Fashion Flashback: Antonio Lopez

Fashion Reverie looks back at fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez. In the pantheon of fashion illustrators, Antonio Lopez was one of the most prolific and illustrious fashion illustrators of the 20^th Century. With illustrations that appeared in most of the fashion glossy bibles of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, including the New York Times, as well as ad campaigns for Missoni and Valentino, Lopez helped mentor the early careers of industry icons Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Tina Chow, and Grace Jones.

“Antonio’s girls came on the scene like a new generation in fashion, like something out of West Side Story,” detailed Pat Cleveland to the nytimes.com. “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.”

A native of Utuado, Puerto Rico, at the age of seven Lopez moved with his family to NYC. While attending Fashion Institute of Technology. Lopez interned at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) which led to a position at WWD and later the New York Times. In 1969, Lopez moved to Paris and become closely associated with Karl Lagerfeld while Lagerfeld was designing for Chloe.

With his business and life partner Juan Ramos, Lopez helped usher in a more liberated, inclusive and egalitarian era of fashion that begin to break barriers of race and class. This burgeoning movement also incorporated street fashion which quickly began to the influence the growing ready-to-wear market.

Marc Jacobs’ 2007 “Arabian Nights” event was inspired by Lopez’s 1985 book Antonio’s Tales from One Thousand and Nights. A book on the career of Antonio Lopez, Antonio Lopez: Fashion, Art, Sex, & Disco, by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha (with a foreword by Andre Leon Talley and an epilogue by Anna Sui), was published by Rizzoli in September 2012.

“Antonio used to say, ‘Don’t waste a minute of your life dreaming of what you want to be,’ ” said Pat Cleveland to the nytimes.com. “ ‘Just be it.’ ”

Antonio Lopez died from AIDS‒related complications in 1987.

—Staff