Ray Petri - Stylist

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Audio Slide Show
The Spirit of Ray Petri

Ray Petri is still rallying the fashion troops. Armand Limnander pays tribute.



nytimes.com

[Multitudes]

Simon Dennis and Tony Felix
Photography by Jamie Morgan
Styling by Ray Petri
The Art Issue no.28 August 1985


‘Martine’
Photography by Cameron Mcvey
Styling by Ray Petri
The Love – In Issue no.27 July 1985


‘Tony Felix’
Photography by Cameron Mcvey
Styling by Ray Petri
The Love – In Issue no.27 July 1985


Photography by Mark Lebon
Styling by Ray Petri
The Flesh and Blood Issue no. 24 April 1985

i-dmagazine.com

[poliopoliopolio]

sorry to bump an old thread, but he is AMAZING. i didn't realize how much what i want to wear today was influenced by him. anyhow...

[BerlinRocks]

'THE HARDER THEY COME, THE BETTER'
(Ray Petri, The Face March 1985)

Let Them Eat Cake readers enter promo code when adding to cart to receive your special price of £20 inc p and p

Mitzi Lorenz was by her own definition 'a fifteen year-old ragga/punk chick' when she first met Ray Petri. He bought her a cappuccino and they chatted for over two hours. So was born the beginning of a lifelong friendship and collaboration together, that was tragically cut short by Ray's death from AIDS at the end of the 1980's.

Over their years together, and along with other founding members, photographers Jamie Morgan, Cameron McVey and Mark Lebon, and brothers Nick and Barry Kamen, they started a revolution in the world of fashion, beginning the evolution and definition of the term 'stylist'.

Before this fashion shoots had clothes and had photographers, but there was no one who brought to the shoot their own interpretation of a look, their own style. Ray was inspirational in the way he could put together an outfit, mixing up streetwear with high fashion labels, sportswear with ripped up headlines from newspapers. Mitzi remembers how Ray would start going along to Jamie Morgan's shoots, then even high fashion establishments such as Vogue would operate without such a thing as a stylist at their shoots, somehting unheard of today, where stylists are known almost as much in their own right as the designers. “At this point” says Mitzi, “fashion shoots as we know it were pretty dry. The clothes would turn up and someone was in charge of bringing them together, but we were there getting the beers in and turning the music up.”

New magazines that had sprung up, such as The Face, iD and Arena, owed a lot of their groundbreaking shoots and covers to Ray and the Buffalo crowd. At the time the magazines were mostly music based, with some fashion. When Ray turned up on their door, it blew the lid off what they had worked with before. “It was definitely us approaching the magazines, not the other way round. It was us who came up with the ideas and styled the shoots, and then they loved what we did. It was a really organic process.” As Nick Logan, editor of The Face from 1980-90 puts it, “Nick Kamen in a leather skirt, boys in Doc Martens and their underpants, ring-scarred black boxers in nursery-pink bobble hats. Were they serious? Of course they were. Could we run this stuff? How could we not?”

Armani suit jackets, boxing gear, flags wrapped as sarongs, headlines ripped out and pinned to lapels, this was men’s fashion as it had never been done before. Mitzi herself would don suits, mix it up with hats and accessories, blur the boundaries. “Buffalo was androgynous in many ways. I was a bit of a tomboy. Women weren’t women and men weren’t men.” Even age didn’t matter, Felix Howard (left) was 8 years old when he appeared on the front cover of The Face in March 1985, full of Buffalo attitude with a scowl, suit and the word ‘Killer’ stuck to his hat. How did he end up doing it? “Oh he was just the son of one of our friends.” Naomi Campbell was fourteen when she started to hang with the gang, her portrait showing her before the small scar on her top lip was removed, by all accounts “just really quiet and sweet.” In fact using black models and models of other races was something pioneered by Ray, “no one had done it before.” It was about the face, as they would say, 'Start with the face and the rest falls into place.'

Ray Petri died in 1989. Mitzi had been closest to him, nursing him through his final months and abandoning fashion as the impact of her friends's illness took hold. Petri’s inspiration and influence continues still. Fashion may come and go, but style, as Buffalo will show you, lives forever.

trolleynet.com

i've checked on amazon....
if you live in the US, the book ONLY costs 3.30$
on amazon.fr, it's 26€........

[BerlinRocks]

article in full length... from NYtimes (posted by softgrey in #1)

March 11, 2007
Buffalo Soldier

By ARMAND LIMNANDER
It’s a testament to the stylist Ray Petri’s genius that more than 15 years after his death, his influence is everywhere. At the spring shows, his spirit turned up in collections as diverse as D&G (tribal power), Alexander McQueen (Harlem dandies) and Junya Watanabe (sports gear as high fashion). Even his personal uniform of dark jeans, bomber jacket and porkpie hat has recently been sighted in Lower Manhattan, Omotesando and Hoxton Square.
“Ray Petri is an inspiration for most people in men’s wear,” says the designer Kim Jones, who, like Petri, makes a point of routinely exploring offbeat cultural signifiers. “He worked with a loyal group of people to create a new aesthetic, and his references were so on target that they are still relevant today. This is extremely rare in fashion, where everything seems to move so quickly.”
Ray Petrie (he later dropped the “e”) was born in Scotland in 1948. When he was 15, he moved with his family to Brisbane, Australia, where he formed a band, the Chelsea Set, playing R&B and Motown. But Australia felt provincial, and in 1969 he landed in London, where he experimented with ambisexual liaisons, swinging parties and the requisite interest in Eastern religion. During his spare time, he kept a jewelry booth at the Camden street market and took classes at Sotheby’s to learn about antiques.
By the early 1980s, the English scene had grown to resemble a supermarket of style — punk, new wave, dandyism and sportswear converged on the street — and Petri found his calling as a new kind of fashion arbiter. His passion was for overseeing everything about the creation of a photograph, except actually snapping the picture. Instead of using models and the buff blonds of the time, he cast teenagers, often of mixed descent, to wear designer clothes that he paired with underwear, vintage pieces and athletic basics best suited for bicycle messengers. The resulting look was unflinchingly tough and sexually charged.
“Ray created an entire personal world,” recalls the photographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
“He was obsessed with ‘bad boys,’ Jamaican culture and Native American imagery, and was always surrounded by a crowd of beautiful people. It was a true collective — in a way it reminded me of the Surrealist movement, but everyone was cool and relaxed. We would sit around listening to music, smoking a joint, and ideas would just come to us.”
Mondino, who over the years collaborated with Petri on projects ranging from a David Bowie video to editorial spreads and commercials, sees him more as a designer than a stylist. “He reshaped clothes to create silhouettes that simply didn’t exist at the time,” he says. “He loved the idea of classic Italian tailoring done in a Caribbean way. From the front, the boys appeared effortlessly dressed, but in the back they were completely pinned, tucked and taped. Ray was obsessed with extra-long shirt sleeves, so he would cut them off at the shoulder and reattach them with big safety pins so that they stuck out under suit jackets.” On occasion, he would even spray models with cologne during shoots.
Some of Petri’s more daring sartorial propositions, like boxer shorts and combat boots worn on their own under a trench coat, were clearly not the stuff of everyday life. Still — or perhaps precisely because of that — his vision had a profound effect on the culture at large. Pace-setting magazines like The Face, i-D and Arena embraced his work, and his circle of collaborators expanded considerably. Besides Mondino, regular members included the designer Jean Paul Gaultier; the himbo singer Nick Kamen, who got his break after Petri used him on the cover of The Face; the hip-hop star Neneh Cherry; and a sweet-tempered teenager named Naomi Campbell, who occasionally helped out at Petri’s wardrobe sales, where he famously parted with Mugler jackets and other odds and ends for five pounds apiece.
As fashion stylists started to become celebrities in their own right, Petri gathered his followers under the umbrella of Buffalo, his visual imaging company. He borrowed the name from Jacques Negrit, the bouncer at Les Bains Douches nightclub in Paris, whose private security business was staffed by large men from Guadeloupe who wore Air Force MA-1 jackets with “Buffalo” written on them. It was also an allusion to “Buffalo Soldier,” the Bob Marley song about black infantrymen who fought in the United States Army against Native Americans. Petri’s posse wore cobalt-blue Buffalo jackets, and soon that word became shorthand for their universe. Neneh Cherry cemented the phenomenon with “Buffalo Stance,” her 1988 hit.
“The song is about our gang, our time and our mentor, Ray, who is still behind every word and every melody,” says Cherry, who met Petri en route to Tokyo, where he was producing a fashion show using eccentric London kids as models. “Buffalo meant classic. None of us were into here-today-gone-tomorrow fashion, which is why we gravitated toward each other. Ray was always consistent, and he taught us that we shouldn’t be afraid to be honest.”
Just as Petri was poised to receive the mainstream recognition and financial success that many who followed in his footsteps enjoyed, he became sick with AIDS. “He was one of the first well-known personalities in London to get the disease, and at the time not everyone knew how to react,” says the milliner Stephen Jones. “Sometimes people would move away from him at fashion shows, or they wouldn’t invite him at all.” A notable exception was Gaultier, who held a front-row seat for Petri until his death, in 1989. “I was actually criticized for that by people working in the business, which made me very upset,” Gaultier says. “I felt that it was extremely courageous of Ray to expose himself. It was a show of strength, which I admired and had to support. But others refused to see the truth.”
How would Petri feel about his posthumous vindication? “I often think of what it would be like to have him around now,” Mondino says. “Ray died just as fashion was becoming more commercial, but I don’t think that he would have approached things any differently than he always did. Most of his friends have made some money over the years, but to tell you the truth, we get a little bored a lot of the time.”

[BerlinRocks]

i actually revive the thread because just found this pretty big online library....
mainly from the face...
http://niwde.blogspot.com/2006/12/ra...ffa-style.html

[softgrey]

wow...that is all i can say right now...
..

[BerlinRocks]

you can check this, too....
http://nickkamen.com/photoalbum/thum...album=3&page=1

[BerlinRocks]

My Mentor: Adrian Clark On Ray Petri

'It was Ray's influence that made me fearless in my decision-making'
Interview by Sophie Morris
Monday, 24 April 2006
The first magazines I started to look at were i-D and The Face. Ray was a stylist and he created all those iconic Face covers in the 1980s. It was really exciting and the influence Ray had in fashion journalism pushed me all the way through college. Before him it was all about power dressing and what Ray did was make street fashionable.
Even more interesting was that he went against the politics of fashion journalism. It's a niche market which relies on advertising sales more than on circulation and Ray turned his back on designer clothes. He said that you can re-create all of these looks from thrift shop clothes and stuff that you've borrowed from your grandad. In turn, that spawned a generation of designers who had that feel.
After college I went into styling for a trade magazine called Fashion Weekly and what I brought to the magazine was a real essence of risk-taking. I used to review the catwalk collections and I would score them out of 10 for creativity and commercialism. Nobody would have ever dared do that before. It was Ray's influence that made me fearless in my decision-making and that hadn't been seen before in trade journalism.
Ray was incredibly creative and pioneering. He created a new fashion phenomenon - Buffalo - and really shook fashion up. People like Jean-Paul Gaultier and John Galliano would be the first to say he was probably the most important fashion stylist and of the 1980s. Without him The Face wouldn't have become as iconic as it did, and without The Face he wouldn't have had a vehicle to vent his creativity. The two fed off each other and that created a complete scene which moved into the club world and eventually into the mainstream.
He died of Aids in 1989 and several beautiful books have been published about his work which sum up the1980s and what the Buffalo period was all about.
Adrian Clark is the editor of Fashion Inc

the independent

[BerlinRocks]

rbpmfanzine

[BerlinRocks]

^by the way go and visit the blog source... it's pretty good...

[BerlinRocks]

bump it ...
recently his style/work has been a HUGE influence onto the male editorials (and not just talking about Olivier Rizzo and this clique ...)
...
I really thought i posted images from the Bufallo book ... but it seems not ...
I'll post some tonight ...

[cesarcmma]

...wow... what an interesting reading Thanks BerlinR

I should be embarrased I didn't know him, but I guess you learn a new thing everyday...his work is indeed a huge influence as BerlinRocks said, but how couldn't be it, his styling is excelent and he was the pioneer of styling, and how interesting it that Macy's incident if they knew that that would be all the rage latter

...so inspiring

...what is this bumping thing??? i don't get it??? please explain!

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all pic from the blog posted above...