REQUIEM FOR A YELLOW SUIT

Here's the news from Valerie:

The photograph above may be the only picture I have of myself wearing that yellow pants suit, which makes me very sad.  It's from Bill Cunningham's On the Street, which is great, but it's a small and grainy photo and, worried about the changeable weather, you can see I put a scarf around my neck and a shawl across my shoulder, all of which help obscure the suit's many qualities.  So really, except for the fact that it's yellow, you can have no idea why I loved this suit so much, and why it pains me so much now that it is going the way of all things.  Regrets...  I've had a few...

The newspaper is dated 2001, and I bought it second hand sometime before that, so really this suit, by Emporio Armani, owes me nothing.  I've worn it a million times.  There is a vague stain on the front of the jacket now, that neither I nor my dry cleaner could get out.  It has hung in my closet unworn for so long that the sharp crease in the pants has morphed into a dozen shapeless wrinkles.  I'd keep it - and wear it - if I could still do it justice, but time marches on, and I have trouble closing the waist on the pants now.  I can do it, but only by creasing the waistband.  (The waistband should lie on the waist as if gently napping, not grab the waist as if holding on for dear life.)  The jacket - which draped so beautifully that when I first wore it I thought this must be how Bianca Jagger felt in a bespoke Tommy Nutter suit - clings a bit now, and flares where it was never meant to.  It's not made for the millennial me.

I remember my delight when I found it, I remember praying it would fit me as I went to try it on, and I remember my astonishment that I could afford it, but mostly I remember thinking how droll of Armani to make an egg yolk yellow suit.  Women were being exhorted to dress for success, and wear suits to be taken seriously.  I remember imagining a woman having this interior dialogue.  "Oh yeah?  You want me to wear a suit?  Fine.  How's this?"  Perhaps it's no wonder that I have not risen to become CEO at a major - or even a minor - corporation.

Below is a non-glam photo of the suit in question.

Everything about it was right for me then.  It even had the right amount of padding in the shoulders.  Below, I've arranged the suit so you can get a better look at the pants.  The roomy legs almost veer into zoot suit territory.  (Actually, the whole thing veers a bit close zoot suit territory.  It's a very happy suit.)  It's high waisted, generously pleated, and it has pockets, which everyone needs.  (With the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth.  Please, can we have a referendum on whether women want pockets in their clothes?  'Cause we carry stuff.  Have you ever seen men's pants without pockets?)

In the photo showing the jacket, you can see there's a boutonniere.  Often I wore a Victorian turk's head in it, shown here.  In this close-up, you can see that the suit is not a mere plain weave silk, but has pin wales woven into it, for a bit of texture, and a bit more weight.  A good designer thinks of everything!

Some of you will be asking "but what can you accessorize that with?"  In the first photo, because it was Easter, I accessorized it with lots of green.  (I think I wore mustard shoes with rubber soled wedges that day, and if memory serves, that was the day I first felt the neuromas in my feet.  I threw away those wedges that day, and never wore heels again.)  Off the top of my head, I could wear an orange shirt, a green shirt, or a red shirt (with matching shoes, none of which are shown here), and that's just for starters.

I've worn it with these perforated yellow leather flats.

I could have worn it with this vintage yellow straw hat from Mr. John.  (I haven't, but I could have.)

Or with this natural straw hat by Frank Palma, which is natural straw color, but looks yellow.

I've worn it with vintage two-toned suede gloves.

And I wish I'd had the opportunity to wear it with these vintage butter yellow cotton gloves.

I would not be writing this post if the suit were black.  There will always be another black suit.  I write because color is disappearing from the millennial palette, and so are complicated weaves.  I'm assuming this suit is from the very colorful '80s.  Not everyone likes yellow, but in the '80s there was a color - and a shade of that color - for everyone.  (Remember teal?  When was the last time you saw a teal suit?  I'll bet it was in the '80s.  And yes, I had one, by Irka, with little three dimensional knots in the wefts every half inch or so.)

Fashion today is relentlessly driven by the bottom line.  Many people in the industry have been talking about the demise of the most respected mills, and our readers may have noticed that it's more and more difficult these days to find anything that expresses originality - in fabric, color, or cut.  Pret-a-porter has become very cookie cutter.  That keeps costs down and profits up, but drives a true lover of the needle arts to tears.  Where will I get another droll egg yolk yellow suit that fits me to a T?

So gather ye rosebuds - and colorful natty suits - while ye may.

IN MEMORIAM: BILL CUNNINGHAM

It is with the heaviest of hearts that we write this post.  By now, the world has heard of the passing of Bill Cunningham.

His fans are legion. He was definitely old school and a real gentleman, but never a fuddy-duddy. In Sanskrit, "Mahatma" means "Great Soul" and Bill Cunningham was a Mahatma of the first order.

Word spread quickly yesterday on Instagram, Facebook and cable and network TV news.  Nobody wanted to believe it.  Many shared anecdotes about how they were touched by their interactions with Bill in terms that rivaled descriptions of meeting Pope Francis or Mother Teresa. But their descriptions were heartfelt and not exaggerated.   He was 87, and after he reached 80 without hanging up his camera, we just assumed we could keep him forever.

He was a fixture at Fashion Week in New York and across the globe. Over nearly four decades he chronicled street fashion and elevated it to an art form.We were lucky enough on several occasions to have met and been photographed by Bill and to chat with him. Every encounter was a privilege and being photographed elicited an inner "Eeeeeeeeeeeeee" reaction in each of us.  The world is a far less interesting place without Bill in it.

We wanted to share just a small number of our encounters in memory of Bill.

You could say it all started in 1997, the first year Valerie joined the Easter Parade.  She had no idea who Bill was, but she'd seen the annual photo array, and figured she should participate.  Everyone photographs everyone at Easter, so as far as Valerie was concerned, Bill could be anyone with a camera.  It wasn't until Easter of 2001 that Valerie finally made it into the paper.  (See the lady in the green hat and yellow suit?)

When she saw the photo, Valerie knew EXACTLY who'd taken it from that angle. It was a broadly smiling, slim elderly man in a very un-Easter-ly bright blue jacket, who'd taken several shots while alternately crouching and springing forward to keep up with the crowd.

That first success was enough to keep Valerie going back every year, like a gambler at a blackjack table.

When the two of us met, of course we had to do the Easter Parade together, and in 2009 Bill rewarded our first joint effort.  At the time, we didn't know how to do screen grabs, but these are the photos that appeared in the paper and in the video:

Here's Jean with our friend Tziporah Salamon (the first time for both of them)

and Valerie with our friend Shiho (who made her own hat).

We made it in again for Easter of 2011 (video here)


















And for Asia Week, 2012 (bottom left quarter of the page), among other occasions.






















Bill gave us the most wonderful Christmas present imaginable when he featured us wearing Carol Markel's felt helmets in the center of On the Street just before Christmas of 2012.  We like to think Bill had a special place in his heart for hats.  Before he took up professional photography, he was a milliner, making hats under his own label, William J.

In October 2013, we attended Issey Miyake's Hues of Red party with our pal Shelley aka Forest City Fashionista, and were thrilled to be photographed by Bill.  Shelley and Jean appeared in the New York Times in Bill's Evening Hours coverage of the Miyake party - along with Henry Pierre, Louise Doktor and Tziporah Salamon and a lady with red dreads and a terrific gold-toned jacket. Valerie arrived only minutes later, but the moment was gone.  Timing is everything.

(To see the full New York Times page, scroll down or click here for a blow-up.)

Here we are again in Bill's coverage of the September 2015 opening night party for FIT's "Fashion Underground: The World of Susanne Bartsch" exhibition (video here).

(

What now turns out to be our final encounter with Bill took place just this past April 1, again at Easter.  That's us in the top left corner.

It is definitely the end of an era.  It is too soon to wonder whether someone else will take over On the Street and Evening Hours, but even if someone does, no one will ever replace Bill.  We can all take some comfort knowing that he loved his work - it's fair to say his life was his work, and his greatest source of pleasure - and that he had the rare privilege of continuing to do what he loved until just days before his death.  We hope he would have been tickled pink to know how much he is missed and how many lives he touched.

We have lost an icon.  But we had him so much longer than we had any right to expect.

Antonio Lopez at El Museo del Barrio

Antonio Lopez, probably the most extraordinary fashion illustrator of the 1970s and 80s, is being celebrated at El Museo del Barrio in their current exhibition, Future Funk Fashion.  Last week we attended the exhibition's press preview and opening night. We are both fans of the illustrator/artist whose drawings were ubiquitous in our youth. Antonio was the subject of Mauricio and Roger Padilha's book, Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex and Disco, which is chock full of his colorful, sweeping illustration of clothing, models and men.

One of the many victims of the AIDS crisis, Lopez died at the age of 44 in 1987.  That so many of his contemporaries were lost at the same time may have contributed to his not receiving the recognition he so clearly deserved.  This exhibition, with literally hundreds of drawings, dazzles the eye and demonstrates why he was so in demand at many of the major fashion magazines of the day.   The show also highlights his collaboration with his creative partner and lover Juan E. Ramos who died at 53 in 1995.

The gorgeous illustration above of Angelo Colon is one of the highlights of the exhibition.  Over three feet tall, the sketch was part of a live demonstration given for students in 1983.  Lopez himself said that fashion illustration of the period had become very boring and "WASPy".  With his use of color, line, and particularly his choice of models, Lopez infused his illustrations with life, and vibrant sexuality.

In contrast to people in the fashion world today, many of whom dress in "normcore", Lopez (below) lived and loved the look he promoted, full of color, balance, attention to detail, and a little - or a lot - of outrageousness.

Here he is sketching one of his models, with Karl Largerfeld looking on.

Much as we would like to, we can't show you the exhibition's amazing start-to-finish video of Lopez sketching Angelo Colon, but you can click here to see him doing another live demonstration.  He has a very strong and confident hand, and a masterful use of line.  (Watch how he uses his entire arm, not just his hand, to get the desired effect.)

In this half finished color illustration, you can get some idea of his process.  Lopez's models tend to have a louche, come-hither look about them.  They often view the viewer.  The artist lures you into loving the clothes by luring you into loving the model.  His use of shading adds to the interest of the illustrations.  In the clothes, shading gives the illusion of the texture and luxury of the material.  In the model, Lopez takes the extra time to emphasize facial contours by adding dabs of white to the eyes, cheek, nose, lips and chin.

Here's an illustration of a dress with a black velvet yoke and matching skirt, held together by a large golden jeweled violin, and a smaller green violin at the hip.

Below is the dress the illustration was drawn from, the only actual garment in the exhibition.

There were quite a few drawings of impossible, but nevertheless marvelous, shoes...

And in one display case were plexiglass versions of several of the obviously unwearable but fabulously glamorous shoes.

The exhibition points out that Lopez discovered such well known faces as Jerry Hall, Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland and Tina Chow.  The portrait below is Sayoko Yamaguchi, who was often photographed in highly colorful make up.

On the walls were quite a few sketches that appeared to be preliminary drafts, but the lines are so lovingly and expertly drawn that it is easy to imagine what the actual product looked like.  In the drawing below, Lopez catches the feminine, romantic mood of the dress with the the soft, voluminous folds, and the model's delicate features.  (Sorry about the reflections in the glass.)

Here, the model's sportier, jauntier clothing is matched by the forward thrust of her hips and leg.  In both of these photos, the clothed woman is accompanied by a nearly nude man.  Each figure was probably drawn independently, but it's interesting that the artist makes the effort to bring the figures together with an understated hand gesture.

There is a vibrancy and urgency to his drawings.    Even when there are no facial expressions, the body language is telling.  The women below are straight-backed, in control, proud, and dancing effortlessly in their stilettos.

A different side of Lopez, as if he were drawing for comic books:

Imagine what Jean would have looked like had Antonio sketched her!

Since it was opening night, we have to show you some of the marvelous people we ran into.  Amelia Malayamba-Ansotegui (left), who co-curated the show, posed with artist Julia Santos-Solomon in a gorgeous reversible Italian coat.

Artists and designers Ruben and Isabel Toledo bookended one of the guests in a photo. Ruben drew the fabulous pattern on Isabel's dress with a black marker.

Patrick McDonald sported a tropical look.

Paul Van Ravenstein and Pat Cleveland made the scene. Pat was one of Antonio's favorite subjects, and appears in many of the illustrations in the show.

Roger Padilha and Josh McLaughlin posed in front of one of several of Antonio's iconic shoe drawings.

We posed in front of the dramatic graffiti mural which was one of the main props in Antonio and Juan's studio and may have been painted by the Rock Steady Crew.

A few weeks back, we took a Diseno Shoe Design Workshop co-sponsored by Cooper Hewitt and El Museo del Barrio, and conducted by Edmund Castillo, chief designer at Aquatalia.  Let's just say that we drew outside the lines and didn't exactly follow directions, but Edmund (left) was a good sport. He posed with photographer Rose Hartman and his boss from Aquatalia.

Jean couldn't help but notice how Valerie's hat and earrings mirrored those in the image in this poster that Antonio designed for Versace c. 1981-82.

The press preview was followed by a VIP reception that included a party in the lobby and on the plaza in front of the museum.  Jean ran into designer Narciso Rodriguez, who had also designed costumes for Stephen Petronio Dance Company.

Doris Casap, who is on the board of El Museo, was sweet enough to pose for a photo.

We loved running into Steve Caputo from Lower East Studios at the VIP party.

Author and illustrator Bil Donovan always looks incredibly dapper. We loved his Dior tie.  The cameo-like flower is hand painted.

Jean just about freaked when she got to meet Michelle Lamy in the flesh.  She wore her clothes back in the day and has been a fan for many years. Woo hoo!

Out on the plaza, Valerie ran into Alejandro Figueredo who was also enjoying the balmy weather.

We had noticed each of the members of this group individually during the show, but when they ended up all sitting together outside, we had to take a photo. Actress Parker Posey (now blond) is in the center and the lady on the right, Leana Zuniga, owns Electric Feathers, an avant garde women's wear store in Brooklyn.

This British couple was enjoying the evening. We loved her shirt.

Jasmin Hernandez and her friend Marquita posed for a photo before we headed outside.

Go see the exhibition!