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GRACE JONES, NIGHTCLUBBING (1980) JEAN-PAUL GOUDE
The first time the designer Jean-Paul Goode met Grace Jones in the offices of Esquire magazine, in New York, it was as if all his fantasies had been incarnated. She came in wearing a Miyake shirt and no underwear (or so he claims), carrying a big bottle of wine.
“Her wildness seduced me in a way I had never been seduced before,” he would say. They soon became partners in life and art. Goude remodelled Jones on the page and in person. He created a look – androgynous, cool, angular – that matched the soundscapes that producers Sly and Robbie were creating for her on record at the outset of the 1980s. Jones, meanwhile, was too much her own person to conform to Goude’s at times sexist fantasies.
The cover of her 1981 album Nightclubbing is typical. Here’s Grace with flat top and Armani jacket, all cheekbones, lipstick and skin; a disco Amazon.
The story of Goode and Jones’s collaboration features in Katie Baron’s new book Fashion + Music, which examines how fashion, design and music overlap (think Nicola Formichetti and Lady Gaga, Antony Price and Roxy Music).
In the case of Goude and Jones it was never a partnership designed to last. Both were too volatile for that. And when the personal relationship finished so did the professional one. What remains is the image and the music. They still burn.