“The CKbe ads are about a generation of kids, how articulate and smart and amazing they are. We chose them because of their huge personalities, not because they were skinny or had strange eyes. They’re playwrights, poets, illustrators. They’re incredible - and they never thought about doing fashion. It’s refreshing. I don’t want to see sulky models anymore.” (Swing Magazine Canada 9/97)I’ve been reading a bunch of Ned Ambler’s old press clips lately and thinking about the east village in the mid-90s.
The first time I went to Avenue A was Fall of 1994. I was wearing a black school-girl kilt, threadbare wool stockings, vintage army boots, my hair was in platinum blond braids with half an inch of roots, I had on Blackberry lipstick and red lip liner around my eyes. I got a watery sweet “regular” coffee to go at Leshko’s and crossed the street to sit in Tompkins Square Park. I looked up Avenue A and felt like an imposter – even with my weird androgynous face and crazy cheekbones, I felt too fresh-faced and round-cheeked, my clothes too clean.
I was there because of my friend Kate’s stories about her summer shooting heroin in New York with her gorgeous fuck-up boyfriend. There was the day smoking laced joints in Tompkins Square Park – a policeman caught them, but this being the tail end of the bad old days in New York, he just confiscated their joint and started to smoke it. One of the kids blurted out “Wait, it’s laced.” “With what?” “Coke.” And the cop proceeded to take a huge toke. Or the night spent riding the Staten Island Ferry for hours, high as fuck, hiding in the bathroom to avoid the ticket agent (back when you had to pay). Or panhandling on Avenue A and flirting with the hipsters who gave her money. In Kate’s stories, the New York was a wonderland.
By the time I was working at Taylor’s Bakery on 2nd Avenue 2 years later, I wasn’t so fresh-faced. I’d started shooting heroin, had been exposed to tuberculosis, had gone through 6 grueling months of INH, my complexion had gone completely septic, I had sunk into the worst depression of my life and had broken up with my long-time girlfriend after a terrible experiment of living together in Cambridge. But I had graduated, gone back to San Francisco to clean up and was travelling around and working a series of brainless jobs in the year before I started graduate school. Everyone I knew was in New York, and a lot of them in the East Village. I couldn’t go to the MoMA free day without seeing at least one person I’d gone to college with. Iggy Pop lived in the neighborhood and you would see him walking down the street, like some grizzled cartoon super-villain. You could watch the beautiful goth couple get grungier and grungier as they sold their carefully curated collection of import CDs for dope money.
The cross-section of humanity that came to Taylor’s was amazing – mothers getting treats for their kids after their violin lessons at the Third Street Music School and complaining about how Courtney Love was ruining her voice on my Pretty on the Inside tape, couples getting $4 brownies to sneak into the Village East Cinema, cops and drug dealers and sex workers getting their coffee the same way: light-and-sweet. A music school mom asked me, “How do you stay so slim surrounded by so much delicious food?” “Just lucky, I guess,” I said, biting my tongue to keep from saying, “Oh, it’s the heroin,” because, of course, I’d started using again. One day, a crazy woman stole $20 out of my tip jar and the next morning, I saw her sprawled out on a drug dealer’s car at 13th and 1st. My first thought was, “That’s my dimebag, bitch.” It was a strange fluid world of bars and hipsters and the last vestiges of the open air drug markets of the 80’s, now selling to college kids and hipsters instead of homeless old men.
It was a pretty crazy time and place – a playground for artists and wannabe artists before they closed down the squats to make room for the frat boy bankers in khakis. In reading his old press clippings, I really like that Ned Ambler was pushing the boundaries of acceptable beauty in fashion, that he used artists, musicians and activists (Theo Kogan, Kembra Pfahler, Chloe Dzubilo) in his photos and films and generally promoted the visibility of people I could relate to and admire.
But Ambler’s “stars” quickly disappeared from public view when fashion moved on from “New Realism” (try Googling Jakob Prufer, the Danish student Ambler found for Mario Testino’s Gap campaign). Some, like Kembra Pfahler, Jennifer Tzar and Concetta Kirschner are still around, but they were artists in their own right and didn’t need Ambler and his fashion spotlight. If anything, he was benefitting from their street cred.
It is his attitude towards the nobodies that he temporarily bestowed with glamour that I find most problematic. Ambler specialized in the “young, groovy, edgy-looking kid who is not a freak” (NYM 11/18/1996) and provided them in the time-honored tradition of a procurer finding hustlers for his artist client. ”[Steven] Klein sent Ambler back to his old East Village stomping ground in search of five interesting-looking street types. Ambler combed the clubs, squatter dorms, alleys, and streets and returned with 30 examples of the eccentric, the tattooed, and the pierced.” (Swing, September 97)
There is also something of Henry Higgins in the way Ambler describes his stable of models. "It’s a great gig to be able to give really glamorous jobs to people on the skids.“ (Depeche Mode 5/97) or describing Oliver Peterson to Paris Match "He was a punk that I cleaned up.” (Paris Match 5/97)
Kate’s boyfriend Ian was also a punk, an edgy-looking kid, who got scrubbed up and tried his hand at modeling. It was the era of full blown heroin chic, and Ian was a junky, or, as they say in social services, a street-involved injection drug user. He got into modelling because it seemed like easy money, but he hated it and, anyway, was too fucked up and flakey to really follow through. His only actual modelling gig was for L’Uomo Vogue and was never published, and it’s possible that he was one of the interesting-looking street types that Ambler rounded up for Steven Klein. If so, it really underlines the different expectations that people had of the New Realism. Ian got signed to an agency but he never actually made any money because he didn’t work long enough to pay back the Bumble and Bumble hairstyle his agent wanted (including tips to hair washers and colorists and various salon functionaries that Ian tried to "steal” maybe not realizing it was his own money). But from the perspective of Steven Klein, he was a street kid, an experiment that didn’t work out (at least not for L'Uomo Vogue – I image the shoot would have looked a lot like “Performance” The Face December 1995 or “Morning Glory” Arena Homme Plus Spring/Summer 1996).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
