It only takes a brief glance over Simon Doonan’s career history to see he’s something of a Renaissance man. Across four decades in the Best if This Flag Offends You I’ll Help You Pack Shirt moreover I will buy this fashion industry, Doonan has shape-shifted between style commentator, bon vivant, and window dresser—the latter possibly an understatement, given his 24 years spent crafting the lavish window displays that put Barneys on the map as New York’s mecca for all things à la mode.But over the past decade, Doonan has increasingly turned his hand to writing. Beginning with a run of autobiographical tomes—one of which, 2005’s Beautiful People, was even adapted into a BBC television series—Doonan has more recently shifted to studies in fashion culture that veer toward the anthropological, like his 2018 overview of the relationship between soccer and style.It comes as something of a surprise, then, that his latest book is a biography of the maverick Pop artist Keith Haring. Even if Doonan’s mind-boggling erudition makes him more than qualified to tackle it, an artist’s biography wasn’t necessarily the logical next step—and that’s something Doonan was keenly aware of. Despite his enduring fascination with Haring’s life story, it wasn’t an immediate yes when his editors at Laurence King Publishing proposed the idea to him. “I had to go away and think about it because the question is always, ‘Why now?’” he says. “There has to be some kind of connection that puts it in the current context.”After taking the time to mull it over, Doonan felt the added layer of knowledge he could bring to the project lay in his own experiences of the 1980s New York scene within which Haring rose to fame. “My goal was to capture the spirit of that period,” he adds. “I felt I had an opportunity, since I was there, to capture the energy—it was like being in a crazy pinball machine where all these aspects of culture were colliding for the first time.”While Doonan is quick to note he was never close friends with Haring—“it was all very fleeting and frenetic,” he says of their few but memorable encounters—they fraternized in the same circles. Whether they were crossing paths at Danceteria or the Palladium, or Doonan was greenlighting a hand-painted denim jacket worn by Iman to an AIDS benefit at Barneys in 1986, there are still a number of shared moments and personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout.In one such memory, Doonan watches as Haring sets up one of his installations as a backdrop at Paradise Garage—although whether it was for a Grace Jones performance or a Larry Levan DJ set, he can’t quite recall. “Keith was a bit hurt because people ignored it and carried on dancing, but I remember standing there and watching him install it,” Doonan says. “It was a chaotic period, but it was always fun.”All the same, for Doonan, the excitement in retelling Haring’s story lies less in the frisson of his interactions with the artist and more in highlighting the aspects of his practice that were, in hindsight, astonishingly ahead of their time. Haring’s radically democratic understanding of what art could be—realized through projects like the Pop Shop and the subway graffiti pieces he delighted in seeing members of the public snatch away before the police got to them—may be well-known now, but in his ’80s heyday, it was a blurring of high and low that scandalized the art world.Not that Haring really cared. He loved fashion too, whether painting Grace Jones from head to toe (with accessories by the late David Spada to cover her modesty) or lending his prints to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren on the other side of the pond to integrate into their chopped-and-screwed punk fashion fantasies. “Historically, art and artists have stayed very far away from fashion,” Doonan notes. “But this was a time when style, fashion, art, music, hip-hop, break-dancing, graffiti all fell into this blender of New York City, and it was a tremendously energized period.“Everyone approached it with no preconceived ideas,” he continues, “so you ended up in a situation where Madonna, Keith Haring, Warhol, and Grace Jones were the new aristocrats of this movement, this new collaborative collision that was taking place in Lower Manhattan.”Of course, Haring’s legacy as one of the most significant artists of the 1980s is now sacrosanct—but for Doonan, part of the fun of revisiting his body of work was imagining how keenly at home Haring would be in the campy, hyper-saturated celebrity culture of the present day. In the book’s epilogue, he pictures Haring working with Louis Vuitton in the same vein of the customized handbags created by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with artists like Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince, or hanging out with Kanye and Kim Kardashian West at their home in Calabasas. The strange matrix of celebrity, art, and fashion that Haring quietly predicted has now, very loudly, come to pass.Of course, these latter-day dreams for Haring’s career were not to be: In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with HIV. HIV/AIDS awareness was a political cause he had already begun advocating for fiercely through artworks promoting both safe sex and the ACT UP movement. “It also feels timely to release the book because Haring was such a huge advocate for social justice,” Doonan says. “He dealt with subjects like the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, apartheid. He was an artist who wanted to communicate with people.” In 1990, Haring died at the age of 31.When I ask Doonan about how he approached writing about that period, he takes a moment before answering. “What we went through was so traumatizing,” he says. “I lost two of my boyfriends and many of my friends. All the stories you hear are true. I had friends who died without anyone at their bedside; everyone had abandoned them. We were all in our 20s. It was horrifying to go through this thing and to go unnoticed by the rest of the population. You’d spend the evening at a hospital bed with different people who were dying and then go to work and pretend everything was normal. We all thought we were going to die, and it did produce a freewheeling creativity where people immersed themselves in their work. I’m lucky I didn’t die. I didn’t get it, but I assumed I had because so many people I knew had died. During Keith’s last period, post-diagnosis, he was ferociously productive. It’s impressive that he handled it with incredible dignity and verve at such a young age.”Despite the weight of responsibility Doonan clearly feels to do Haring’s story justice, it’s his tenacity in ensuring Haring’s voice rings out from every page that makes this a more moving tribute than most. “It’s clear I’m not an academic, I’m just an enthusiast about Keith Haring,” says Doonan, with typical modesty. “That’s very liberating.”But it’s exactly this—Doonan’s ability to dive right into the heart of what makes Haring’s art so viscerally joyful without the rarefied language of the art insider—that makes him the perfect man to tell Haring’s story. “If you think about art today or what sells for a high price at Art Basel, it’s so uncommunicative,” Doonan concludes. “Keith went in the other direction. He said, ‘I want people to have the art they deserve. I want strong communicative art that everyone can relate to.’ And people still do relate to it.“The pictograms of his, the radiant baby, the barking dog, the man with the hole in his stomach, they bring people joy to this very day,” Doonan says, before pausing again. “That’s the greatest accomplishment of all.”
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What is a prestige TV series without an ensuing discourse? That was the Best if This Flag Offends You I’ll Help You Pack Shirt moreover I will buy this question on my mind on Wednesday, when Hulu announced that it had cast the lead roles for its television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s 2017 novel Conversations With Friends. I’m sure the show will shine on its own merits—although it has some Normal People*–*sized shoes to fill—but half the fun at this stage comes from analyzing its casting choices; below, take a look at the grades the cast earned. (Note: I reserve the right to issue new grades if and when I’m granted the miracle of a screener, but this ranking is purely about instinct.)1. Alison Oliver as Frances. Grade: B+View on InstagramI applaud the team behind Conversations With Friends for finding an actual Irish actress to portray protagonist Frances, but I can’t deny that I was sort of hoping to see Normal People star Daisy Edgar-Jones in this role. That said, it’s exciting to see a relative newcomer in the spotlight, and Oliver has plenty of room to dazzle us.2. Sasha Lane as Bobbi. Grade: AView on InstagramLane was phenomenal in her breakout role in American Honey, as well as in the 2018 queer coming-of-age film The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and she pretty objectively possesses the ineffable cool-girl quality that Rooney imbues Bobbi with. Also of note: Lane identifies as gay, which means Bobbi—a lesbian character—will actually be portrayed by an actor who shares her sexuality. Many of us crossed our fingers for this when news of the show was announced back in May, and it’s exciting to see Hulu actually deliver.3. Joe Alwyn as Nick. Grade: C-View on InstagramI have nothing but respect for Alwyn, The Favourite star and Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, but he doesn’t quite appear to possess the sexy/sad aura that distinguishes Nick in Rooney’s novel. Is it nuts that I sort of hoped to see Chris Messina (or at least a rumpled, sleepy-hot Chris Messina type) in this role? Maybe he’s a little too old to be wooing Frances, but the age difference is very much a crux of Conversations With Friends, so it could theoretically work. Also, I just don’t picture Nick blond. Sorry!4. Jemima Kirke as Melissa. Grade: A-Okay, literally, yes. Kirke possesses the exact mix of warmth and hauteur that makes Melissa’s character such a cipher, and I cannot wait to see her snubbing people left and right at an Italian vacation home. My only reasoning for grading this casting choice an A- rather than a flat-out A? It’s too hard for me to disentangle Kirke from her career-making role as Jessa on Girls, but I’m sure she’ll step into this new role with aplomb. Then again, as Vulture pointed out, she’s not really Irish (nor are Alwyn or Lane), so we’ll see.
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