There’s a vision you associate with the fashion designer Antony Price. It’s simple, direct, nailed down in a manner few designers could dream of. It’s Amanda Lear on the cover of Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure LP in 1973, balanced on fetish shoes originally intended for lying down in, wrapped in a second skin of shiny shiny slithery ciré satin, one whiplash of a glove tethering a snarling panther – which, contrary to popular belief, was neither sedated nor rampant but actually painted in later by the artist Nigel Weymouth. That’s an image that still has a potent, palpable charge – woman as predator, sexualised yet powerful, and it's an idea that shaped Price’s entire career, from the ‘Roxy Girls’ – Jerry Hall, of course, being the greatest example – through his dressing of Grace Jones, to his own sensational 1980s London shows, counterparts to the spectaculars staged by Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana in Paris. Inspiration for generations of designers since, it’s been 36 years since the Price vixen stalked a catwalk with the designer’s own name in the back of her dress. That changed on Monday night, when he teamed with Marco Capaldo and 16Arlington for an extraordinary off-schedule salon show of 16 looks that brought his exceptional and singular vision of femininity roaring back to life. It’s like it never left.
“Glamour” was the word both Price and Capaldo were obsessed with, and what cemented this collection, born – Capaldo said – after a six-hour phone conversation into the dead of night in February this year. Here’s a confession that will surprise precisely no one: I am a passionate, ardent Antony Price fanatic. A master of a pithy nickname – he dubbed fellow London leader Rifat Ozbek ‘Chipfat Ozbek’ and gave Judy Blame his moniker after Ms Garland (his own was ‘Fantasy Prices’, from the extortionate amounts his clothes cost back in the early 1980s) – Price calls me ‘Kathy’ (after Bates in Misery) as I’m his biggest fan. I wrote my thesis on Antony Price, and his role in the construction of the visual iconography of Roxy Music. Which is a mouthful for a fashion show review. Nevertheless, to say I was thrilled to see his clothes on the catwalk again is the understatement of the century. Twentieth or twenty-first. Warning – there will be no objective analysis herein.
What do I love about Antony Price? I love his construction, the fact that, as he terms it, he “nails” his clothes to the body, bending Rigilene boning in ways and places it should never be bent to reform the mere mortal flesh beneath into something divine. For Philip Treacy back in 1998, he created dresses with bosoms – actually, let’s put it plainly, as Price would, with “tits” – arching like mid-century cheesecake pin-ups, like Kari-Ann Muller, her smile halfway to a snarl, in a bravado reclamation of the Vegas showgirl on that first Roxy album. Antony Price loves the body – of men and women too. When customers complained to Vivienne Westwood about the dropped crotch of her Pirate trousers she retorted “Well, go to Antony Price then!” as buttocks (and the rest) were hugged in his clothes. I love Price’s fantasy, too, sexual and otherwise, his men superheroes, his women part Rita Hayworth in Gilda, part prowling sci-fi glamazons. When he ran his seminal boutique Plaza on the King’s Road (just down the way from Westwood and McLaren’s World’s End), he used to illustrate the advertising with a galactic being called Zonda, dressed in slithery synthetics that looked straight from the golden age of Hollywood.
And so it was on Monday night, when a bunch of Price diehards – Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Treacy, and me – took our seats alongside those who perhaps saw Price’s name on the back of their parents’ Roxy Music albums. Or grandparents, even. What we all got to see was Price at full throttle alongside Capaldo’s own glammed-up version of today – this was less a collaboration, more two like-minds egging each other on, encapsulated in 16 exceptional looks. Every dress was built around what Capaldo, laughingly, said Price called the “heavenly body” – a hyped up, unreal construction that whittled the waist, pumped the greats and exaggerated the hip. And then, it was a case of why not. Why not slick Edie Campbell’s lips with scarlet and dress her in a highwayman’s coat with a peep-over Dracula collar? Why not create a redux of Jerry Hall in Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together video, albeit in foamy white crêpe embroidered with zebra pattern brown plumes like smears of bombé chocolate glaze on Lara Stone? Why not smother Lila Moss in a mini dress of cock-feathers sprayed chrome under a horned bodice? And why not dress Lily Allen – Price is a fan, Capaldo is a friend, Allen loves them both – in a dress somewhat unsubtly titled ‘Avenge’, a corseted and bombasted oil-slick of inky-navy velvet lined in kryptonite-green satin like a nuclear reactor leak? She is, after all, having a moment, as she herself said backstage.
Price did the same in his first ever show in 1980 – when crash-helmeted models removed them, they were revealed to be Jerry Hall and Marie Helvin. But this wasn’t a throwback show – there were echoes and reminisces of Price looks (an art deco-scalloped bodice from 1981, a pushed down sleeve from 1988), but no retro reissues. And this time, the starry cast were mixed with fresh faces, but each was a singular, exceptional entity, an embodiment of confidence and glamour – modern, old time, eternal. Tailoring was taut, bodices cinched, all with twisted, pointed breasts “like armour,” Price said. There was lots of leather – which felt contemporary, as well as a throwback to the pleasure-seeking Lear – and 16Arlington’s best-selling Solaria dress was requisitioned by Price (he thought it looked great) and oomped up with those pneumatic curves. Each look was – and will be – made-to-measure for every woman, with three fittings minimum. They’re both new guard and old school. With models preening and posing in their unique looks, licked by pools of spotlight on their custom made Manolo Blahniks, it was, in fashion parlance, a moment, as the standing ovation at the finale testified. “It did seem to be a magical end,” said Price, his face lipstick-smeared in the glorious aftermath.
There’s plenty to be written about the altruism of this gesture, the generosity of Capaldo giving over his label, studio and show to Price – and Price, in turn, lending decades of expertise to a like-minded fan of glamour. And bravo to both, for carving out their own moment in a season filled with them, and making it truly magical.
