Fashion idea man

How does one label an artist who hated labels? Such is the dilemma when describing the life and work of Stephen Sprouse, the fashion designer, painter, pop-punk visionary, and longtime Interview contributor who died in March at the age of 50.

Paige Powell, a close friend of Sprouse's, remembers first meeting him in the early 1980s at Andy Warhol's Factory, which was also home to Interview. "Stephen would come up and have lunch," she recalls. "He was extremely shy, but he constantly provided Andy with energy. He was just so rock 'n' roll."

And he was a perfect embodiment of the cultural renaissance of the times, when the barriers separating high and low, uptown and downtown, and fashion and art---once as solid and redoubtable as the Berlin Wall--came crashing down and everything from painting to politics came together. Sprouse was front and center for this big bang, and he carried with him throughout life the idea that art could exist without boundaries.

Case in point: his 2001 design collaboration with Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, in which Sprouse splashed graffiti across Vuitton's leather goods, giving the iconic company a much-coveted shot of cool. Some remarked that Sprouse was at it again, blurring the line between high and low, but the truth is that for Sprouse, notions of high and low had long since gone the way of the dinosaurs.

"He loved the future and anything futuristic," says Powell. Here we take a look back at a pivotal moment in Sprouse's life, when the then-30-year-old maverick spoke with Berry Berenson about his past, his present, and his vision of things to come.

Uptown sophistication meets downtown imagination in the pop culture clothes of designer Stephen Sprouse. With a fluorescent orange wool overcoat worn over a bright yellow tank dress and graffiti-print headband coming at you, it's not too difficult to recognize the work of this 30-year-old designer. His growing success is substantiated by well-made, classically-styled, seasonless garments, It's the American clothes tradition with the Sprouse twist: cashmere T-shirts, sequined miniskirts with the words "peace," love," and "rock." Day-Glo yellow flannel hip-hugger bell bottoms printed with black graffiti, and Sprouse's re-styled, silver graffiti-printed engineer boots.

Sprouse got into the business at the age of ten when columnist Eugenia Sheppard wrote a raving article in the "New York Herald Tribune" on one of his "imaginary collections." His Indiana-based family encouraged their child with summer trips to New York, where at the age of twelve he found and apprenticeship with Bill Blass, and later with Coty Award-winner Leo Narducci. A few years later he was studying fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, until he was offered a job as Halston's assistant. After three years of intense experience and pressure, he took time off for painting and photography, and in that time developed patterns and silkscreen techniques which uses today.

Last December, his first one-man show at his silver-painted showroom on 57th Street dazzled the fashion public with designs that remind us just how relevant the 1960s are to today's pop culture. Just a fad? Sproase says, "The neon coats should last ten years. They're classics." His creations are available at Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel in New York.

STEPHEN SPROUSE: I grew up in Columbus, Indiana, a kind of industrial and farmland place. It's south of Indianapolis; a town of about 30,000 people. I lived in town until I was eight and then I moved nearer the farmland, so I had a mixture.

BERRY BERENSON: What kind of hobbies did you have when you were a child?

SS: I watched television a little, but I mostly just drew and read magazines.

BB: Fashion magazines?

SS: Yes. Like Vogue.

BB: How old were you when you began reading about fashion?

SS: Eight.

BB: So rather than sit and watch television, you would pick up a pad and pencil and draw. Would you draw from the pages of Vogue?

SS: Yes. That's how I taught myself how to draw--tracing the ads and petting new clothes on the models.

BB: Did you have friends who were also into this kind of thing ?

SS: No.

BB : Did your friends think you were a little strange?

SS: I told a couple of friends, but not very many.

BB: What did they think? I mean, what were they into?

SS: Spans.

BB: You have a brother, too. Was he interested in fashion?

SS: No, he was always playing sports with his friends.

BB : Did your parents encourage you?

SS: Yes, so in a sense I was lucky, because in that part of the country they really could have been pushing me to go play on the team and they didn't.

BB: Did you finish high school?

SS: I finished high school there and then I went to Rhode Island School of Design. When I went to college, I wasn't interested in fashion anymore--I was interested in art.

BB: So you actually then wanted to be a painter or an artist?

SS: Right, because it was kind of the hippie period around 1971 when I went to college. But late in highschool I had been a hippie, and fashion didn't seem as important.

BB: Had you followed fashion up through the late '60s--people like Twiggy?

SS: Yes, through my New York publication reading.

BB: What happened in Rhode Island?

SS: I stayed three months. Then I got a job in New York during the winter session, so I didn't have to stay in Rhode Island. I didn't like it there.

BB: Had you always wanted to go to New York?

SS: Yes. I used to go there in the summers when I was a teenager.

BB: With your family?

SS: Once when I was about ten with my family, and then after that I went and stayed with this friend of mine, Adele, and her son. I'd go there for a month every summer.

BB: When you came to New York, where did you work?

SS: I went to work with Leo Narducci, a designer who I'd worked with when I was 16 one summer in New York. And I got permission to leave school since I got a job with him in the city, which was fine with me because I wanted to he away from Rhode Island.

BB: So you left completely after that?

SS: Not until I got the job with Halston. Leo called up a designer named George Halley and said my stuff looked like Halston and had I ever met him, and I said no, but that I had admired him and thought Halston's stuff was great at that point. So I of went up there and Halston hired me. He asked me about college and I said I didn't like it and he said, "Oh. well, I need an I assistant. Why don't you just come to work here?" So I quit school and went to New York.

BB : How long did you work with Halston?

SS: Almost three years.

BB: Did you do drawings for him that he used?

SS: I would just sketch everything that was being made for the collections.

BB: What made you decide to stop working there?

SS: I got to the point where I was sick of fashion again, like I was at the end of high school. I wanted to do art, but then I got the job with Halston which I thought I couldn't pass up--that chance to, learn from him. But after the time there I'd had it with fashion again, so I left to go to architecture school in a summer course at Harvard, which didn't last very long.

BB: And you stayed there for the entire summer?

SS: No, for about a week.

BB: How come you didn't like the school situation? Was it just too restricting?

SS: I don't know, but the technical things, like the architecture class.... Math was always a problem.

BB : Didn't you start painting fabrics with graphics at Ore: time?

SS: Yes, after Harvard I went away for a while and I came back to New York that fall and started doing color Xeroxes. Actually, at first it was black-and-white Xerox. And then I would do these sort of photo drawings, I'd photograph people and make black-and-white Xeroxes and draw on top of them. I just really wanted to do art, except when I was taking those photographs of people I would make the clothes that I would photograph them in so I could control the whole thing. The photograph, the clothes, the sets--this was about 1974, and I started hanging out with my friend Richard Sold, who was playing in a band with Patti Smith. I was like a groupie, always liked rock and roll, but then I was really close to it, which was a lot of fun for me. Then I moved down to the Bowery to this building where Debbie Harry lived. It was there that I started combining some clothes for her and continued doing the art and photography.

BB: I get the impression that it's not just one thing that you' re interested in, but all media of art as opposed to one expression of it.

SS: That's really what I like.

BB: But then, it seemed to turn itself around again where you've really become a fashion designer. I mean, that's what you're considered now--a fashion designer.

SS: That's what I hate.