Gladys Perint Palmer has recorded high fashion and all its characters for more than six decades, like these 1990s supermodels.Gladys Perint Palmer/Supplied
The sharp pencil and gimlet eye of artist and fashion reporter Gladys Perint Palmer (or GPP, as she’s better known) have recorded the foibles of stylish society for more than 60 years – always with a cynical, satirical gaze. GPP One of a Kind, a new biography by curator Connie Gray, is a full-colour retrospective of the artist’s work, with contributions from fashion heavyweights such as Suzy Menkes, Jean Paul Gaultier and Valentino.
Gladys Perint Palmer/Supplied
Gray, a leading specialist in 20th-century fashion illustration, posits that the medium can feel more three-dimensional than photography because it’s interpretive. Her London gallery, Gray M.C.A., represents Perint Palmer, whose work Gray was drawn to for its timeless quality. Built on a foundation of figurative drawing fundamentals, Perint Palmer’s style is fast, confident and dynamic, with the added frisson of acerbic wit and wry critique (picture Dorothy Parker with a sketchbook instead of a typewriter).
Yohji Yamamoto after Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, 1991.Gladys Perint Palmer/Supplied
In one 1988 column, Perint Palmer juxtaposed San Francisco’s extravagant charity gala scene with descriptions of the unhoused living in harsh conditions mere steps away. In another from 1991, she rendered a Yohji Yamamoto collection in the style of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.
Born to a dental surgeon and dress designer in Budapest in 1938, Perint Palmer, along with her family, fled Hungary in 1948 for England. She studied fine art and fashion at London’s Saint Martin’s School of Art and Parsons School of Design in New York, respectively, and soon after landed the November 1962 cover of British Vogue.
She rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s, when decadent runway shows and the supermodel era transformed fashion into a spectacle (one cheeky composite by the artist annotates the “supes” with their presumed day rates). She travelled to Europe four times a year to cover the collections for Vogue, The New Yorker and L’Officiel.
The book features portraits of boldface names: commissions by Dior and Gianni Versace, as well as on-set sketches from Robert Altman’s 1994 film Pret-à-Porter. “That’s why I called it ‘one of a kind,’” Gray said by phone from England. “The breadth of her work is so much more than just a fashion illustrator.” While some illustrators are preoccupied with elegance – the ideal woman, for instance – Perint Palmer is drawn to truth and reality, Gray observed, one “imbued with character and personality and not necessarily beauty. She always talks about the jolie laide.”
Gladys Perint Palmer rose to prominence in the 1980s and ‘90s, travelling to Europe to cover runway shows for major publications.Supplied
“There is inspiration wherever you look,” Perint Palmer, now 87, said via e-mail. “If a runway bored me, I found inspiration on the front row (or rows three and four – where people who want to see the fashion sit but don’t care about being seen), but never farther back than that. Yves Saint Laurent seated his mother in row three after all. Celebrities taking themselves too seriously, eccentrics who delight in being themselves or wannabees teetering about as if they matter – they all gave me divine inspiration.”
That front-row perch is a world away from her home in Canada, where her dog, Henry, is her frequent and “most patient” subject. After a trip to B.C.’s remote Denman Island in 2003, Perint Palmer and husband, Simon Palmer, made it their second home. They’ve since become Canadian citizens and now live there full-time.
Romeo Gigli Winter 1991/92.Gladys Perint Palmer/Supplied
Assembling One of a Kind was a collaborative process that involved poring over a rich archive. When Gray visited the Palmer home last summer, she was confronted with more than 2,000 originals, including childhood drawings, as well as 60 years of correspondence. “It was a big, deep breath moment,” the curator said. The result is a vibrant 335-page tome containing decades of reportage and hundreds of original illustrations, as well as behind-the-scenes anecdotes and lesser-known globetrotting biography.
Perint Palmer lived in London and Washington with later stints in Hong Kong and San Francisco. A popular illustrated column on fashion, culture and society in the South China Morning Post in the 1970s inspired Gladys Parker: The Magic Circle of Hong Kong, Perint Palmer’s first book and solo exhibition. After moving to the Bay Area in 1980, she became the fashion editor at the San Francisco Examiner and later the executive director of fashion at the city’s Academy of Art University – all while working as a freelance illustrator.
“Drama makes a collection worth watching,” the artist said. “Today’s models? They are interchangeable, no personality. People bring clothes to life, not the other way around.”
Does she still follow designers and collections? “The truth is I never followed fashion,” Perint Palmer said. It was people who interested her. “I knew Ferré, Galliano, the greats, and of course Armani, who we just lost. His vision was a dream to watch and draw.”
In fashion’s ever-changing landscape, there’s another creative she’ll be watching – not on the runway but at the title formerly led by Anna Wintour, the bobbed Vogue editor-in-chief who was a frequent illustration subject. “Chloe Malle has big sunglasses to fill. That is going to be interesting.”
