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babettepress · 7 years

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Radical Reinvention – The Making of Edwige Belmore

History is kind to those who leave behind a tangible body of work. It is less so to those exuberant personalities that lived with great flair, but channelled their creative energy into more ephemeral modes of expression. Babette is fascinated with oral histories of these more fringe personalities in the history of art, design and pop culture. One of them is Edwige Belmore (1957–2015). A subcultural icon who criss-crossed between Paris and New York, Edwige played in several punk and new wave bands in the ‘70s and ‘80s (most memorably Mathématiques Modernes), starred in a spate of experimental films, was photographed by Helmut Newton and walked the runway for Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler. And yet, no one of these things quite encapsulates (or contains) her legacy.

When Edwige worked as the Maitresse de Maison for French fashion house Agnès b’s New York store, she was told by a ‘friend’ “that it must be pretty cool to be paid for doing nothing”.“I’m not doing nothing,” she retorted, “I’ve been something for my whole entire life,”[1] and its that intangible ‘something’ that burns most brightly of Edwige’s legacy. Her essence. Her attitude. The way she presented herself to the world.

It is deemed shallow to suggest that someone be remembered for their ‘look’, but Edwige was no fashion plate. Rather, she used her body as her primary means of expression. With her cropped, peroxide blonde hair and a razor blade hanging from one earring, Edwige radicalised the Paris fashion world in the 1970s. She walked the tightrope between a DIY, street-punk aesthetic and high fashion: “She was punk with total elegance,” reflects videographer Clayton Patterson.[2] When top French fashion houses would gift her free items, Edwige would style them with her wardrobe of battered hand-me-downs. “I did a concert with Matématiques Modernes wearing jeans that were completely destroyed, a Chanel jacket and a push-up bra,” she told Italian Vogue before her death. “I didn’t want to be like every punk in Paris, or every punk around that dresses exactly the same.”[3]

Edwige also pioneered a new aesthetic for queer women. She was openly bisexual, romantically linked to Sade and Grace Jones, and sported a playful combination of butch and femme aesthetics, teaming mannish suits with bright red lipstick. “She was the legendary lipstick lesbian,” photographer Marcus Leatherdale told New York Magazine.[4] When she spent six months in Japan in 1982, Edwige would sneak into the male-only sex clubs of Shinjuku, pretending to be a boy.[5] It’s hard not to imagine that the 1982 science fiction film Liquid Sky, with its androgynous lead Margaret (Anne Carlisle), a queer club kid with cropped, peroxide hair, is not at least partially inspired by Edwige.

This subversive aesthetic was not limited to clothing. Edwige took a diaristic, even confessional, approach to tattooing that was quite unique among her generation: “My tattoos are stepping stones in my life – moments, loves, fears, messages”.[6] Patterson reflects, “It was highly unusual for someone to have words and sentences on their body in the mid-’80s”[7] and in a eulogy published on the punk blog Please Kill Me, Sandra Schulman (a former lover of Edwige’s) recalls that Edwige’s tattoos “lined her thin arms and up her neck, scripted across her collar bone and trailed down her legs”. Many were part of a project in which “she asked all her friends and lovers to mail her a note in their handwriting and she would ink it onto her body.”[8]

Edwige clearly saw her flesh as a canvas, but what is more provocative by today’s standards was not her tattoos, but the self-harm scars she wore unapologetically alongside them. Schulman describes bringing Edwige swimming at a New York health club: “In the women’s room she stripped down, strode around, and had the Village gym bunny ladies gasping at her scars, tattoos and boy/girl manner. Six feet tall barefoot.”[9] Patterson also remembers the scars: “She was such a beautiful woman, a Paris runway model, and to have her body modified like that was also very unusual.”[10]

Though self-harm was as taboo in the ‘70s and ‘80s as it is now, Edwige abided by an approach of candid honesty. “She told me that ‘everyone has a past’,” reflects model agent Kendall Werts, “but that the past will never define your future.”[11] In New York Magazine’s eulogy, friends and colleagues remark that Edwige’s acceptance of her flaws and contradictions was part of her powerful appeal. “She was a super-glamorous femme-butch dyke who was honest about her struggles with pain, with depression — but she never dumped that on anyone. In fact, she cheered other people up without lying about her own struggles,” says writer and artist Penny Arcade.[12]

Edwige was candid about a great many things, and that includes her own ‘creation story’. In the few interviews with her available online, she recalls with earnest detail how she simply decided one day to reinvent herself and ‘become Edwige’. Abandoned by her parents at a young age (“They gave me $20 to have a life. They moved into the country side and I stayed in Paris,” she told Moco Loco in 2014),[13] Edwige was raised in a convent with little access to the music or subcultural movements of the early-1970s. That changed in 1976 when, aged 19, she saw the Sex Pistols perform live. It would prove to be a life-altering event: “No one at the time had SEEN anything like that! NEVER! It was the first MIND BLOWING new thing.”[14]

This brief exposure to the punk movement would inspire Edwige to reinvent herself with a remarkable degree of precision. “It was November 6 of 1976, I decided that in exactly a month from then that on December 6th: Edwige Will Die, and Edwige Will Be Born”.[15] True to her word, on December 6, she burned all of her clothing, bar one hand-me-down vintage leather jacket. “I decided to embrace that new movement … I wanted to be part of something. That was my family … I shaved my head, I burned all my clothes.”[16] She bought a pair of riding pants, a white shirt and a tie and took to wearing the same outfit day in, day out, like a uniform. “The real Edwige was born. The one before was shy, was ugly, was insecure, was scared.”[17]

There is something remarkable about the agency Edwige took in her reinvention, or self-creation as it were. She is by no means alone among her generation in creating a new persona for herself, but unlike most ‘invented’ stars, she candidly acknowledges the constructed nature of this act, detailing the steps taken to become who she wanted to be. Much as Edwige’s flaws only added to her strength of character, revealing the constructed nature of her identity seems, to me, to add conviction to the act.

With ‘the new Edwige’ established, the next logical step was to join a punk band. It happened organically. “I was in a club and these two girls approached me and said, ‘Wow you look great! Want to be part of our band?’. I said ‘OK!’.”[18] The band was called L.U.V. (which could stand for either ‘Ladies United Violently’ or ‘Lipsticks Used Viciously’, as you please), and true to the ethos of punk, Edwige played no instruments. She did not let such a detail get in the way of her enthusiasm. Again, what endures of the band was their aesthetic: “We were a mythical band… We were FIERCE looking.”[19]

That fierce look was enough to attract press attention, with French Vogue and Elle clamouring for interviews, and Edwige quickly emerged as the poster girl of the Parisian punk movement. In 1977, the publishers of French avant-garde magazine Façade (inspired by Andy Warhol’s Interview) invited her to grace its cover – starring alongside no other than Andy Warhol. In the magazines wrap-around cover and inside spread, the peroxide-blonde Edwige leans in and kisses an unperturbed Andy, who dons a pin-badge of her image on his lapel. The headline? The Pope of Pop meets the Queen of Punk.

With Andy Warhol for Façade, Paris, 1977

Edwige recalls of the shoot that she spoke very little English at the time – and Andy no French – but the pair managed to strike up a rapport via instinctive, non-verbal communication. When she travelled to New York later that year, she gave Andy a call, and he brought her along to Studio 54. “Approaching the illustrious nightclub of all nightclubs, swathes of partiers parted like the red sea as she entered the club for her very first time, arm-in-arm with her regal rebel counterpart,” reports Autre Magazine.[20]

This ultimate outsider quickly found acceptance from the ultimate insiders of New York and Paris. Brought to a party by Paloma Picasso, she was spotted by Helmut Newton who, rumour has it, persisted to follow her around the party, begging to photograph her. She relented, but insisted she was photographed “not as a model, but as a personality.”[21] She also sat for Francesco Clemente, who painted her with “eyes half closed and completely blue … I was nodding out or on drugs. Blue, blue, blue, blue!”[22]

With Helmut Newton, 1986

Upon her return to Paris, Edwige was appointed front-of-house at Le Palace, the city’s answer to Studio 54, where the staff wore crimson and gold tunics designed by Thierry Mugler and Grace Jones performed atop a pink Harley Davidson on the opening night. Everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Roland Barthes came there to party, and Edwige’s job was essentially to decide who would be permitted entrance. She took the same, seemingly contradictory, approach to the door policy as she did her fashion choices, creating a mix of elite and punk, gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor. “Karl Lagerfeld mentioned in his book that I once refused the King of Sweden because obviously, he must have been an asshole.”[23]

Its perhaps in this role – the high/low gatekeeper of Parisian nightlife – in which Edwige is most fondly remembered. When she died in 2015, tributes came flooding in on social media. One of the most substantial homages to Edwige to date has been Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, which was both inspired by and devoted to his late muse. Gaultier’s collection was a 70s-inspired romp of butch tailoring, femme sequin jumpsuits and sassy models. “Red lips, fishnet tights, lamé; gold leggings, white gloves it was all about attitude, attitude, attitude,” read the review by British Vogue.[24]

Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2016 couture show, a tribute to Edwige, complete with mock Le Palace façade, an Edwige-inspired ‘bouncer’ and lesbian trysts with runway models

The show opens with a lesbian tryst between a runway girl and an androgynous pixie-cropped model who starts manning the door of a club, a replica of ‘Le Palace’. The parade of models who sashay up and down the runway includes Anna Cleveland, daughter of legendary model Pat, who Edwige surely must have rubbed shoulders with at Studio 54. The girls bring their cigarettes and glasses of champagne along for the walk, stopping to air-kiss one another (or catfight) en route. For the finale, the our queer heroine pulls door-girl ‘Edwige’ inside ‘The Palace’. The curtains descend and reveal the full crew of models, accompanied by Mr Gaultier, dancing, laughing and drinking champagne to the sound of Amanda Lear’s ‘Fashion Pack’.

If heaven looks like this, I do hope they let me in.

Babette, 25.08.17

FOOTNOTES

[1] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.2′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt2/ on 19 August 2017

[2] Clayton Patterson, quoted in Walter Armstrong, ‘The Life of Punk Queen Edwige Belmore and the Death of the Old Downtown’, New York Magazine, 25 September 2015, accessed online at http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/edwige-belmore-death-of-a-punk-queen.html on 19 August 2017

[3] Edwige Belmore, quoted in a video interview with Barbara Frigerio, ‘Focus on: Edwige Belmore’, Vogue Italia, 4 July 2011, accessed online at http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/focus-on/2011/07/edwige-belmore#ad-image102614 on 19 August 2017

[4] Marcus Leatherdale, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[5] Moco Loco, ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] Patterson, ibid.

[8] Sandra Schulman, ‘Death of a Glamazon. A Tattooed Love Letter to Edwige’, Please Kill Me, 26 September 2015, accessed online at http://pleasekillme.com/death-of-a-glamazon-a-tattooed-love-letter-to-edwige/ on 19 August 2017

[9] ibid.

[10] Patterson, ibid.

[11] Kendall Werts, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[12] Penny Arcade, quoted in New York Magazine, ibid.

[13] Edwige Belmore, quoted in Eepmon, ‘In Conversation with Edwige Belmore, The Queen of Punk Pt.1′, Moco Loco, 31 December 2014, accessed online at http://mocoloco.com/in-conversation-with-eepmon-edwige-belmore-the-queen-of-punk-pt1/ on 19 August 2017

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] Vogue Italia, ibid.

[17] ibid.

[18] ibid.

[19] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[20] Summer Bowie, ‘Beautiful Vagabond: 10 Things You Need to Know About the Late Edwige Belmore’, Autre Magazine, 24 September 2015, accessed online at http://autre.love/this-and-that-main/2015/9/24/beautiful-vagabond-10-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-late-edwige-belmore on 19 August 2017

[21] Pt.1, Moco Loco, ibid.

[22] Pt.2, Moco Loco, ibid.

[23] Nick Vogelson, ‘In Memory: Edwige Belmore, Our Lady of Punk’, Document Journal, 22 September 2015, accessed online at http://www.documentjournal.com/article/in-memory-our-lady-of-punk on 19 August 2017

[24] Ellie Pithers, ‘Spring/Summer 2016 Couture: Jean Paul Gaultier’, Vogue, 27 January 2016, accessed online at http://www.vogue.co.uk/shows/spring-summer-2016-couture/jean-paul-gaultier on 19 August 2017

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