Antony Price: The Greatest Designer You May Never Have Heard Of

LONDON — The word is that Antony Price’s heart gave out while he was seated at his pattern-cutting table on Tuesday. There’s a certain grim poetry in that: the notion of a fitting end for a man whose razor-sharp tailoring was a key element in his transformatively glamorous ethos. A case can be made for Price being the first fashion designer that an entire generation of baby glam rockers in the early ‘70s was ever aware of as they osmosed every detail of Roxy Music’s debut album. Price’s clothing credit on the cover was surely a first for the music industry.

Later on, he recalled that the first time he met Roxy, they looked like schoolteachers. He gave them an out-of-this-world image that was much more in keeping with the extraordinary songs Bryan Ferry was writing. And, more to the point, he dressed and styled Roxy’s cover girls: Kari-Ann Muller, Amanda Lear, Marilyn Cole, Jerry Hall… the gleefully kitsch pin-up potency of those pictures, combined with the sui generis sound of the band, created one of the great before-and-after schisms in popular music. And maybe it even helped initiate a new wave in fashion.

Ferry remembers walking down the King’s Road and experiencing the WOW! factor of that first Roxy album cover on a billboard. Who’s to say that Thierry Mugler and Claude Montana, also in London at the same time, weren’t soaking up the Price vibe which they would later translate onto to their own catwalks? Price himself certainly entertained that possibility later on in life when he wondered aloud why the parade had passed him by. Maybe it was wearingly repetitive for Price that his creative partnership with Ferry subsequently became the touchstone of his career. “He always worked with music at a time when that was everything that fashion hated,” says filmmaker and producer Baillie Walsh, who calls Price his mentor and guru. “So he was out of sync with what was going on in the world. Of course, it came round to that, but Antony somehow missed that moment.”

Fact was, the precision, the drama, the cinematic quality of the shows and covers Price styled for Roxy Music and Ferry’s solo projects were also determinants in his own fashion career. True, they fostered an aspirational sensibility in wannabe rock sophisticates like Duran Duran, who wore Price’s silk suits at the height of their “Rio” pomp (he apparently hated that they pushed their jacket sleeves up), but they also led to Price dressing some of the iconic fashion plates, male and female, of the ’80s and ’90s: Bowie, Jagger, every supermodel of the era. And it was his clothes that helped make them that way.

He downplayed his art when he called himself a “frock doctor.” The humility was winning, given the unabashed oomph of his designs. After a stunning show at the Camden Palace in 1983, directed by Walsh and pitched at the level of a Leni Riefenstahl spectacle, Price shuffled bashfully on stage like he was almost embarrassed by the audience’s cheers.

“That show was so full of ideas, in a sense too many, because it wasn’t clear who Antony was,” says Walsh. “Every idea was brilliant and if he had focused any one of those themes into what we call a show today…” The possibilities dangle, unfulfilled. Still, the industry was apparently taking note. After Gianni’s death, Price was allegedly considered for the design job at Versace couture. It was, after all, in the one-off world of couture that he excelled. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes even funded Price’s own salon at one point.

His designs never exuded anything other than supreme confidence and a seductive luxe, calme et volupté but in 1979, Price took a visionary step towards making them accessible too by opening Plaza on the King’s Road. The retail concept was sci-fi. The styles were stapled to boards, you ordered your size and it was handed through a hatch. But the shop billed itself as “Clothes for Studs and Starlets” and Price outdid himself in injecting a deliriously campy sexuality into the garments. They were utterly sensational. I’ve had Helmut Lang on the brain lately, which is why it’s easy, in hindsight, to see Plaza as Price’s own Gesamtkunstwerk. As easy as it is to say, it was way ahead of its time. Which means, inevitably, it was another disappointment for Price. Now, of course, everything from Plaza’s clothes to its store design to its advertising screams CULT, and that also points, for better or worse, towards Price’s own place in fashion posterity.

A month ago he collaborated on a collection with Marco Capaldo of 16Arlington. “It was a really beautiful show in the sense that Antony got the standing ovation he so deserves,” says Walsh. “There was so much love in the room for him, and he hadn’t seen that love for a long time.” Afterwards, Price was inspired, keen to get on to the next show. “He always wanted to be creating, he always wanted to be working,” Walsh adds. “The fact that he essentially died at his work table… that’s right.”

So maybe the poetry isn’t so grim after all.