camp chic

 

----------------- [continued-Excerpt from Jerry Hall book] -----------------

Antonio Lopez:  My Mentor

I first met Antonio in the Club Sept in Paris.  I was wearing gold satin with lots of glitter and feathers and he was wearing a white satin jacket and a red beret.  Antonio was a brilliant fashion illustrator, he asked me to pose for him and we became very close.  Then after my sister Terry went back to Texas I moved in with Antonio and we became lovers for a while.

        Antonio knew everyone, and everywhere we went he introduced me to people from the world of fashion, film and art.  He was friends with Andy Warhol and when he came to town we had dinner together at the Club Sept.  Andy had been a very successful commercial artist and fashion illustrator, who had won awards from the Art Director's club, before he had become the Pop Art media superstar of the sixties.

        Antonio taught me so much about make-up and style.  When I got to Paris I was wearing blue eye shadow from eyelash to eyebrows, pink right up my cheeks and pink lipstick.  Antonio would spend two hours making me up, with eye-liner, false eyelashes and plucked eyebrows.  After that I always made my eyebrows arched, the way he drew them.  

        I used to sit for hours with his drawings of me and copy the make-up.  He taught me how to pose, what to do with my hands and how to stay still and look graceful and elegant.

        He used to laugh at my poses and my outfits.  I was still wearing my mother's Frederick's of Hollywood outfits -- I thought they were chic, but Antonio taught me that they were camp instead.  

I'd been camping it up all along and I didn't know it.

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{Jerry Hall:  My life in pictures.  Written by Jerry Hall.  Curated by Jonathan Phang.  2010.  Quadrille Publishing.}

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