Editor and provocateur
Brit Andrew Richardson is still shocking New York’s fashion scene at the age of 49
When Andrew Richardson visited Japan last month, customs officials confiscated copies of his magazine, Richardson, for its sexually explicit photos. About a year ago, his Instagram account was temporarily suspended for showing a part of a woman’s derrière.
And at the New York Art Book Fair, held in September at MoMA PS1, Richardson sold a zine with images of duct-taped women held hostage by frat boys. While wandering the fair, he bought stickers from the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls.
“They would put a stake through my heart if they knew who I was,” he said. Richardson enjoys being a provocateur. After a career as a fashion stylist for clients like Calvin Klein and Valentino, he is arousing attention on his own. The current issue of Richardson magazine features a mostly nude cover photo of the rap vixen Blac Chyna, pornographic prison drawings and male nudes by the photographer Bob Mizer.
His streetwear label, also called Richardson, includes logo-speckled T-shirts, bombers and balaclavas. It has been spotted on Rihanna and Kate Moss but remains an in-the-know signifier for skaters, art kids and downtown types. His eclectic vision of erotica comes together at his Lower East Side boutique; a second store opens on Dec 1 in East Hollywood in Los Angeles, next to a cinema that shows X-rated movies.
“Andrew likes to live and act in the margins,” said David Sims, the British fashion photographer who recently worked with Richardson on a book for Supreme, the influential skating company. “He’s an obsessive, most often for something that is so obscure that I can’t help but suspect the fix is on the journey as much as the object of his desire.”
On a recent Monday afternoon, Richardson lounged on a sectional couch in his Forsyth Street apartment overlooking Sara D. Roosevelt Park. He was wearing his company’s red sweatpants and glasses with a rose-tinted frame. Afghan rugs depicting grenades and Kalashnikovs covered the floor. A photo of P. Diddy captioned with an Oscar Wilde quote adorned the wall.
“I’m 49 years old and I’m still living a somewhat adolescent life,” Richardson said, in a pacifying British accent. “You know, I’m sort of happy about it. As you get older, you can get really restrained by fear of your future.”
Born in Marlow, England, outside London, Richardson is the son of a civil engineer father and a stay-at-home mother. He described himself as an adventurous child.
“It was always me and some friend who were drunk at 11 years old at a wine tasting at the rugby club,” he said. (He has been sober for a decade, he said.)
By 19, he was managing the Kenzo men’s store in London and immersed in a nightlife scene that included experimental Mutoid Waste Company art parties and the embryonic stage of raves.
“We walked around like dandies living in council flats,” Richardson said of his interest in fashion. “You were obsessed with saving everything and buying one pair of Comme des Garçons trousers on sale.”
In the late 1980s, he moved to New York to work for a company that designed menswear for Charivari, the au courant boutique that closed in 1999. While staying in a loft on West 26th Street, Richardson met several photography assistants.
“These kids were making much more money than me, flying all over the world and surrounded by beautiful women,” he said. “So I was like, ‘That’s what I should do’.”
He found his entre through styling. While assisting the photographer Steven Meisel (whom Richardson calls his “father in the business”), he assembled tear sheets with mononymous supermodels.
“We worked with Linda, Christy and Naomi,” Richardson said. When working on Madonna’s 1992 book, Sex, he familiarised himself with New York sex shops and began integrating rubber clothing and S&M themes into his aesthetic.
Richardson magazine, which is published annually and has a circulation of 3,500, has navigated the same murky boundaries between art and obscenity. The first issue, released in 1998 by Little More, a Japanese publisher, included a spread with Jenna Jameson, the adult film star, and Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America”, showing 11-year-old Brooke Shields in a bathtub.
With contributors like Terry Richardson (no relation), the magazine has suffered consequences for being risqué. Last year, a Nobuyoshi Araki cover photo of a nude woman with a noose around her neck prompted the website’s credit card processor, Stripe, to sever ties temporarily.
“You can’t be a full examination of the human ID,” Richardson said. “You can’t be your ID. You have to have the conscious filter of what’s appropriate and where the line is.”
Richardson’s clothing label started as an afterthought to a 2003 T-shirt collaboration with Supreme. It has expanded to include items like car club jackets (US$629 or 22,624 baht) and carpenter pants ($275), but the line’s most popular item is a $22 T-shirt that reads “Richardson Hardware” with the address of his second-floor Broome Street store.
Other designs riff on familiar American iconography, like a tweaked version of the Narcotics Anonymous emblem.
“We’re into subverting the US Marines logo, for example,” he said. “The drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket is like a sexual dom.”
After the book fair, Richardson and a small cohort of friends and assistants encircled a table at Sapphire Gentlemen’s Club, a Manhattan strip joint beneath the Queensboro Bridge.
As Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’ Get Low thundered, he flung bills toward the stage and received a lap dance from a woman wearing nipple rings and thighhigh stockings.
A bald, thick-necked patron, who said his father was an electrician, inquired about the “Local 143” insignia on Richardson’s jacket, which, naturally, was from his own line. “It’s a Lower East Side union, bro,” was the reply.
You can’t be a full examination of the human ID