INDIANAPOLIS – The music of the Rolling Stones blared from speakers at the Ritz nightclub on East 11th Street in Manhattan as men and women walked side by side on the runway. Over 1,500 spectators, beads of sweat on their necks in the tight space, the size of the works glowed in the dark under the flickering lights.
But this show didn’t happen last week, last year, or even in the last decade. This is the debut of designer Stephen Sprouse’s second year collection 38 years ago, in May 1984.
“He was so much ahead of his time,” says rock legend Debbie Harry, 77, who shared a bathroom and kitchen with Sprouse in an East Village loft for several years in the mid-1970s. know in a recent phone interview. .
In the 1980s, Sprouse, who died in 2004. He has created iconic looks for Miss Harry, Axl Rose and Billy Idol, and his later collections incorporate the art of friends including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.
The designer’s eclectic aesthetic is on display in a new exhibition, “Stephen Sprouse: Rock, Art, Fashion“Opens this month at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, in the state where Sprouse grew up.
The show, the largest survey of Sprouse’s work to date, showcases his passion for punk couture, including many unseen clothes since they debuted on runways in the late 1990s, among them a version of The asymmetrical silver dress Miss Harry wore in Blondie’s 1979 “Heart of Glass” music video and the polyester and metal button-down dress worn by supermodel Kate Moss in a 1996 ad for the education campaign voting for MTV’s “Choose or Lose”.
“I hope people will appreciate how talented and groundbreaking he is,” said Niloo Paydar, curator of textiles and fashion art at the museum.
The works, including two portraits of Sprouse painted by Warhol, a close friend of the designer, are part of an archive of more than 10,000 items that Sprouse’s mother, Joanne, and younger brother, Bradford, created. donated to the museum. 2018.
“I really want to give it to the IMA because I know they will take great care of it and a lot of people will get a chance to see it,” Bradford Sprouse talked about the collection in a phone interview.
“I mean, look at Warhol,” he added, referring to the decision Andy Warhol Museum opens in the artist’s hometown, Pittsburgh, in 1994. “There aren’t all the other museums in the area.”
During a recent tour of the collection, Lauren Pollien, an assistant curator at the museum, pointed out several other show-stealers: a neon nylon and spandex t-shirt with an image of Mars. taken by the NASA Pathfinder mission (which spectators on the runway at Sprouse’s fall 1999 show looked at through 3-D glasses); two Sprouse leather jackets that were hand-painted by Italian artist Stefano Castronovo in the mid-1980s and depict a young Warhol and Miss Harry; a 1988 silk velvet bubble dress featuring Haring’s famous dancing birds; two graffiti-lined handbags from the spring 2001 Louis Vuitton collection; and some oversized denim suits, which Ms. Pollien said the curators were initially confused because they couldn’t determine if they were for men or women.
“He designed for both,” she said. In addition to the inherent mismatch of his creation, which does not take gender seriously, Sprouse’s collaboration with Teri Toye made him one of the first designers to work with a transgender model.
When Sprouse was growing up in Columbus, Ind., about 45 miles southeast of Indianapolis, his parents weren’t initially sure if he was a prodigy or just obsessed. Bradford Sprouse recalls: The fledgling designer had been detailing his spring and fall collections every year since he was 10 years old.
After his father took him to New York when he was 12 years old to meet designers Bill Blass, Geoffrey Beene and Norman Norell, he began his career as an assistant to Halston, a fellow Indiana native. , in New York City in 1972.
“We had such a strange life,” said Dennis Christopher, 79, a friend and former assistant to Halston, in a phone interview. “We would go to Diana Vreeland’s for dinner in a limousine, then we would stand on the platform and count the money to see if we had enough change to take the subway home.”
In 1975, Sprouse moved to the East Village and began designing clothes for his downstairs neighbor Harry, before opening the business with a $1.4 million loan from his parents in 2005. 1983. While Sprouse has an intimidating appearance – he is known for his head. — the black leg-length suit, nail polish, and clunky black Dynel wig — he was sweet and shy, his friends said.
“He lets his designs speak for themselves,” says Candy Pratts-Price, 73, Sprouse’s friend, former neighbor and former creative director at Vogue.com.
He has a refrigerator-sized colored Xerox machine in his apartment, on which he will enlarge images of rock stars and newspaper headlines until they are distorted before recreate them with paint on canvas. His bedroom sparkled Day-Glo blue under the black lights (one of his favorite quotes was “Does it glow?” recalls Jamie Boud, his longtime assistant).
He has some eccentric personalities that both anger and endear him to his friends: He serves his guests Bloody Marys in measuring cups – he doesn’t wear glasses – writes phone numbers and addresses on the wings hand with a marker that he kept in his pocket. , and often draw on his friends’ shoes.
“Watching him draw is like when you see a Japanese artist draw calligraphy with a brush,” Ms. Harry said. “It has that flow and the beauty of movement. One of my favorite things is just sitting and watching Steve sit down and scribble on a piece of paper at random.”
His use of Velcro, Day-Glo colors, mirrored sequins and high-tech fabrics was ahead of his time, helping to propel his designs to the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
However, commercial success still eluded him. Mr. Christopher says his commitment to quality – he developed a taste for expensive materials during his time with Halston – and his disregard for profits got him into financial trouble when Unable to complete the order. He filed for bankruptcy in 1985.
He came back in the early 2000s with a spring 2001 collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, he painted a logo a bag. (Harper’s Bazaar once stated that the collection “Given a thousand waiting lists.”)
Then, in 2004, Sprouse, who had been secretly battling lung cancer after years of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, died of heart failure at the age of 50. He was buried in an Edie Sedgwick T-shirt, and after the funeral, the mourners wrote him messages on his wooden coffin with pen and ink.
Mrs Pratts-Price said: ‘It’s a pity we lost him so soon. “He’ll have a lot of fun designing for today’s world.”
At the Indianapolis show, true to Sprouse’s love for punk, the vibe of a rock concert. Exhibition visitors will hear a playlists of the music Sprouse uses in his runway performances as they take on his flamboyant colors and bold graphic prints.
Bradford Sprouse, who was in Indianapolis this month to see a preview of the exhibition and attended a punk concert the museum held to celebrate its opening, said he hopes it can serve as a showcase. his brother’s work for Midwesterners, many of whom do not recognize the designer, who spent The last 33 years of his life in Manhattan, were from Indiana.
“My hope is that they will get in there and they will learn, be appreciated and understand who he is and what he has done,” he said. “That they feel good about an Indiana artist.”
