JESSICA LANGE slipped into a booth at Le Drugstore in Paris, face bare of makeup, hair a nimbus of soft blond curls. She was not a standout beauty or, for that matter, in any apparent way exceptional. Certainly she was not as crazy pretty as Jerry Hall or as oddball gorgeous as the gaptoothed model Donna Jordan, with her shaved eyebrows and platinum bleached mane, or as startling to gaze at as the lunar Warhol superstar Jane Forth.
There was something slightly crooked in Ms. Lange’s features; she had a distant air. That she was uncommonly quiet made sense when you learned that she had come to Paris to study mime. That she was going places was a given. Why else would she be at a table with Antonio Lopez?
This was in the early 1970s. Just out of my teens, I had made my way to the City of Light and been taken under wing by Mr. Lopez, whom I’d first encountered amid the baroque disarray of lodgings the designer Charles James shared with an incontinent beagle named Sputnik at the Chelsea Hotel.
Although Mr. Lopez’s name may mean little today, at the time he was among the most celebrated talents in fashion, a virtuosic illustrator whose drawings — in ad campaigns for Valentino and Missoni, published in the predictable fashion bibles (and often in the pages of The New York Times) and in portfolios commissioned by men’s magazines — were like semaphores beckoning strangers to enter his glamorous sphere.
That place, which W magazine recently characterized as an “irreverent orb of gossip, gorgeous people, designer clothes, groovy tunes, art, kitsch and street culture,” was something more. It was a cultural crossroads of a kind long since gone from the landscape, a nexus of high and low, rich and poor, of outlandish self-presentation and serious business, of 110th Street and Boulevard St-Germain.
“Things are obviously a lot different now,” the designer Anna Sui said. “It’s not about fabulous anymore. It’s about having 500 friends on Facebook and the same American Apparel outfit to wear to a festival. It was kind of the opposite then. Freak was the preferred genre.” Thus anyone with the slightest interest in becoming a fabulous freak made a beeline for Mr. Lopez’s studio.
And now his world has been rediscovered, not a moment too soon to infuse the twice-yearly trade carnival that is New York Fashion Week with much needed inspiration and energy.
Next month, Rizzoli will publish “Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex & Disco,” a monograph by Mauricio and Roger Padilha. Also next month, the Suzanne Geiss Company gallery in SoHo will open “Antonio Lopez: Antonio’s World,” a related show of Mr. Lopez’s work that includes the artist’s fashion illustrations alongside his experimental Instamatic portraits, nightclub drawings, erotic sketches and the 8-millimeter films featuring friends from his inner circle, including the photographer Bill Cunningham, a friend of Lopez and a former studio neighbor at Carnegie Hall.
“Younger people are not aware of him and people who are slightly older may think of him as just a fashion illustrator,” Ms. Geiss said, noting that the work in the show covers three decades, from the 1960s until Mr. Lopez’s death, at age 44, of AIDS in 1987. “The quality of the drawings is so superior and the photography so outstanding, it all deserves to be looked at afresh.”
A further element of the unexpected revival comes in the form of an announcement this week that the next big MAC cosmetics campaign (following collaborations with Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin and Nicki Minaj) will be makeup thematically inspired by Mr. Lopez’s illustrations and by the rare birds he surrounded himself with, drew and photographed — and whose images (in cases like that of Ms. Lange, Ms. Hall, Ms. Jordan, Pat Cleveland and Grace Jones) he substantially helped create.
“Antonio showed this tremendous zest for living,” said James Gager, creative director of MAC. “The people around him felt the same thing or else he wouldn’t have had them around him.”
For MAC executives, Mr. Lopez’s posthumous obscurity was far outweighed by their sense of him as an emblem of a chromatically vibrant and pre-corporate fashion world. “When you see the pictures and the drawings, you want to re-meet these people at a party or on the street,” Mr. Gager said. “You want to stop them and say, ‘You look incredible!’ ”
And looking incredible was the point, according to Ms. Cleveland, a favorite of designers like Halston and Stephen Burrows and among the first of what came to be known as “Antonio’s girls.” Nobody in those days had a five-year or even a five-minute plan, said the model, who lives now in rural New Jersey, where she raises pet peacocks and is at work on a memoir.
Ms. Cleveland, with her Olive Oyl features and elongated limbs, was still a design student in high school when she first encountered Mr. Lopez and Juan Ramos, his partner in business and life. “Antonio’s girls came on the scene like a new generation in fashion, like something out of ‘West Side Story,’ ” Ms. Cleveland said. “We were a flock of parakeets dressed in bright colors. We didn’t know what we were going to be, but we were going to take our energy and fun and bring it to boring old fashion and society.”
Mr. Lopez, who was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx, where his family arrived in the great postwar migratory wave that came to be called La Guagua Aérea, or the Airbus, was “all about that fun-filled fashion life,” Ms. Cleveland added.
Mr. Lopez’s vision, formed on the streets of the city, was of a world “in all its beautiful colors before AIDS came along and scared everyone to death and turned everything gray,” she said.
For Roger Padilha, writing the book was in part an effort to pay homage to that generation of gay men — producers of the arts but also, as Fran Lebowitz once noted, its vital audience — who, having died en masse, were afterward lost in a fog of cultural forgetting.
“People don’t know anymore,” Mr. Padilha said. “They make the references, recycling the decades, but they don’t know where they’re from.”
The best references of Mr. Lopez that many designers and photographers still sample date not merely to a particular time (the early ’70s) but to a specific place. Although Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ramos had long been in demand on both sides of the Atlantic, it was at a roomy white-painted Paris apartment lent them by Karl Lagerfeld on a corner of the Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie and the Boulevard St-Germain that the two improvised a transplanted New York salon, Champagne flowing and stereo blasting Curtis Mayfield and Sly and the Family Stone. It was at Lagerfeld’s place and in outposts like Le Drugstore and the ineffably seedy disco Club Sept that Mr. Lopez seemed best to fulfill his role as a creative catalyst.
Taken up by Mr. Lagerfeld, then a designer for Chloé and perennially cast in the shadow of Yves Saint Laurent, Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ramos conjured an ongoing spectacle. Its revolving roster might include Paloma Picasso, the model Jay Johnson, Mr. Lagerfeld — then in a beefy bodybuilder phase — and young beauties like the actress Patti D’Arbanville, Ms. Jordan, Ms. Forth, Ms. Hall, Ms. Cleveland or Ms. Lange, long before any of them became tabloid fodder, Oscar winners or boldface names.
“In those days, wealthy people wanted, needed almost, these bohemians in their lives,” said Ms. Forth, one of Mr. Lopez’s models and a star of Warhol films like “Trash.”
“The goal for us was never to be rich or famous,” Ms. Forth said. “No one said: ‘I really want to be famous. I really want to be rich.’ Those were things that would just happen if they happened. But did one want to be acknowledged for uniqueness? Yes.”
Pictures from the Padilha monograph leave little doubt as to Ms. Forth’s singularity. Hair skinned back tight to reveal the expansive forehead of a Memling Madonna, brows clipped into Kabuki tufts, deep-set eyes rimmed with painterly swathes of jade green shadow, she resembled nothing anyone had ever seen before or, for that matter, since.
Her look, like the Jean Harlow image of Ms. Jordan — a rangy New York Galatea with mousy brown hair on arrival in Paris — was engineered by Mr. Lopez, for whom models were often treated like drawings breathed into life. Where beauty didn’t exist in any obvious way, it was manipulated into being.
“Jerry Hall didn’t look like Jerry Hall until Tony got hold of her, believe me,” Ms. D’Arbanville said last week from her home in North Carolina. “Looking at Donna Jordan, ‘top model’ was not the first thing that popped into your mind.”
At Mr. Lopez’s suggestion, Corey Tippin, a makeup artist, sometime Warhol film star and core member of the Lopez coterie, shaved off Ms. Jordan’s eyebrows. “We stripped the hair until it was Harlow blond and then made it even lighter, like albino blond,” he said.
Once transformed, Ms. Jordan went on to be featured in ad campaigns and on numerous covers of French and Italian Vogue. Her visual impact continues to be felt in pictorials like the one photographed in 2010 by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott for an issue of W magazine, in which Ms. Jordan was impersonated by Lara Stone.
Long before occupational chameleons like Madonna and Lady Gaga appeared, those in Mr. Lopez’s circle shifted identities as readily as some people change clothes.
“We would go from doing amazing drawings or photos all day long straight to La Coupole for dinner though, believe me, we weren’t just popping in for a bite,” Ms. D’Arbanville said, referring to the Art Nouveau brasserie on Montparnasse. “We planned everything and never, ever went out without full makeup. It wasn’t done. We’d flounce in to the restaurant and I don’t know how people’s necks weren’t broken they whipped their heads around so fast to watch us pass.”
Mr. Lopez’s group may have shifted often — “different pretty boys, different pretty girls,” as Ms. D’Arbanville said. “But there was a core group, everyone fell in love with everyone, and everyone was transformed by Tony, not only by his pencil, but by his life.”
It is worth remembering, Mr. Tippin said, that in an industry that would remain white-dominated for decades, Mr. Lopez stealthily and seductively broke down barriers. “Don’t forget that these are Puerto Rican men having great success in the early 1960s, and that is not far from the time when Hispanics were the low men on the social totem pole,” he said.
For all that his aura is suggestive of a dreamer and fantasist, the lessons conveyed by Mr. Lopez in his person and his example, Ms. Cleveland said, are rooted in pragmatism and reality.
“Antonio used to say, ‘Don’t waste a minute of your life dreaming of what you want to be,’ ” Ms. Cleveland said. “ ‘Just be it.’ ”
A correction was made on Aug. 30, 2012
A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misspelled Eija Vehka Aho’s surname as Ajo. And a caption for an accompanying slide show of Corey Tippin, misspelled his surname as Tippen.
