POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL By Boudoir Queen

SKIN DE SIECLE

Photograph-Steven Arnold
Styling -MUA Dawn Younger-Smith
This was even more fun! This was a shoot featuring the famous Mark Mahoney. His tattoo designs have been on everything even Betsy Johnson Clothing. Steven and I did the styling and I did the make-up as well. I have real photo from the shoot I'll post. This is a tear sheet yellowed with antiquity .

Cockette Style

The guy with the top hat is obviously suppose to look like Steven Arnold. This is one of my favorite editorals.

Boudoir Queen and Steven Arnold

Boudoir Queen Photo Steven Arnold

Photo of Me by Steven Arnold in Berlin Museum

Steven Arnold with the Cockettes

Me in Details photograph by Steven Arnold

Steven Arnold: "Exotic Tableaux"

One of my favorite art books is "Exotic Tableaux" As many of you know who read my blog I was Steven Arnold's Muse during the years if 1989-92. Here is more on Steven. You can also see is website dedicated to him at www.stevenarnold.net

PANDORA'S OFFERING

PANDORA Star of "Luminous Procuress" Steven's Muse & Life-Long Friend:

Steven , Kaisik Wong and I went to New York to show Salvador Dali Luminous Procuress (1969 full length color feature) . Dali had arranged to premier Luminous Procuress in the basement of Rizzoli¹s Bookstore but their projector broke. So he arranged to show it at the Louis XIV room in the St. Regis Hotel. It was quite a spectacular event. He had ice sculpture, all kinds of wines and hors d¹oeuvres , - The crème de la crème of New York society, Vogue Magazine and Andy Warhol were there. Dali fell in love with Luminous he played it upside down, backwards and sideways. He thought it was a work of genius, which it was.

I believe Dali understood a place where Steven was coming from and wanted to enhance that space... It was a wonderful time for Steven working on Dali's Museum. We dressed differently every night for Dali for a minimum of five years.

HOLLY WOODLAWN ON STEVEN ARNOLD (Star of Andy Warhol's & Paul Morrissey's TRASH)

When I came to Hollywood Steven took me under his wing.

He immediately invited me to one of his salons. There would be his patrons, a countess, a baroness, sex changes talking to lawyers, lots of beautiful boys Ðhalf of them running around naked like angels... and tons of food, and it was free and we were all starving to death. Everyone was so free.

All these artists going into this fortressÐ like Sleeping Beauty's Castle. It was covered with thorns and suddenly you're in an artist's heaven. And there was this Emperor - Steven was very soft spoken and just made everyone as comfortable as possible for hours and hours - you never wanted to leave.

And one day there was no more salons and no more Steven. It was very sad.

Comparing Warhol's evenings to Steven's salons: Being from New York and going to lots of Andy's parties at the Factory was fun because you got to meet a lot of famous New York people. It was very electric because obviously everyone was on speed and drugs, it was rock and roll - The pace was so fast it was non-stop like New York is and no one took the time out... They met you, went to bed with you, you know whatever they did.

But Steven's Salons were sort of like Versailles, but without the guillotine... Versailles versus Andy Warhol... Alcatraz where you could go in and out or Sing Sing or Bellevue with a little museum of modern art.

ruth weiss ON STEVEN ARNOLD

ruth weiss innovated poetry with jazz at the Cellar when it opened in 1956 in San Francisco's North Beach.

Steven and I had a deep friendship. We were two artists on the same beam. He was the first person ever to make me feel comfortable in front of the camera. He always did my makeup for his films and I was in all of his films. He knew how to make me feel beautiful - that was his magic.

Steven told me about this fabulous group called the Cockettes. They had called him and asked if they could appear at the Palace Theater where he had been hosting midnight movie shows he called the Nocturnal Dream Shows.

The showings first began at the 17th St. studio and moved to the Palace Theater in North Beach when he and Michael Wiese decided to show their film "Messages, Messages "to a larger audience. This film would later win Steven Best New Director at Cannes in 1970. When I arrived at the theater the marquee was lit with "ruth weiss and The Joseph" aka Joseph Zaccarella, the featured actors.

Kaisik Wong Steven Arnold Pandora Native Funk & Flash

Click on the link for more******I cannot believe I found this and it describes Steven's Studio too very cool!! *****I have photos of Kaisik as a Pharaoh, Juan as Christ I'll post.



LIVING DREAMS OF VISIONS
BY RON ATHEY

http://www.laweekly.com/index.php?option=com_lawcontent&task=view&id=3327&Itemid=122
Photos by Margaret M. Sison
The first time many fashionistas heard the name of Kaisik Wong, the late San Francisco–based designer once celebrated for his wearable art garments, was in spring this year after Balenciaga designer and style-mag golden boy Nicolas Ghesquière was busted for blatantly copying a collage vest made by Wong in 1973. The scandal sparked new interest in Wong’s work. In one of those curious moments of serendipity, Decades owner Cameron Silver, who had himself just discovered Wong a few months earlier and had bought a number of pieces from Wong’s family, was in the midst of preparing to mount a retrospective of Wong’s fantastical one-of-a-kind pieces which opened last week.

Wong once said, “I think the whole body should be a jeweled, radiating beauty.” His designs conjure up a sense of both motion and containment, creating an illusion of spiritual armor: a gold-blue-and-purple starburst gown seemingly held together by an oversize red mystic-knot in the center, or a flowing, translucent, triple-layered, orange wing dress, which captures both Tibetan fire and the grace of a butterfly. Brightly colored, multilayered fabric constructions are intricately detailed with embroidery, piping and padding; belts, bibs and vests add an ornamental layer.

The shapes of his robes, gowns and headdresses are both futuristic and tribal; the combining of metallic, Mayan and Chinese textiles is his way of fulfilling Aquarian prophecy. “I like the progressive state, the forward movement, the concept of the Aquarian Age,” he said. He certainly lived it. Wong’s personal fashion sense directly related to theater — he appeared in public often dressed in character of the Monkey King, a mischievous trickster deity from Chinese folklore.

About 15 years ago, I learned of Kaisik Wong through a mutual friend, actor/model Juan Fernandez. With Juan, I attended salons hosted by the late photographer and former Cockette Steven Arnold, whose loft was adorned with layers of red Chinese lanterns, anything golden, and a trapeze hung in the center of the room. The walls usually showcased Arnold’s current photo projects: The only constant images were of Kaisik as a Pharaoh, Juan as Christ, and the Surrealist painter/model/actress Pandora as Venus de Milo.

“Kaisik took the love and spirituality that came out of the movements of the late ’60s, and transcended them into a magic that was felt by people,” says Fernandez, who notes that Wong didn’t use patterns: Rather, with a pair of scissors in each hand, he let the spirit or “energy” of the fabric guide him through cutting it. “Working with mythology, he was trying to connect the past with the future — his creations were the kinds of things goddesses would have worn. I think this is why he didn’t want to be bothered with making ready-to-wear.”

Juan and Wong were part of an intimate group of artists that had collected around Salvador Dalí. “I met Dalí in Paris in 1969, and brought Kaisik, Steven and Pandora to him,” says Fernandez. In a relationship that spanned almost 10 years, they worked on a series of projects which included films and plays, and in 1974, Dalí commissioned Wong to make an installation for the grand opening of his museum in Figueras, Spain. Wong created seven mystical garments, which he called “Seven Rays.” When the exhibit opened, according to Pandora, “The collection brought people to their knees.”

Light-blue chiffon poncho with
netting and chiffon pants

Of course being brilliant doesn’t necessarily make one famous. Although Wong enjoyed a certain renown as a seminal art-to-wear designer, it was l’affaire Ghesquière that put him on many style mavens’ maps. A fashion archivist/aficionado and video director who goes by the name of Chorro discovered Ghesquière’s deception. Chorro, who gave the Weekly his first interview on the subject, was at a trade show where he was looking through the seminal 1974 book Native Funk & Flash: An Emerging Folk Art, when he spotted a spread on Wong. “I turned to the page with the Kaisik Wong vest, and was like, wait a minute! My employee, Sameer Reddy, worshiped Ghesquière, so I made the vest connection immediately. I went to Sameer and said, ‘I have something awful to tell you . . .’” Reddy was so disenchanted with Ghesquière’s thievery that he took the story to hintmag.com, where he was interning, which broke it in the Chic Happens column. Publications from The New York Times to WWD to The Guardian weighed in.

Wong briefly launched two commercial lines in his career, carried at Henri Bendel and I. Magnin as well as Obiko, an innovative art-to-wear boutique in San Francisco. But he always returned to custom work. His clients ranged from Tina Turner and Elton John to Dodie Rosekrans and Ann Getty. In December 2003, Rizzoli is releasing the definitive book on the art and fashion of Kaisik Wong, guaranteed to keep the legend and collecting fever alive for some time (among the first to buy pieces from the Decades exhibit were Linda Evangelista and Jennifer Tilly, as well as a few designers who prefer to remain anonymous for obvious reasons). “His influence on contemporary fashion is both profound and controversial,” says Silver. “I think he always functioned a little under the fashion industry’s radar, yet he still infiltrated. It’s totally what we need in the world again, someone as over the top and eccentric as Kaisik Wong.”

Decades, 8214½ Melrose Ave., (323) 655-0223; decadesinc.com; exhibit runs through December 31.

A Steven Arnold Photograph

This is from his book. Or I should say one of his books.

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS BOUDOIR QUEEN

Me in a Steven Arnold photo. This photo is a large nude that has been cropped down for the internet. It has been in several museums and is one of my favorites.

Steven Arnold Boudoir Queen Blog

Picture I found online of Steven. I think this was taken at Staphanie Farago's house.