HEROES & VILLAINS: Peter York on Antony Price

THERE ARE very few fashion people who I think cut the mustard as potential heroes. Manolo Blahnik is socially interesting and his shoes are more original than Jimmy Choo's, but he's just not important enough. Vivienne Westwood is thoroughly irritating. Tom Ford is a very good 7th Avenue editor, rather than an actual designer, and Zandra Rhodes - well, she makes pretty clothes for rich old American ladies, but her personal presentation means she's less than outstandingly attractive.

Going back in time, Beau Brummel is a reasonably sympathetic dandy figure - his insistence on simplicity was good - but then he ended up mad, incontinent and in rags in a boarding house in France, which won't do. So for me the only truly marvelous fashion person is the difficult, but always consistent, Antony Price.

Price has been a figure in British fashion since the late Sixties, when he learnt his trade doing mass-market stuff for Stirling Cooper and Miss Selfridge. He dressed the Rolling Stones for their "Gimme Shelter" tour in 1967, and has had a hand in the look of various rock acts over the years, including David Bowie, Rod Stewart, Robert Palmer and Duran Duran. Nowadays he is strictly couture but clearly what he will be remembered for is his time as the aesthetic steward of Roxy Music, the most visually literate rock band that ever walked the earth.

In 1971, Price bumped into fellow working-class-Northern-boy- turned-art- student Bryan Ferry in a club. Ferry took him back to his place and played him try-out tracks by his band. They hit it off straight away and came up with what was then an outrageous idea: to fuse fashion with rock. Together they would control every last detail of Roxy Music's look: the sets, the album covers (Jerry Hall in a mermaid outfit on Siren), even what the backing singers wore (dresses so glamorous and tight that, says Price, their wearers "had to be winched onto the stage").

The look was pure Price: pop, brilliant, but absolutely not vulgar. What he did then, and does now, is to take big ideas and translate them into something fantastically flattering, to the extent that he can turn quite ordinary people, women and men, into high- impact stunners. And because he draws on popular themes, but also knows how to make an idea work at the level of construction and tailoring, he can make fabulous, expensive couture clothes for rich people at the same time as making high-impact cheap clothes for the mass market.

Price clothes have a strong sense of theatre and fantasy about them: he doesn't do awful, middle-class, comfortable populism. Janet Street- Porter has called Antony Price pieces "results clothes" - ie. they get you laid - and Jerry Hall clearly thinks of him whenever she needs to pull off a fashion spectacular. This may be because he believes in fashionable, high-interest formal clothes, and is quite out of sympathy with sports- derived clothing; as such, he's completely against the temper of the times (as am I). His formality and flash means Price was bling before bling existed - he thinks almost like a gangsta rapper. He has an unwavering vision that fantastic tailoring can turn ordinary human beings into magical, cartoonish characters - and one hopes that it is his world view that will eventually prevail.

Now here I must admit to a small difficulty. I no longer wear Antony Price. This is not his fault, however, but mine: I've rather lost the plot and have no idea if, now that he has gone so up in the world and sells high-priced, small-batch stuff, Price still makes ready-to-wear that I could wear. I certainly have lots of old Antony in my wardrobe, clothes from before the days when I had to spend much of my time in City meetings. I've still got his 1983 bronze satin jacket with enormous shoulders, which I keep simply because it is such a fascinating old thing. It hangs alongside lots of Price suits, worn out but worth holding on to because, in terms of the cut, they are just so spectacularly clever.

I could go and ask him to make me something I could actually wear, I suppose, but he'd be bored rigid by the dullness of what I do: those City meetings, as opposed to being flash on the telly. Of course, if I was going to be flash on the telly, I'd go straight to Antony and say: "Invent me something." And I'm sure he would. E

Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.