Antony Price: The fashion designer “vital” to the success of Roxy Music
From a high perch looking back on 60 years of pop-art, art-rock, and pop-rock, the first few Roxy Music albums look quite at home on the historical timeline – a seminal 1970s band following David Bowie’s lead and ultimately setting the stage for the cool flamboyance and increasingly synthy sounds of ‘80s new wave.
If you were a music journalist in 1972, however, when Roxy Music’s self-titled debut album was released, it wasn’t so easy to frame the band’s place in an ecosystem that also included Neil Young’s Harvest, Deep Purple’s Machine Head, and an epic chart battle between Donny Osmond (Portrait of Donny) and David Cassidy (Cherish).
The Bowie comparisons were certainly there, as Ziggy Stardust had come out just a few months prior. But Roxy Music’s more specific re-framing of 1950s aesthetics and references – a template for cabaret futura – could just as easily have been seen on the same level as winking, retro novelty acts like Sha Na Na, the New York ensemble that had blown all the hippies’ minds by performing a set of sock-hop and doo-wop songs on the Woodstock stage.
Of course, Brian Eno and Bryan Ferry had much higher aspirations for their musical outfit, as well as the outfits they’d be wearing. Toward that end, they employed a secret weapon to ensure that Roxy Music would communicate something thoroughly new, even as they pulled from the past. His name was Antony Price.
The Yorkshire-born Price, who died last month at the age of 80, was one of London’s up-and-coming new fashion designers at the time of Roxy Music’s emergence, having already worked with the Rolling Stones and Lou Reed on a few odd jobs. It would be his long-lasting relationship with Roxy Music, though, that really established Price on the scene and turned his shop on the King’s Road, ‘Plaza’, into an art punk’s hangout nearly on a level with Vivienne Westwood’s famed ‘Sex’ shop down the street.
“As a fashion designer, [Price] was vital to Roxy Music,” Ferry told the Guardian in 1997. “We didn’t feel that we were a part of glam rock; it was a different sense of style altogether, and Price made wonderful clothes, like some kind of sculptor. He loved dressing us up.”
As Price famously and boldly put it himself, “It seemed to me that before Roxy Music, fashion hated rock and rock hated fashion.”
Through Price’s vision, which took touchstones of conservative, 1940s and 1950s style and sent them through a sort of space-age drag-race machine, a new type of smart, ironic chicness was born—paving the way for everything from the B-52s to the new romantics. He was also involved with the look of the iconic “Roxy girls” on the band’s album covers, scantily clad though they might have been in most cases.
“There was a definite Janus feeling abroad at the time,” Ferry recalled, “Looking to the past in a kitsch way, and imagining the future as it might be, but perhaps in an equally kitsch way. Our costumes were quite deliberate takes on those Fifties visions of space nobility; the masters of the Galactic Parliament and so on. But we wanted to make the world sit up and pay attention to itself, and to reflect its images back to it in weird combinations that hadn’t been seen before. To locate romance and threat in strange new places; to look beautiful, but in ways that men had not thought of looking beautiful before.”
Later in his career, Antony Price served a similarly important role in crafting the style of another decade-defining British pop band, Duran Duran.
