Fashion history can be unkind. Designers without big corporate backing or luxury contracts can be written away, go unmentioned in footnotes, and not celebrated in exhibitions. That’s why we’re dedicating some ink—or some pixels, rather—here at Vogue Runway to celebrating the unsung designers who have changed fashion history. First up, a recommendation from Rick Owens.
You could be the biggest fashion nerd with a Wi-Fi hookup, but even then the name Larry LeGaspi may not ring a bell. It didn’t for me, and I certainly qualify.
Working in New York in the 1970s and ’80s, LeGaspi’s oeuvre is a pre-Internet one, making his legacy almost unsearchable online save for a handful of photos and scattershot quotes. Getting the full picture of what he created through Google is almost impossible; you’ll find a silhouette without a halo, a lightning bolt without any thunder. LeGaspi was the designer who conceived Kiss’s black unitards and peaked collars and shoulders. He clad Labelle (where Patti LaBelle got her start) in transcendent silver leotards and jackets. He helped Grace Jones unlock her supernatural superstardom, and he made clothes to match George Clinton’s rainbow hair and aura. But then he passed away in 2001 from complications of AIDS at age 50, leaving behind his wife, Val, and a treasure trove of sketches, garments, press clippings, and photographs in his Long Island home. It was a remarkable archive hiding in plain sight—and then Rick Owens found it.
In 2002, Owens gave an interview to Plaza magazine in which he revealed his newish obsession. “I just found out that Larry LeGaspi, who did the costumes for Labelle, also did the costumes for Kiss and then Divine’s costumes for the play Pork, and yet there’s hardly any documentation on [him]! I’m gonna talk about him every chance I get.”
This October, Owens will do just that with a book on the designer, published by Rizzoli. But before it’s released, Owens scooped himself, creating his Fall 2019 collection in homage to LeGaspi’s life and work. “For me, as a teenager growing up in Porterville, California, what Larry LeGaspi did was a huge thing—the way he infiltrated Middle America with this subversive sensibility,” Owens told my colleague Luke Leitch at his show in Paris, describing this collection as a tribute to “the glory of lust and vice.” There were Owens-esque puffa bombers and long, sexy, swooping trousers, and on the cuffs of slim jackets there was the label Owens Instagrammed the day before the show that read “L. LeGaspi, Inc. New York.”
About 3,600 miles from Paris in Long Island, New York, Val LeGaspi woke up just before 6:00 a.m. to stream Owens’s runway show on her tablet. “I loved it! I loved it! I hate to sound prejudiced, but I thought yesterday was the best. That disk of light was like the moonbeam, and then the darkness . . . it was wonderful,” she said over the phone the morning after the show. “It’s been so ethereal to me how we were brought together from across the world. It’s so far-out.”
Val, née Aronoff, met Larry in 1975 and was married to him from 1982 until his death in 2001. She was not only his muse, but has become, since his passing, the chief archivist of and cheerleader for his legacy. Val does not own a computer; her friends Theresa and Sandra, whom she lovingly calls “my girls,” helped meticulously catalog Larry’s sketches, photographs, press clippings, and designs, creating a thorough timeline of his life. “Larry had such an imagination,” Val remembers. “It was mind-blowing to see him and the things he created.”
Born in New Jersey in 1950, Larry moved to New York the day after his high school graduation, purchasing his first sewing machine at the Salvation Army and attending classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. He sold an early collection titled Mother Superior Clothing in 1971, and had opened the Moonstone boutique in the hinterlands of the West Village on Hudson Street just south of Christopher Street later that year with Richard Erker, a jewelry designer, and Rob Comucio, a graphic designer. Around that time he linked up with Labelle, ultimately creating costumes for the trio to wear for their “Wear Something Silver” performance at the Metropolitan Opera in 1974. “Patti [LaBelle] even speaks of that,” Val says, “that they never would have made [it to] the Met as three soul singers [in those days] if they didn’t have that visual created by Larry.”
Kiss came calling around the same time, broadcasting Larry’s signature trapunto-stitched leather pieces into the mainstream. But there’s more to the story than Paul, Gene, Peter, and Ace’s Kabuki makeup and peaked shoulders. In 1977, Larry opened his first salon uptown on Madison Avenue. “Workroom downtown, salon uptown,” Val says. “Eventually he found a space on 57th Street [in 1979 or 1980], which would incorporate the showroom and the workroom under the same roof. We would do PR and sales, go to dinner, and then come back and do production all night. That was our life.”
Larry maintained his ready-to-wear collection and created one-off pieces for clients in New York and around the U.S. while simultaneously clothing the biggest stars of his era. “He did a lovely matte jersey line that was not too outrageous. We had a few society women who, rather than wearing Adolfo or Halston like their other friends, loved Larry’s clothes,” notes Val.
Looking at images from her archive, you can see the languid, sensual appeal. The drama of costume and camp isn’t diminished in Larry’s bias jersey pieces, like a dress-meets-cape aquamarine number worn with a feathered hat and coordinating muff. Rather there’s a clever hot-meets-haute appeal. He was also ahead of the curve on what we today would call prairie chic, creating a series of cherry red frocks and frilled skirts with heart pockets and high collars in the ’70s, versions of which sell online nowadays by contemporary designers for hundreds of dollars.
“He didn’t really look at what was happening in fashion or follow the usual rhythm of the fashion world,” Val explains, noting that Larry’s biggest fashion references were Erté and Charles James, though he much preferred to draw from ideas of science, nature, and science fiction, like the H.G. Wells film Things to Come. “Larry would come out with all this information that was mind-boggling; I don’t even know where he got it from, because it was way ahead of its time.”
He was among the earliest in fashion to adopt Thinsulate, a man-made fabric developed by 3M in 1979. An article in The New York Times quotes Larry on the subject, though the best demonstration of his innovations is the red cocoon dress Val wore to the 1979 Met Gala, then held in December. “That was the most special, I think. That was the first time he and I were out in public together. When I went to the Met in the red dress, that was before Madonna was huge. You had Debbie Harry, who was platinum blonde, but she was more punk rock. I was a full-figured platinum blonde in a fishtail. They went crazy—and I was warm as toast! That was such a magical night for us because I don’t think Larry had ever gotten so much coverage,” Val recalls. That dress now lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archive, a gift from Val.
It was around that time that Val and Larry had started a romantic relationship, too. “There are a lot of parallels between Michèle [Lamy, Owens’s wife] and Rick and Larry and me,” she says, referencing both couples’ nontraditional relationships. “Larry was openly gay for his whole life, and Rick is bisexual, so there are a lot of similarities.”
Another parallel: Bill Cunningham. Having inhabited a space on 57th Street, the LeGaspis became fast friends with the photographer, who spent most days shooting subjects on 57th and Fifth Avenue. “There was one time when Larry was busy working on the bulldog shoes for P-Funk [Parliament-Funkadelic]; he was wearing them, practicing walking, because the shoes had leashes. Bill popped in, and it was hilarious,” Val remembers with a laugh. “Bill loved that. Bill was an artist himself and he really loved the sculptural art of Larry’s wearable art clothing.”
It was a few years ago, around the time that Cunningham passed away, that Owens first reached out to Val over email. “When I was looking up who Rick was, I saw an Instagram of Rick and Bill. Larry and Rick never met, even though they were in L.A. at same time. I felt as though Bill died and he wasn’t dead. He got there [to the afterlife] with Larry, and he made this happen,” says Val.
Shortly thereafter, Owens and Val started discussing a potential book on Larry’s work. “Rick sent me his book so I could see his work. I was blown away. I loved his work, and I really felt good about him. I said, ‘When are you coming to New York?’” In the winter of 2016, Owens made a rare trip stateside to visit Val in Long Island. “He had never seen a LeGaspi in person. He was blown away, because Larry’s construction is incredible. He went right to the clothing racks. I think it blew Rick’s mind when he walked into the studio I set up downstairs,” she says. Suffice to say, the feeling was mutual. “Rick has every right to be the most jaded man, with the empire he has built, but he is just such a wonderful human being,” Val adds.
Soon after, the book idea turned into a collection idea. “Rick surprised me with wanting to do the show in Larry’s name and pay homage to him,” she continues. “It just blew me away. He’s so deep and so sensitive; he really gets it. I just love this man!”
In 1980, Larry gave an interview to Us Weekly for a profile touting him as the future of fashion. “I knew I’d have to wait for the world to catch up to me, but I didn’t think I’d have to wait this long,” he said. In the end, it took 38 more years and a similarly ahead-of-his-time American designer for the world to really catch up. When lightning strikes twice, it’s worth the wait.
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