{"id":1157,"date":"2013-10-18T07:45:23","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T07:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fashionsphinx.com\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2025-03-09T19:56:25","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T19:56:25","slug":"tony-viramontes-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fashionsphinx.com\/?p=1157","title":{"rendered":"Tony Viramontes Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt was the most talented and most beautiful that everyone wanted to make love to in the 80\u2019s, so they were the ones who died.\u201d <\/em><\/strong>Doomed by their beauty, their talent, their joie de vivre, damned for all the wrong reasons.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In two earlier posts I wrote about fashion illustrator and photographer Tony Viramontes and how meeting him changed the course of my life and that of many other people as well.<\/p>\n

Tony Viramontes Part one is here\u00a0<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/strong>and Tony Viramontes\u00a0 Part two is here<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Here is part three:<\/p>\n

In the fall of 1983 I was forced to leave Paris abruptly, so I went to Milan and opened my agency with Tony as my first client. While doing the rounds of the advertising agencies and fashion pr offices with Tony’s portfolio of mounted transparencies, I met fashion pr Maggie Newman whose office Audience handled Adriano Goldschmied’s Genius Group brand. Tony was fast becoming an underground name in Paris but it took many months for his Italian career to take off, mainly because the Italians were scared and put off by the ugly beauty and the strange models they saw in his book. Mamma mia, che paura! <\/em>they would say and sometimes do the sign of the cross as if they had seen the devil in those strong, twisted, tormented and contorted features, silhouettes and expressions.\u00a0 Nothing was tame about his work and Tony’s anti-models and muses evoked images of the Wild Side<\/em>, a dark, louche and dangerous place in sharp contrast to the elegant, measured and\u00a0per bene<\/em>\u00a0Italian women they were used to seeing in the pages of Vogue<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1984 Maggie put a call through to Adriano because he was looking to advertise the Genius Group for the first time and as a single unit. The designers in the Group were Goldie, Goldie Italia, Goldie Junior, Goldie Shoe, Replay, Retour, Via Vai, Martin Guy, Hot Products, Diesel, Dieselito, Bo-Bo Kaminsky, Clothes On Fire and Ten Big Boys. Adriano took one look at the portfolio and asked us, my partner Carlo Baccheschi Berti and I, to come immediately to meet at the headquarters in Treviso. At the now famous and very rushed meeting he told us that Tony was the perfect man for the job and that he wanted a ‘groupage’ of the fifteen brands for the September 1984 issue of Vogue Italia<\/em>. Tony’s book was sent by Maggie to Vogue Italia’<\/em>s Editor in Chief Franca Sozzani for overall approval and everyone agreed on the choice.<\/p>\n

Adriano was looking for something unique, strong, bold and memorable, the September issue being the most important and read by everyone in the business. Tony told me to pass on the message that he wanted to experiment with a combination of Polaroids and illustrations, collage style…Adriano said without hesitation: “He can do whatever he wants.”<\/em><\/p>\n

We had Adriano for another twenty minutes to iron out some of the creative and budget details and then he announced that he was off to a catamaran regatta in the Atlantic Ocean and would be uncontactable for the next month.<\/p>\n

The meeting went sort of like this: “Adriano, where can we see the clothes to shoot?” <\/em><\/p>\n

“Oh no problem, just call the Paris showroom, they have everything, all the new collections and they will be available to give you anything you need”…<\/em><\/p>\n

“Great!”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Adriano…and the budget?” <\/em><\/p>\n

“Oh , anything you need, just tell me how much it will be and my accounting office will wire you the money in 24 hours, budget is not a problem….how many days shoot for fifteen totally different setups? five days? Not a problem.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Adriano, and do you want casting approval? Do you want to speak to Tony about the concept? How do you want to proceed?”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Look you two…if I hired Tony it’s because I trust 100% his vision so he can do anything he wants however he pleases. I just want to see the images on my desk when I come back in one month, not one day later or I will lose the pages and the advance I already paid.”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Whaaaaaaaaaaa? In a month? But Adriano we have not even started production! How can we budget this, cast this, style this and post- produce this in thirty days if we have not even started?”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Well…then START! Just leave for Paris this week and START for God’s sake!”<\/em><\/p>\n

“Byeeeeeeeee! Arrivederci! \u00a0I’m outta here! C-YA in four weeks!”\u00a0<\/em>And he grabbed a duffel bag with his boat gear in it and right in front of us left the offices waving goodbye.<\/p>\n

And start we did, even if we had never produced a big shoot before, three days later we were in Paris still trying to call the Genius Group showroom who had no idea what we were talking about: “Clothes? For the shoot? What shoot? The new collection? We don’t have anything from the new collection yet!” <\/em>They told us over the phone.<\/p>\n

We also put in call after call to the accounting office in Treviso and the so-called allotted budget of unknown quantities was nowhere in their books, so basically we were in Paris to shoot a huge campaign with no time, no clothes and no money: Great! I thought.<\/p>\n

Tony was thrilled; he loved working in chaos, he enjoyed the drama, the tension. We spent hours in his studio trying to figure out what to do, how to cast, style and shoot the job and Tony came up with a great but expensive idea: You will rent the biggest Polaroid camera in Europe, there are only three in the world and I will shoot these huge photos and will fuck around with them and it will not matter that we don’t have clothes since you won’t see them anyway ….I just need a bunch of very strong faces, some good bodies, a young kid for Goldie Junior and that’s it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Little did it matter that he did not know how to operate the thing since it came with a technician. We got busy and started calling Germany to try to get the machine delivered in time. It was all rush rush rush. Tony was thrilled that after years of taking small Polaroids of his models he would be able to do his first ever photographic shoot with the biggest camera in the world, with no client around to breathe down his back, and no time to get into too many annoying details.<\/p>\n

Since we could not afford a hotel room we moved into my friend Florence Maeght’s home and turned it into our offices. It became a nightmare for her, the phone ringing day and night as we cast a bunch of ‘real’ people from agencies like Quasimodo who represented odd and unusual types. Not finding the models we needed Tony called his friend, model agent Cyril Brul\u00e9 who also helped us. I ran around Paris looking for clothes to use in the styling. We had brought huge suitcases full of personal wardrobe and props from Italy just in case: my mother’s 1960’s Nehru jackets and turbans from Asia, some Andalusian flamenco hats, matador pants, bright stretchy fabrics, cummerbunds, ties, pleated silks from Michel Leger and a bunch of tube knits in every color bought by the meter from La Soie De Paris in Belleville, which could be shortened, lengthened or scrunched up as needed and which we ended up using on most of the models, girls and boys alike.<\/p>\n

Every piece of clothing that you see in the campaign belonged to us, except for an old Bob Bo Kaminsky man’s blazer and a canvas sailing jacket in bright orange and denim that we salvaged from the showroom.\u00a0We cast Christine Bergstrom who was a friend of mine and was modeling for Jean Paul Gaultier, plus Nick Kamen, Paul Hendrix, Lisa Rosen and Catherine Mathis’s young son Ian.<\/p>\n

The shoot was a nightmare to say the least. Tony had never done anything of such magnitude and it was chaos. We had no schedule. He told all the models to turn up at the same time on the same days so everyone got bored waiting around and got into trouble. We could not afford a stylist so I ended up doing the styling… with my own clothes. The camera arrived one day before the shoot and Tony never had the chance to meet with the technician who then took an instant dislike to him anyway and they ended up fighting all throughout the shoot. One of our models whose name I will not say, started taking drugs and went ballistic because she had to wait for so long while Tony figured out how to shoot everyone else. She ended up locking herself in one of the empty studios at Pin Up where we were working, yelling that she was going to set the studio on fire if she had to wait one minute longer for her dealer to come to the set. The studio assistants had to break down the door and pull her out of there; I then called her agency and she was carted away howling like a wildebeest and sent back to the airport. Nick Kamen, our gorgeous and super sweet male model, ended up assisting Tony too, often naked because he was in many of the shots, either in a tube top with no underwear or just simply naked. Nick Kamen then went on to star in the famous Levi’s laundrette commercial,<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0with no clothes on of course.<\/p>\n

On and on, the shoot dragged on for three nightmarish days and nights but the worst was to come. Our models, clothes, Tony and our small test Polaroids started disappearing. \u00a0I was tired and hallucinating from lack of sleep but not to the extent that I did not know who or where my team was. After confronting Tony on the last day in and after a huge screaming row, I discovered why: a well-known french art director and contributing editor was shooting at the same time with Tony and for an Italian magazine, in the studio building just one floor down, it was Machiavellic! \u00a0No one in their right minds could have plotted a more perfect but twisted coup and right below us, one floor down, thinking they could get away with it .<\/p>\n

I was devastated. Adriano\u00a0Goldschmied had insisted that he wanted the exclusivity for the shoot and since it was Tony’s first time taking actual pictures instead of just pure illustration, he did not want him to publish any editorial anywhere else in the world with the same concept for the thirty days after the publication of this groupage.\u00a0 I went downstairs, tore the studio door open and up on the wall were all our Polaroids, two of our models, some of my clothes, and worst of all: Tony and the art director on the seamless, directing the next shot.<\/p>\n

I went over to them and asked what they were doing even though it was clear to me. Tony looked sheepish and ran away as I faced the art director telling him that we would all get sued by Adriano. The verbal exchange got out of control and I had to be restrained by my partner because I was ready to punch him in the face.<\/p>\n

I was angry and scared and this ruined the magic of the shoot for me and everyone else. I sadly learnt not to trust Tony, he was his worst enemy and seemed oblivious to the dangerous legal situation he had gotten himself into. Not only it was risky but it was also disloyal, unethical and unprofessional. Maggie Newman and Adriano Goldschmied had entrusted us with a very big and important job, they had believed in us and had rooted for us, and Tony was double crossing them, betraying all of us just because he wanted so desperately to be in that magazine as soon as possible and did not want to wait one month for the Genius Group embargo to be over.<\/p>\n

These are some of my Polaroids from the shoot.<\/p>\n

Below: Lisa Rosen for The Genius Group September 1984. From the archive of Eugenia Melian. Polaroids by Tony Viramontes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Below: Lisa Rosen for The Genius Group September 1984. From the archive of Eugenia Melian. Polaroids by Tony Viramontes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Below: Clockwise: Christine Bergstrom, Carlo Baccheschi Berti, Tony Viramontes, Lisa Rosen.\u00a0The Genius Group September 1984. From the archive of Eugenia Melian. Polaroids by Tony Viramontes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Below Ian Mathis\u00a0for The Genius Group September 1984. From the archive of Eugenia Melian. Polaroids by Tony Viramontes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Below: The finished Genius Group campaign as it appeared in Vogue Italia \u00a0September\u00a01984.\u00a0From the archive of Eugenia Melian.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\t\t