Before Campbell’s soup cans, Brillo boxes, and famous faces became hallmarks of Andy Warhol’s culture-defining pop art, the artist worked as a department-store window designer and a commercial illustrator for style magazines, including Vogue and Glamour. These roots in the fashion world would serve as a fruitful foundation for his career, and a theme that continued to catwalk through his artwork for decades.
The exhibition Andy Warhol: Fashion at Anton Kern Gallery offers a fresh look into Warhol’s stylish fascinations. It assembles 48 fashion-focused drawings from the 1950s and ’60s, along with four episodes of Fashion (1979–80), Warhol’s first public-access television show. Each 30-minute episode delved into a facet of the fashion industry, such as modeling, photography, and design, and began with a clip of the artist snapping a photo with his SX-70 Polaroid camera and murmuring the word “fashion.” The exhibition’s curator, Vincent Fremont, produced this television program. He also served as Warhol’s studio manager and, later, co-founded the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. So the show is infused with a subtle in-the-room-where-it-happened aura that’s playful and inviting.
Installed across two floors, Andy Warhol: Fashion feels, at turns, like a private, over-the-shoulder glimpse of Warhol at work and like a party. On the screens playing Fashion episodes, male models banter about their work life, designer Betsey Johnson talks about clothing through the eras, and danceable ’60s and ’70s music spills into the gallery as young women rocking mini dresses and colorful tights shimmy and strut.
Clusters of framed ink and graphite drawings — many with cut, torn, or otherwise uneven edges — are grouped by form, and organized around the body: feminine faces, male nudes, coiffures, feet. The titles are typically straightforward and descriptive, such as “Tattooed Female In Girdle” (c. 1955) or “Male Genitals With Bow” (c. 1956). The drawings’ sensitive lines and embellished details, including flowers and butterflies and bows, add a sense of humanity, intimacy, and wit. Occasionally words join the images, with captions penned in lively cursive.
Some frames hold pairings that reveal the artist’s process. “Female Head in Flowered Hat” (c. 1957–58) and “Boy’s Head” (c. 1953), for instance, each include two mirrored drawings that show the mechanics of Warhol’s famed blotted-line technique — a basic printmaking method that involves inking a drawing and then pressing a fresh sheet of paper over the wet ink. This resulted in his perfectly imperfect lines that blob and feather, wobble and dot. Alive with analog charm, these stylish, inky lines wend through the show, beckoning us to follow and see where Warhol’s keen eye for fashion will lead next.
Andy Warhol: Fashion continues at Anton Kern Gallery (16 East 55th Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through August 13. The exhibition was curated by Vincent Fremont.