Tag Archives: Antonio Lopez

THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM

I’m not talented. Wee Gee was a real photographer… I’m lightweight stuff… I think of myself as a fashion historian… [Street photographer] Harold Chapman was the biggest influence on me… He taught me to be invisible. “Stop waving that camera around like a fan,” was his expression… 

I’m strictly interested in the way women dress in their own lives. — Bill Cunningham*

Cunningham—New York City’s greatest postwar documentarian of street style—was incredibly self-deprecating, claiming that his New York Times colleagues dismissed his regular columns “On the Street” and “Evening Hours” as “filling around the edges of the ads.”

Arriving in New York in 1949 at age 19, Cunningham went to work as a milliner at Bonwit Teller and the high-end boutique Chez Ninon, where Jacqueline Kennedy and Babe Paley shopped for line-for-line copies of couture originals. While Ninon’s proprietors valued his contribution, they did their best to push him away from fashion and into “straight” journalism—above all keeping him away from Diana Vreeland, fearing the eccentric editor would irrevocably seduce/corrupt the impressionable young man.

(Of course, Cunningham and Vreeland eventually met, and the photographer went on to document nearly every show the doyenne of fashion staged at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute.)

In the new documentary THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM—directed by Mark Bozek, and constructed around a long on-camera interview he shot with the photographer in 1994—Cunningham tells his tale: making hats under the name “William J,” sharing a loft at the Carnegie Hall studios with Bobby Short, Marlon Brando, and Norman Mailer, decamping to Paris for the shows during his U.S. Army stint in Rochefort-sur-Mer.

In the early 1960s, Cunningham wrote a column for John Fairchild’s Womens Wear Daily, and in 1967 was given a small Olympus-Pen by David Montgomery, who worked with Antonio Lopez. A Cunningham street photo of Greta Garbo was published in the Times in 1978, and his career at the paper began.

The year of the film’s interview is key. 1994 was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and several times during the second half of the film, Cunningham breaks down in anguish at the loss of loved ones, including Lopez and his partner Juan Ramos.

THE TIMES OF BILL CUNNINGHAM

Now playing.

Royal

11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

Playhouse 7

673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

Town Center 5

17200 Ventura Boulevard, Encino.

From top: Bill Cunningham in Paris in 1970, photograph by Jean Luce Hure. All other images by Cunningham: street views, New York (3); Grace Coddington, New York; Anna Piaggi; Josephine Baker, surrounded by models including Pat Cleveland and Bethann Hardison, at the “Battle of Versailles” fashion show, 1973; Kay Thompson, who choreographed Halston’s segment of the show; Diana Vreeland, New York, at the Costume Institute in the 1970s; André Leon Talley, Vreeland’s then-assistant, at the Costume Institute; Vreeland and Marisa Berenson; Sonny Bono, Cher, and Ahmet Ertegun (in glasses); Gloria Swanson, New York; Greta Garbo, New York; street scene, New York; Gay Pride Parade, New York, 1970s; Juan Ramos (left) and Antonio Lopez; James Kaliardos (second from left), Stephen Gan (second from right), and Cecelia Dean (right) in 1991, displaying issue #1 of Visionaire. Below, Cunningham in Paris. Images courtesy and © the estate of Bill Cunningham and Greenwich Entertainment.

ANTONIO LOPEZ

“Antonio didn’t record—he rendered.” — Joan Juliet Buck

ANTONIO LOPEZ 1970—SEX, FASHION & DISCO—an exquisite time capsule directed by James Crump—takes viewers back to the would-be golden age of the early 1970s for an exploration into the lives of artist Antonio Lopez (1943-1987) and his personal and creative partner Juan Ramos (1942-1995) as they navigated the art and fashion worlds of Manhattan and Paris.

With the flashy exuberance that characterized Antonio’s life as well as his drawings, the documentary features extensive on-screen interviews with Antonio discoveries Pat Cleveland, Donna Jordan, Jane Forth, Patti D’Arbanville, Jessica Lange, and Corey Tippin.

Editors Grace CoddingtonJoan Juliet Buck, and Bob Colacello explain Antonio’s various entanglements within the distinct yet overlapping Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld “families,” and the late photographer and Lopez-Ramos confidante Bill Cunningham walks away with the film, giving the last word on Lagerfeld’s final betrayal and Oscar de la Renta’s heroism.*

ANTONIO LOPEZ 1970—SEX, FASHION & DISCO

Through Thursday, October 4.

Laemmle Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Boulevard, West Los Angeles.

 

Through Thursday, September 27.

Laemmle Playhouse, 673 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena.

 

Post-screening Q & A with director James Crump, Corey Tippin and artist and Lopez estate-director Paul Caranicas

Friday, September 21, at 7:30 pm.

Laemmle Royal

theantoniolopezbook.com

bookdepository.com/Antonio-Lopez-Instamatics

* See Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris for an in-depth look at the Antonio LopezJuan RamosKarl Lagerfeld saga.

From top:

Antonio Lopez in Paris, 1970. Photograph by Bill Cunningham.

Corey Tippin, Donna Jordan, Jane Forth, and Jay Johnson in Paris, 1971.

Lopez in the Jardin du Luxembourg, 1971. Photograph by Juan Ramos.

Cunningham and Lopez. Photograph by Ramos.

Jessica Lange. Photographs by Lopez.

Lopez, Tippin, and Jordan.

Image credits: The Estate of Antonio Lopez and Juan Ramos, and Film Movement.