Female Fashion Figure

A unique drawing by Andy Warhol

“For many years, large parts of Andy Warhol’s artistic output in the period between the late 1940s and late 1950s –comprising drawings and commercial and fashion illustrations – have only been accessible to visitors and researchers at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Although these early works on paper have long been the most marginalized, undervalued and critically neglected component of the artists oeuvre, they demonstrate how fundamental drawing was to Warhol at the beginning of his career. Drawing was his sole method of artistic output and also provided his livelihood.” (Brett Littman in Adman: Warhol Before Pop, at page 35.)

Upon graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in pictorial design, Andy Warhol moved to New York in 1949 to become a commercial illustrator; he was quickly hired on by the likes of Glamour Magazine, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. According to Simon Doonan’s foreword in Andy Warhol: Fashion: “From his whimsical line drawings of cars to sleek renderings of ladies’ shoes, Warhol’s work became a hit in the fashion world…. [he] sketched hundreds of drawings of shoes, handbags, jewelry, and gloves” (page 7).

His interest in fashion was not limited to these illustrations and advertisements, however. As the decades went on, Warhol would befriend, collaborate with, and create portraits of designers including Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, and Diane von Furstenberg. Models, especially in the 1960s, were a new kind of celebrity, and Warhol capitalized on this notoriety. He is recognized as one of the first artists to print his work onto clothing and sell it exclusively to high-profile clientele. Warhol may have captured it best when he said that “[f]ashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.”