collage. And he rendered with a vivid, fluid hand, one that captured details of garments faithfully while also charging the entire image with a seductive, kinetic energy. His finest work is soaked in fantasy. There’s a lovely, lyrical pencil drawing of a naked woman sitting with her hands across her lap while antlers grow out of her head. Lopez’ imagination perfectly served the pulsating, eccentric energy of the time.

Illustration by Antonio Lopez from the New York Times Magazine, 1966

October 05, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Last summer all the lads were sporting ribbon-trimmed straw fedoras pulled down low in front, and this year it looks like they’re going to be sporting black porkpies perched at perilous angles. At a diner I spotted a young man wearing one just like that and it took me right back to the 1980’s, when I was in high school, and, more specifically 1986, when Madonna wore one in the video for Open Your Heart.

I can’t tell you how much videos meant to us back then. We listened to music on the radio and on cassette tapes in our Walkmen. We saw what artists looked like by reading Creem and watching MTV, whose original mission was to, like, play music. And I can’t tell you how much Madonna meant to us back then. It wasn’t all the obvious things she did to provoke – like singing about being a virgin and wearing wedding dress. It was the way she dressed up and then dressed down and wore too much makeup and transformed herself into the different women she wanted to be: lady, artist, ingenue, whore. After seeing the videos for Burning Up and Borderline I acquired fishnets, black leggings and an oversized white t-shirt with neon graphics. I didn’t wear them with the boldness that Madonna did and I couldn’t, as I was a trapped in a Catholic school uniform and my own nice-girl inhibitions. But I started, tentatively, using clothing to make myself the person I wanted to be.

June 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses