Q & A David Downtown by Cathy Horyn
I first met David Downton maybe five years ago at a showing of his drawings in Paris. His subject was Erin O’Connor. You might say David, who is English, has an obsession with Erin’s long neck and lines. Well, she was meant for charcoal. Shortly after that meeting, I asked him to sketch a Dior couture dress in the studio, for a story about the making of a collection. Our link then and now was our admiration for the work of Joe Eula, and a fascination with the man. I got to know Joe well and in the last years of his life we worked together on a number of illustrated articles for the Times, including one about the denizens of the back track at Belmont. This past January, at the Dior show, David told me he was planning to bring out a magazine of fashion illustration and asked if I’d write something about Joe. Issue #1 of Pourquoi Pas? has drawings by Rene Gruau, Eula, Richard Gray, Jason Brooks, with illustrations by David of Amanda Harlech, Jade Parfitt, and Carmen Dell’ Orefice. Among the writers contributing are Sarah Mower, Tony Glenville and Tim Blanks. The 72-page magazine is on heavy stock, costs about $40, and is available at pqpmagazine.com. David and I chatted by phone a few days ago.
CH: So how did Pourquoi Pas? come about?
DD: I thought about Vanity, obviously, and Gazette du Bon Ton. I really began thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great?” Photography is everywhere. It has just dominated. It’s almost strangled the life out of drawing in mainstream magazines. You can still see fashion illustration—on club flyers, in galleries, on leaflets, occasionally in advertising. But what you don’t really see is the classic thing of drawing used in conjunction with photography in those high-end magazines. I just felt like waving the flag.
Q: Did you think you’d do a one-shot?
A: My initial thought was to do two issues a year for three years, so I could build up the magazine. I wanted a magazine and not an illustrators’ directory or an album of drawings. I wanted it to have a design. And I didn’t want advertising, which is possibly the stupidest thing ever. But I knew that whoever advertised in it would instantly change the tone of the magazine. I thought, “For once, this is my thing.” I generally react to what people want me to do. You wag the tail when the phone rings. But this kind of thing is like being an art director. It was so exciting to be in charge. Naturally [laughs], I didn’t think it through.
Q: So how did you finance it?
A: Entirely out of my pocket. Lucky I’m loaded, I say! I had my best year ever, doing the magazine. But I wouldn’t fund it again by myself.
A sketch of the model Erin O’Connor in an embroidered gown with obelisk sleeves. (David Downton)
Q: How many copies did you print?
A: We did 1,500. We sold 1,000 in the first three and a half weeks. The V & A sold out and reordered 200.
Q: You know, I was thinking how Eula used to accompany Eugenia Sheppard to the shows in Paris and sketch—the immediacy and intimacy of his paper and pencil. And, of course, now we have sites like the Sartorialist, which does such a good job documenting the fashion scene and what people wear. But how cool would it be to have an entirely illustrated fashion blog—really using the point of view of the illustrator and obviously in reverse of the way everything is done digitally.
A: It’s never been a better time to be a fashion illustrator. Because, in fact, there is no universal style; there’s no prescribed way of working today. At one time there was a kind of over-arching style. When Gruau was drawing, everybody kind of drew like him. He put a stamp on an era, and there is no stamp on now. I do think the best ever at what you might call reportage—going behind enemy lines, so to speak—is Kenneth Paul Block of Women’s Wear. He used the space well and the drawings are all right.
They’re anatomically right, which is the starting point. But he has exaggerated them, pulled them out, made them dynamic. He also put a stamp on an era, because everybody drew like him, including Steven Meisel.
Q: I suppose I just like the idea of one person’s point of view, a kind of narrative in drawings. And if you have access to the studios and backstage…
A: I agree. Because even the best photographers at the shows are in a holding pen. They’re all taking the same picture. Backstage has changed so much in the last 10 years. Backstage is now just a prelude to the performance. I always think it must be dreadful for the designers. They’ve got cameras and TV crews pointed at them, and it’s more and more and more. Look at the backstage at Dior. There isn’t a cigarette paper you can get between the TV crews.
Q: When in your opinion was the last good illustration magazine?
A: In the 80s, Anna Piaggi did Vanity. Antonio did most of the covers. His drawings look amazing.
Q: It’s odd, though, that the quality of art direction seemed to seriously slip in the 80s.
A: I think that’s one of the great progresses we’ve made recently. If you look back to Brodovitch—which everybody does—you kind of feel, “Well, we’ve learned nothing.” Brodovitch had it all sorted out, then. But I do think that Fabien Baron, coming along when he did, is very much of that ilk.
There’s probably a 40-year gap between the times when we’ve talked about art directors. I’m sure there will be people who will disagree.
Q: Magazines used to have a different attitude toward an illustrator or a photographer’s original work. A lot of pictures were lost or casually given away to people. What about Rene Gruau? Was he more careful about preserving his work?
A: I think he was much more careful but, also, he was celebrated from the beginning of Dior. He was a friend of Christian Dior’s and he went in after the war and he illustrated the first collection. By then, he was in his thirties and had been down all the blind alleys. And it was a postwar thing—with that great optimism of the New Look and all the stuff we now mythologize.
It’s Gruau who is the poet of the New Look, much more for me than any of the photographers. His sort of grand manner and flourish just sort of chimed with the style.
But it’s puzzled me that everybody in France who knows of Gruau doesn’t also know Bouche or Eric. And I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s because Gruau worked way beyond the confines of fashion illustration. He got out of the box, and the box was those amazing magazines. If you looked in Vogue, you’d see 10 pages of Eric, who worked for 30 years, and gradually it would sink in that he was a Vogue artist. But Gruau was a poster artist, he was a fine artist. He did drawings for the Lido. He kind of went into the national psyche. As great as those other illustrators were, they didn’t beyond the relatively few people who read fashion magazines. Gruau just saw the worth. Supposedly he was driven around in a Rolls Royce with a G on it. He was grander than the designers.
Q: What’s your background? How did you start?
A: I went to Canterbury. I was a very bad student because I was a good artist—or, so I thought. I was encouraged as a child to believe I was really great, and I really believed that until I got to college and saw that everybody could do what I could do. It was a terrible moment! [laughs] That took me into a slow decline. I turned petulant. As we say over here, I threw my toys out of the pram! In the end, though, it served me well. I did 10 years as a jobbing illustrator. I just took anything that anyone asked me to do. I didn’t have a focus—certainly nothing to do with fashion. I did kids’ books, I did a sex manual, I did romantic fiction, menu cards, album sleeves. The lowest point was I used to illustrate math textbooks.
Q: And when did you start drawing fashion?
A: In 1996, I did something for the Financial Times. And then the next week they said, “Oh, do you want to go to Paris and do the couture shows?” I had never seen a fashion show, but I did get the small print—“paid trip to Paris.” And so I just went. The first thing I saw was a Versace couture show at the Ritz. It was the Kate-Linda-Naomi moment. I couldn’t believe any of it. I had to draw Valentino at the Ritz. I just saw it as hilarious and wonderful. I didn’t understand the codes. But now I see it as a few days in the kingdom of indulgence with a pass that they take away when you leave.
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