ANTONIO LOPEZ - MASTER FASHION ILLUSTRATOR

Antonio Lopez

The Wind Dancers

Vogue 1967

Antonio Lopez 

Italian Vogue 1979

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York City, fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez began his body of work during his time as a student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology. On the weekends he would organize fashion illustration classes, inviting kids to pose on the streets around Greenwich Village. His first job as an illustrator was after school for the fashion trade paper Women’s Wear Daily. His illustrations came to fill the pages of each issue and he was soon working for the New York Times as well.

Antonio Lopez

Jerry Hall

Italian Vogue 1979

In the early 60’s Antonio free-lanced for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. By the end of the decade Paris beckoned where he soon established both career and a lifestyle that saw him surrounded by an entourage of beautiful men and women. Antonio was known to be the number one unpaid model scout in Europe. When he called an agent or a designer suggesting a new face, they didn’t hesitate. Jerry Hall, Pat Cleveland, Donna Mitchell, Grace Jones – all became a part of the Lopez group of beautiful people who frequented the clubs of Paris, particularly the Paris disco Club Sept.

Returning to New York during the middle of the 70s, Antonio’s work appeared in almost every fashion publication of the decade on both sides of the Atlantic. His work was always evolving and he used a variety of materials – pen and ink, pencil, charcoal, watercolor – often combining several within the same image. His unique style of illustration injected a sense of movement and energy that had been missing from the medium and he joins company with past illustrators like Erte, Bolin, Dali, and others who have had a hand in raising fashion illustration to an art form.

Antonio Lopez died of Aids-related complications in 1987 at the age of forty-four.

Antonio Lopez

1943 – 1987

Once a great beauty