Stephen Sprouse was a rock star in the truest sense, not through music, but through his fashion and love of music.
“Rock, art and fashion were always my favorite things, in that order,” Sprouse espouses, “but I don’t know how to play an instrument, so I had to work on the other two.”
That DIY attitude and his brazen fashion experiments in the 80’s were as much a part of New York as an extension of himself. Iggy Pop once said, “I don’t think he was looking so much at what people were doing, he was looking at what a few people were doing that everybody should be doing.” And with that he was credited with jump starting the urban-upscale fashion movements surrounded with punk sensibilities.
He found inspiration everywhere, including asking NASA for permission to use early pictures of their space exploration in his own work.
He fluttered between selling out/barely meeting supply/demand for his items and occasionally going bankrupt throughout the 80’s. He enjoyed a showroom in the last of Andy Warhol’s infamous ‘Factory’ lofts (meeting Andy in May of ‘84 while showing off his latest collection at the Ritz), and is known for his neon/day-glo colours, graffiti writing, leopard print patterns as well as such iconic imagery as Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop crucified and his 2001 collaboration with Marc Jacobs/Louis Vuitton and the current, posthumous 2009 Tribute Collection.
Stephen regularly designed for Debbie Harry (of Blondie fame) and later on Axl Rose and Billy Idol. Part of what I like about his work is how he used a variety of mediums besides fashion — photography, collage, and painting. After his death, Andy Warhol was buried in a Sprouse Suit. Debbie Harry swears she still has all of Sprouse’s outfits and guards them with her life.
Sprouse died on May 4th, 2004 at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York City of heart failure, after a closely guarded diagnosis of lung cancer a year before. He was 50.
