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The Line of Fashion: Curated by Robert Richards
April 1 - May 2, 2009

With a sure, knowing line, a whoosh of color - a look, an attitude, even an era can be defined. This is the power of fashion illustration. The line can capture the very spirit of the time, the look, the feel, even the sound of it. The final effect is one that no camera can duplicate. But where has it gone? In the foreword to Susan Mulcahy’s book on the great illustrator Kenneth Paul Block, Yves Saint Laurent bemoans the loss of the genre. “It is a pity but today there are no more fashion illustrators. For however much I admire photographers, I have to admit their work is done to the detriment of the design. It is often the background that takes pride of the place. In the case of an illustration, it is the opposite. The design is well and truly present and alive. I remember all those fashion drawings I so admired. Kenneth, Eric, Joe Eula, Antonio Lopez and many others were for so long the painstaking partners of couturiers. They all showed themselves to be true artists.”

Quoting Rene Gruau - whose iconic drawings from the forties to the eighties for Flair, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar remain fresh and surprising to this day - “Beginning in 1963 photography increasingly took the place of fashion illustration. If you have an acceptable photograph and an acceptable illustration, then a good illustration will always outweigh a good photograph. The alternation of illustrations and photographs really enlivens a magazine. The traits of the illustrations and photographs really enlivens a magazine. The traits of the illustrator and the stylization of the illustration confer an unmistakable graphic identity today, on the other hand, the magazine covers on the newsstands display only the beautiful, exquisite, made-up faces of wonderful women who are completely interchangeable. For the most part, the essential individuality of the fashion magazines exists only in their titles.”

There will always be some fashion illustration in the fashion schools and college departments just as it must always be a practical and incidental function of design studios and fashion houses. But the designer’s graphic preoccupations - to draw attention to himself or his product or to explain the technicalities necessary to getting things made are not the same as those of the artist whose character and value have always been to see things for himself and to make his own critical evaluation. As Baudelaire said, “the fashion draughtsman distills the eternal from the transitory.”

With the exhibition “The Line of Fashion”, opening on April 1 and running through May 2, the Society of Illustrators in association with The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation pays tribute to Kenneth Paul Block, René Bouché, Antonio, Eric, Joe Eula, JC Leyendecker, Mel Odom, George Stavrinos, Michael Vollbracht and many other great fashion artists who wait patiently for the world’s great museums to open their doors and welcome them.

The exhibition curated by Robert W. Richards

For more information contact Kate Feirtag or call 212 838 2560