The Shoe Affair

“He made the shoes larger than life and gave them a personality,” said Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. “He makes them into portraits without a face and turns them into objects of desire. He understood how images drive the world.”
Donna De Salvo
(about Andy Warhol’s obsession for shoes)

Heels, flats, boots. Whatever. And like his later obsessions with soup cans, Brillo boxes and Marilyn Monroe, his footwear fetish became the stuff of art.

During the 1950s, Warhol gained fame for his whimsical ink drawings of shoe advertisements. These were done in a loose, blotted-ink style, and figured in some of his earliest showings at the Bodley Gallery in New York. With the concurrent rapid expansion of the record industry and the introduction of the vinyl record, Hi-Fi, and stereophonic recordings, RCA Records hired Warhol, along with another freelance artist, Sid Maurer, to design album covers and promotional materials.

Warhol was an early adopter of the silk screen printmaking process as a technique for making paintings. His earliest silk screening in painting involved hand-drawn images though this soon progressed to the use of photographically derived silk screening in paintings. Prior to entering the field of fine art, Warhol’s commercial art background also involved innovative techniques for image making that were somewhat related to printmaking techniques. When rendering commercial objects for advertising Warhol devised a technique that resulted in a characteristic image. His imagery used in advertising was often executed by means of applying ink to paper and then blotting the ink while still wet. This was akin to a printmaking process on the most rudimentary scale.

 

 

 

 

 

By the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol had become a very successful commercial illustrator. His detailed and elegant drawings for I. Miller shoes were particularly popular. They consisted mainly of “blotted ink” drawings (or monoprints), a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.

Since he considered him a great inspiration for his works, David Bowie introduced a B-side on his album Honky Dory (1971) called Andy Warhol.

In his 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine, Bowie explained that he had not met Warhol when he wrote this song and he got an interesting reaction when he played it for him. Said Bowie: “I took the song to The Factory when I first came to America and played it to him, and he hated it. Loathed it. He went [imitates Warhol’s blasé manner] ‘Oh, uh-huh, okay…’ then just walked away (laughs). I was left there. Somebody came over and said, ‘Gee, Andy hated it.’ I said, ‘Sorry, it was meant to be a compliment.’ ‘Yeah, but you said things about him looking weird. Don’t you know that Andy has such a thing about how he looks? He’s got a skin disease and he really thinks that people kind of see that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, no.’ It didn’t go down very well, but I got to know him after that. It was my shoes that got him. That’s where we found something to talk about. They were these little yellow things with a strap across them, like girls’ shoes. He absolutely adored them. Then I found out that he used to do a lot of shoe designing when he was younger. He had a bit of a shoe fetishism. That kind of broke the ice. He was an odd guy.

A renegade who created alter egos to complement his music, Bowie never stopped experimenting with avant-garde clothes and footwear. Where others were measured or manufactured, he was a fearless original who shot from his slim androgynous hip, using a special shoe or statement ensemble as an extension of his indelible art. His early ’70s incarnation, Ziggy Stardust, had a love of star-spangled and glittery boots. Bowie had said he took cues from sci-fi novels and Japanese theater. Everyone from Tommy Hilfiger to Marc Jacobs and Jean Paul Gaultier has shown their version of Ziggy. On the red carpet and off, Cara Delevingne and Chiara Ferragni have worn looks in this vein.

In 1976, Bowie unveiled The Thin White Duke, which inspired a whole generation to embrace a more sleekly suited and booted sensibility with a futuristic twist. Runways from Celine to Chanel and Balmain have shown collections that riffed on this theme. And Carine Roitfeld often dresses in a style not unlike this. The footwear was often all-white, block-heeled or platformed. Laurence Dacade did a pair of boots in an apparent homage for spring ’16.

 

From the series: Diamond Dust Shoes (1981)

 

 

Warhol ought to have solarized Bowie using one of his patent silk screening techniques, but Bowie was already a solarized image, a diffraction of light infusing every pore of artistic life of his time. Bowie was a shoe aficionado and when he met Warhol they found a common ground. A ground made of stardust on which to walk and leave the foot-marks of their art.

Dachshunds Lovers

Queen Victoria

 

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; Queen Elizabeth II. Photo by Terry O’Neill, 1992

 

English composer Benjamin Britten and “Clytie”.

In this photograph taken by Yousuf Karsh, Britten is shown holding a dachshund and looking towards the score from his opera Gloriana (1953) which was written for the coronation of Elizabeth II. According to Karsh “the dog demanded to become part of the picture”.

 

Yousuf Karsh and “Jacques”

 

Abraham Lincoln

 

John F. Kennedy, Lem Billings and Dunker, Den Haag, The Netherlands, 1937

 

Lee Radziwill and Andy Warhol with his dog, Archie. Photo by Ron Galella, Montauk, 1973

 

Andy Warhol and Archie

 

Lou Reed

 

Christa Päffgen a.k.a. Nico. Photo: Mark Shaw for Life Magazine

 

Adele and “Louie”, named after Louis Armstrong

 

Cole Porter

 

George Harrison

 

Vincente Minelli and Katharine Hepburn playing with George Cukor’s pet

 

Grace Coddington

 

Juliette Gréco. Photo by Robert Doisneau

 

Elizabeth Taylor

 

Clint Eastwood

 

Marlon Brando

 

Ginger Rogers

 

Marilyn Monroe

 

Carole Lombard

 

Joan Crawford

 

Brigitte Bardot

 

Liv Ullmann

 

 Brooke Shields

 

Jacques Cousteau, his wife and “Scaphandrier”

 

David Hockney with Stanley and Boodgie

 

Pablo Picasso and Lump. Photographer David Douglas Duncan published a book of Picasso’s pictures along his pet, which was titled A Dachshund’s Odyssey

 

The gardener and writer Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter House, a 450-acre estate restored by Edwin Lutyens. Awarded in 1979 the Victoria Medal of Honour, the highest horticultural accolade, Lloyd was the best informed, liveliest and most innovative gardening writer of our times.

 

Within the Wall Garden of Great Dixter is a terrace, with a pebble mosaic of Christopher Lloyd’s two beloved dachshunds, Dahlia and Canna. The stones for Canna’s eye and nose were acquired from Derek Jarman’s rock-garden, at Prospect Cottage, in Dungeness.

Marilyn Monroe as Chairman Mao

Mao Monroe, Salvador Dalí, 1967

 
 

Portrait of Marilyn Monroe as Chairman Mao, Philippe Halsman and Salvador Dali, 1952

Portraits of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1962

 
 

Portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Roy Lichtenstein, date unknown

 
 

Marilyn Monroe, James Rosenquist, 1962

 
 

Marilyn Monroe (Décollage), Mimmo Rotella 1962

 
 

Marilyn Monroe (Décollage),Wolf Vostell, 1962

 
 

My Marilyn, Richard Hamilton, 1965

 
 

Test Stone #1, Robert Rauschenberg, 1967

 
 

Marilyn was here, Richard Lindner, 1970

 
 

Peek-a-boo Marilyn, Mel Ramos, 2002

Like a Warm Red Autumn

“Designers want me to dress like Spring, in billowing things.
I don’t feel like Spring. I feel like a warm red Autumn.”

Marilyn Monroe

 
 

Photo session by Carl Perutz

 
 

Portrait of Marilyn Monroe for American Weekly magazine, Jon Whitcomb, 1958

If Everything is Simply Jake

When you don’t have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it’s sex. When you have both, it’s health. If everything is simply jake, then you’re frightened of death.

Marilyn Monroe

 
 

Movie still from The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955)

 
 

Marilyn Monroe Paperbag Death, Sebastian Kruger, 2006

A New Look at Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe in  black Dior dress. Pictures from The Last Sitting, by Bert Stern, 1962

Covered Up in Pink

“Apart from the two side seams the dress was folded into shape rather like cardboard. Any other girl would have looked like she was wearing cardboard, but on-screen I swear you would have thought Marilyn had on a pale, thin piece of silk. Her body was so fabulous it still came through.”

William Travilla

 
 

Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend number, from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)

 
 

This wasn’t the dress designed for this scene. William Travilla had designed a breathtaking show girl costume with jewels sewn onto a black fish-net body stocking up to the breasts, then covered in nude fabric, embellished with a mass of diamonds, costing close to $4,000. It never got past the cutting room floor. It was rejected because it came out that Marilyn has posed nude for a calendar back in 1949 (the infamous Golden Dreams photographed by Tom Kelley), when Marilyn was desperate for money. And instead of riding on the revelation, Travilla was given strict instructions to cover Marilyn up.

 
 

 
 

It was rejected because it came out that Marilyn has posed nude for a calendar back in 1949 (the infamous Golden Dreams photographed by Tom Kelley), when Marilyn was desperate for money. And instead of riding on the revelation, Travilla was given strict instructions to cover Marilyn up.

 
 

 
 

The original concept for the new dress included black gloves and shoes, and no one is sure why they became pink, but Travilla redid his sketch to show pink gloves. When people see the actual dress they often remark that in real life is lighter than it appears in the movie. That is easily explained by the use of glorious Technicolor according to Travilla himself, not only did he have to design the dress, but he had to make sure he got the fabric right, as Technicolor would make it appear more vibrant on film.

This dress was made out of peau d’ange, a sort of silk satin. The aim was to show the outline of the body, but for the dress to move with the body and not crease – which was rather difficult when Marilyn was moving up and down the stairs. Eventually the silk satin was glued onto felt, with a black lining added to the back, to give it a stiffness.

 
 

Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of the song Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend and her pink dress are considered iconic, and the performance has inspired homages by Madonna (Material Girl music video) , Geri Halliwell, Kylie Minogue,  Anna Nicole Smith, Christina Aguilera, and James Franco (Oscar 2011).

The Pumpkin Sensation

 
 

Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe enter the ship ball room for dinner and everyone gasps. That’s not just in the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953). This orange dress became a prototype for a personal dress Marilyn had made, in salmon pink. Both were made of chiffon, with boning over the hip and the waist, that finished under the arm. The pumpkin dress had beading down the center and on the bust line, with a wonderful pumpkin beaded stole. The zip was in the front.

The Best Breasts in Hollywood

 
 

When William Travilla was designing the costumes for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) he had a real battle with the censors. The scene is which Marilyn Monroe wears this dress was nearly cut by the censors. She was due to wear this incredibly plunging gold gown, while dancing provocatively with Sir Francis ‘Piggy’ Beekman (Charles Coburn) singing a song entitled Down Boy! Apparently it wasn’t deemed appropriate! Having been cut, we only see this halter-neck gown from the back.*

 
 

 
 

However, the front is even more daring. The dress was created out of a single complete circle of gold lame and sunburst pleated. Every pleat lines up with the back seam and there is an iron V build in the center of the dress from the waist to the bust – creating the molding effect. Travilla once said that Marilyn had “the best breasts in Hollywood”, not because of their size or pertness, but because they were wide-set, so he could design dresses that slashed to the waist, without having to pull the breasts apart, or showing too much cleavage. Obviously a designer first, man second!

This dress shows exactly that point. Marilyn had to be sewn into it. In fact it wasn’t even finished.

 
 

 
 

Canny as ever, Marilyn rather fancied this dress, and realizing the effect, wanted to wear it to the 1953 Photoplay Awards. Travilla was not happy. He felt that the dress was for a movie not for a public appearance. Marilyn won the day, and wore the dress without an under-slip, causing a total sensation and Joan Crawford to announce “She looks vulgar”!

 
 

* To watch the mentioned scene, please take a gander at The Genealogy of Style‘s Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Genealogy-of-Style/597542157001228?ref=hl

Like Trying to Summon Up the Smell of Roses

“Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.”
Arthur Miller

 
 

Marilyn Monroe, The Last Sitting photo session by Bert Stern, 1962

A Woman in July

 
 

The Stripper (1963) is a drama film about a struggling, aging actress turned stripper and the people she knows, played by Joanne Woodward. It is based on the play A Loss of Roses by William Inge.

This was the feature film debut of director Franklin J. Schaffner, and co-starred Carol Lynley, Robert Webber, and Richard Beymer. Also appearing as Madame Olga was real-life stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. It was the first Schaffner film to feature a score by prolific composer Jerry Goldsmith, who would later work with Schaffner on such films as Planet of the Apes, Patton, Papillon, and The Boys from Brazil.

The film was first designed to be a vehicle for two Fox contract stars, Marilyn Monroe and Pat Boone. Monroe had been considered for the part as early as 1961 co-starring opposite Pat Boone who turned the part down as his strong religious beliefs nor did he feel his fans would be comfortable with him in such a role. Monroe’s death had nothing to do with Woodward being cast in the film. In fact, the April 28, 1962 Los Angeles Times listed The Stripper as one of four films in production at the studio, including Monroe’s Something’s Got to Give. In fact, Woodward would perform the song Something’s Got to Give in the film.

For her role in The Stripper also known under the working title The Woman in July, William Travilla dressed Woodward in silk and other sheer fabrics that reveal her body movement. But as Joanne’s breast were small, they created “breast cards” that glued to her body and gave the illusion of a fuller figure. “I called in the studio sculptor to make some plaster casts of Joanne’s body. From these, they made another form and created several sets of clay breasts until I gave my approval…..nothing too much, just beautiful breasts that scoop up and move.” From that, thin foam pads were created and glued daily to the actress’ body. “It was a tribute to Joanne as an actress that she went through all this for the role.” Travilla was nominated for his last Academy Award for Costume Design in a black and white film, losing to Piero Gherardi for 8 1/2.

 
 

Woodward poses with Gypsy Rose Lee wearing one of Travilla’s creeations

 
 

A Thousand Dollars For a Kiss

“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”

Marilyn Monroe

 
 

Portrait of One of the Jewish Geniuses

Franz Kafka, from Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, Andy Warhol, 1980

 
 

In October 1980, an exhibit featuring portraits of “famous Jews” opened at the Jewish Museum in New York; in June of the following year, a scaled-down version of the show had its “West Coast Premiere” at the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. Entitled Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century, the exhibit featured silk-screen prints and acrylic paintings — the Berkeley museum showed only the serigraphs — based largely on known photographs of a variety of Jewish figures no longer alive. In 1979, reviewers disliked his exhibits of portraits of 1970s personalities and celebrities, calling them superficial, facile and commercial, with no depth or indication of the significance of the subjects. They also criticized his 1980 exhibit of 10 portraits at the Jewish Museum in New York, which Warhol —who was uninterested in Judaism and Jews— had described in his diary as “They’re going to sell.” In hindsight, however, some critics have come to view Warhol’s superficiality and commerciality as “the most brilliant mirror of our times,” contending that “Warhol had captured something irresistible about the zeitgeist of American culture in the 1970s.”

Andy Warhol became fascinated with a group of influential Jewish figures – a pantheon of great thinkers, politicians, performers, musicians and writers including French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923); the first Jewish judge of the United States Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941); renowned philosopher and educator Martin Buber (1878-1965); the theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1897-1955), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of the twentieth century; the hugely influential founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939); vaudeville, stage and film comedians, the Marx Brothers: Chico (1887-1961), Groucho (1890-1977), and Harpo (1888-1964); Israel fourth Prime Minister and one of the founders of the State of Israel, Golda Meir (1898-1978); distinguished American composer George Gershwin (1898-1937); the eminent novelist, Franz Kafka (1883-1924); and avant-garde American writer, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). The collective achievements of this group changed the course of the twentieth century and may be said to have influenced every aspect of human experience.

For the most part, Warhol’s standard techniques of cropping photographs, outlining faces and figures, and overlaying collage-like blocks of color onto them seem to have little specific connection with the particular character or significance of either the portraits or the represented figures. The multicolored, fragmented surfaces Warhol applied in the 1960s and 1970s to portraits of celebrities in the world of entertainment and politics usually complemented or enhanced the poses and public images of those represented — think of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Mao Tse-tung, or Richard Nixon.

With the possible exception of the Marx Brothers, the “famous Jews” display none of the star quality of many of Warhol’s other portraits; yet the cliché seems to rule in a similarly superficial, commercialized effort to lend the portraits a veneer of flamboyance or “modern” hip. In a rather quirky review of the New York exhibit, Carrie Rickey found in the paintings of Jews “an unexpected mix of cultural anthropology, portraiture, celebration of celebrity, and study of intelligentsia,” but she also observes that “Warhol had recast their visages to make them fit his pop iconology.” Roberta Bernstein, who has a fine critical appreciation of Warhol’s artistic abilities, notes in a discussion of his printmaking that, though his talent as portraitist functioned primarily to reveal only the surface and therefore was “entirely suitable for his portraits of glamorous celebrities and socialites, its appropriateness for historical figures of the type in this portfolio [of the ten twentieth-century Jews] is questionable,” and, she adds, his “unique ability to make insightful selections is not as apparent here as it is in other works.”

Playboy’s Sexy 60th Anniversary Issue

 
 

Kate Moss donned the famous bunny ears in a high-fashion editorial spread for the annual double issue. Photographed by famed photog duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, the fashion icon looks amazing while rocking the bustier suit and bunny ears — and in some shots she’s not wearing anything at all!  Kate brought an air of style to the magazine for the anniversary celebration. Even in her nude shots, she looks incredibly glamorous and picturesque. She calls back memories of the original Playboy bunny Marilyn Monroe, with her sexy cat-eyes and ability to look oh-so-fabulous, even without any clothing on.

Kate looks great in just about any type of photo shoot, and she continues to prove her significance in the modeling world by covering Playboy magazine. Typically known for casting busty, tiny-waisted models and celebrities, it’s refreshing to see the magazine use Kate and her body on the cover — even though she is sometimes critiqued as “tomboyish.” While they might have used some garments to enhance Kate’s figure, her photos are meant to be more timeless and stylish than any typical spread for the publication; it’s for their 60th anniversary, after all! She looks so sultry in a black and white shot that shows the star topless, while sporting minimal makeup save for eyeliner — and her famous cheekbones look amazing in the photos.