POPism by Andy Warhol, Pat Hackett Read Free Book Online

or ’60. Nicky may actually have started the frilly men’s shirt look because I remember him getting curtain lace at Bloomingdale’s and tucking it up his sleeves and everybody would be asking him where he got the “great shirt” because they’d never seen anything like it. He made us aware of the new men’s fashions—the short Italian jackets and the pointed shoes (“winklepickers”)—and of the way the cockneys now were mingling with the upper classes and things were getting all mixed in and wild and fun. Nicky would remark that there weren’t really any
young
people here like there were in England—that kids here went from being juveniles straight into “young adults,” whereas in England the kids eighteen and nineteen were having a ball. Or starting to, anyway—it was a new age classification.
    We all went to the Brooklyn Fox together, too. I hadn’t been there with Ivan in quite a while. In fact, I wasn’t seeing so much of Ivan now, because I was more on the filmmaking and literary circuit, going to all those holes-in-the-walls with Gerard. But I was still visiting all the galleries and keeping up with the art scene too.
    â€¢ • •
    In those days I didn’t have a real fashion look yet. I just wore black stretch jeans, pointed black boots that were usually all splattered with paint, and button-down-oxford-cloth shirts under a Wagner College sweatshirt that Gerard had given me. Eventually I picked up some style from Wynn, who was one of the first to go in for the S & M leather look.
    The girls that summer in Brooklyn looked really great. It was the summer of the Liz-Taylor-in-
Cleopatra
look—long, straight, dark, shiny hair with bangs and Egyptian-looking eye makeup. The Brooklyn counterpart to the Greenwich Village scene around Sixth Avenue and 8th Street was Flatbush Avenue, which was divided mostly between the collegiate-looking kids and the “hitters.” And then over on Kings Highway were the kids who lived with their parents and went to high school in Brooklyn and then hung around the Village on weekends.
    This was the summer before the Motown sound got really big, and it was also the last summer before the English Invasion. The show at the Fox had the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las, the Kinks, and Little Stevie Wonder. Also, we were watching Murray the K before he got to be super-famous for being the American disk jockey who had the best rapport with the Beatles.
    It was a great summer. The folk-singer look was in—the young girls with the bangs were wearing shifts and sandals and burlapy things; but looking back, I can see that maybe by way of the Cleopatra look, folk evolved into something slick and fashionable that would eventually become the geometric look. But this summer, at least, folk and hip were blending.
    President Kennedy was over by the Wall in West Berlin saying
“Ich bin ein Berliner,”
and the two “Career Girls” were murdered—theylived down the street from me and I remember passing all the police cars. And this was the summer, too, before the first bombing in Vietnam, the summer of civil rights marches down south, the summer right before the sixties went all crazy for me, before I moved my work space to the 47th Street Factory and the media started writing me up in the new setting with all the superstars. But in this summer of ’63 there were no superstars yet; in fact, I’d only just gotten my first 16-mm camera, a Bolex.
    Although I didn’t buy a movie camera till some time in ’63, it had certainly occurred to me to be a do-it-yourself filmmaker long before then, probably because of De. His interest had started to shift from art to movies around ’60. For five hundred dollars he’d managed to produce a movie called
Sunday
that a friend of his, Dan Drasin, had made about the Sunday the police had suddenly outlawed folk singing in Washington Square Park