Leo Greenfield is the baby Quentin Blake and Bill Cunningham would have if there was a means, or inclination, for them to reproduce. Minus Quentin’s snot and bum depictions and Bill Cunningham’s batty blue jacket, Leo’s line-drawn watercolours capture the fleetingly fashionable as they go about their business in and around the streets of Melbourne.
His most notable deviation from the inner-northside quadrant took him to Paris for Fashion Week in 2011, where he, literally, had a fairytale time after he was betrothed to a perfectly tailored Givenchy suit and breezed his way into shows like Damir Doma and haute couture at the Palace of Versailles – paper and pencil in hand. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a handsome guy and a pen and paper can be tucked into the pocket of a silk single-breasted suit a lot easier than a hulking camera and flash. Bumping into and sketching Anna Wintour at the Palace Vendome, and Grace Coddington virtually everywhere (Coddington’s fiery red tresses still haunt his dreams) tuned his eagle eye for fashion sharper than ever. So remember, if you’re heading to Safeway on a Sunday morning in your leopard print pyjama pants and an oversized polka dot muumuu, an innocuous-looking bearded illustrator with a cut-glass memory for details might be inking you and your combo to the page. Which is definitely a compliment.
Leo is currently waist deep in the costume archives of the NGV working on a couture versus street-style sketching project as part of the LMFF Cultural Program. Check out his progress on the NGV blog during the festival. He’s also exhibiting some of these drawings in Gertrude Contemporary’s Slide Space from this Friday – and he’ll be working on evolving STREET gallery for this very website throughout LMFF so stay tuned to this channel.
Hi Leo, what are you working on at the moment?
Currently, I’m working on making a series of drawings for an NGV project associated with LMFF 2013. I have made drawings from the fashion archive of the gallery, and have then done drawings from the street that match looks in the different collections.
Leopard print, Smith Street, Fitzroy
Fashion archives, sounds like a fantasy place!
It’s all temperature-controlled wardrobes full of names like YSL, Dior, John Galliano, Yoji Yamamoto, Pierre Cardin and then Australian designers Akira Isogawa, Kara Baker, Martin Grant.
I can’t even imagine. So do you get to choose the pieces? You have gone in and looked at the collection and then gone out onto the street to see where those designs are being replicated in todays fashion?
Exactly. And I thought, I really want to see the big names like Balenciaga and Christian Dior and then I want to compare them with Australian designers like Martin Grant or people that were practising in the ’80s or the late ’70s like Jenny Kee. After I sent the curators my list they got back to me with what was on offer and I had a look at these wardrobes. As I was pulling stuff out I could instantly identify that some things were important because they relate to what I’m seeing on the street and they look a bit like what other designers are rehashing.
Floral prints, Woolworths, Smith Street, Fitzroy
So looking through these archives can show you the root of where the fashion circle keeps coming back to?
Well, I found with almost everything in the collection you can draw out relationships. I’m really interested at the moment in geo-prints and this 1960s Pierre Cardin stuff. So when I went looking I found these clothes from a former Australian label called Marg and it’s really kind of psychedelic stuff and you can see all of these ideas playing out again on the street – and then you look at campaigns like Marc Jacobs and you can see the same thing. It allows you to see the way we dress goes in really visual cycles.
So with my drawings I look at what you might see in the magazines but then there is this other layer that is not always present in the magazines – but what, it seems, everyone is doing. It’s so interesting because it’s different to trends that are pushed by the common forms of media like magazines and online content but it’s something that just keeps coming up. And it’s those types of trends that you see arising in collections later. But with me, it’s something I see and I notice – like it might be a floral skirt, then a dude wearing floral on his sneakers and it’s kind of cute these details can all be linked together.
Geometric print, Smith Street, Collingwood
So is that how you choose people to draw? They just separate out from the crowd?
It always happens and catches me by surprise, you’re going to the supermarket and you see someone in a look. And I think ‘that’s really good’ and I don’t really know what it is that makes someone so interesting but by drawing it, and by redesigning it I can come closer to working out ‘Why is that so good?’.
Platforms, The Grace Darling, Smith Street, Collingwood
Do you have a special spot to go to where you can get off on a bad day, like a guaranteed hot spot for fashion sightings?
No it’s always a surprise. Sometimes people say, “You should do different streets,” because in Melbourne I often do Fitzroy and Collingwood. But I also feel it’s important to be part of the community that I draw; they’re people I know and it gives me more of a reason to draw them.
It’s funny because when I did go to Paris to draw I was there for as long as I could be, which was for a month. I was drawing different stuff, I was drawing from the runway, so to me that justified my being there, watching and being a documenter of this activity or this promenade. It was really interesting for me watching the huge number of photographers and the paparazzi that surround these events and it made me feel really uncomfortable. I think because they so distinctly aren’t part of that community. Which is where I think Bill Cunningham and The Sartorialist are successful, and I don’t want to make a boring parallel, but for me it was really striking. I was talking to him [Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist] out the front of a show by chance and he really dresses like the people he photographs, he’s part of it, he’s not just putting his camera up to a woman without permission. I think that, in a sense, gives him something. That is something that’s really important to me – being a part of the community that you’re working within.
Couple and Pup, Wellington Street, Collingwood
I saw on your blog you had been having dreams of Grace Coddington the other night! Does that happen often?
I have Grace Coddington dreams, she comes to me in dreams sometimes. I’ve got to draw what she’s wearing when I wake up. The other night for some reason we were wearing these Marc Jacob hats. I did draw her a few times in Paris. Grace, and Suzy Menkes, and she really stands out in this beautiful way. Everyone is trying to show off in front of fashion shows; there were fashion people, editors, tourists and then this woman comes through who is just completely herself and so elegant. It’s just such a nice metaphor for the irony of the whole industry.
Nothing really incredible happened in Paris but it was just amazing being in the presence of this world. One night we were at the Hemingway Bar and Grace was just sitting right behind me! And I didn’t know that she was in there because I was talking to some friends and a friend at Givenchy had given me this suit and it was like Cinderella, I had something to wear and I was excitedly telling these friends the stories of what I had seen that day and then this woman whispered to me, “Don’t look, it’s Grace Coddington sitting right behind you,” and we were literally sitting back to back! It was great to just be in that environment. Meeting people on their way to the McQueen show and asking what they thought of it afterwards, talking to stylists who are involved with John Galliano and what they thought about his fall from grace. It was great to draw within that community and to feel accepted and see the other characters. The people who really go to the fashion shows who aren’t the celebrities – they are mostly really rich, stylish American women who stay at The Ritz and they go to Chanel. And it was interesting to talk to those people and not be sticking a camera in their faces.
The funny thing was that you never imagine that you could even get into the Ritz bar or get introduced to editors and it was just I felt like I had something that I really wanted to write about. I really wanted to draw about it. I think they sensed that and it was interesting to them, to see a different type of journalist.
Wool and lace, Brunswick Street, Fitzroy
Would you do it again?
I’d love to do it every year. I’d love to do the whole circuit – New York, Italy, London then Paris. I like Paris because the fantasy and the story of it are the most important, it’s not necessarily the best fashion – maybe there is more interesting stuff even happening here in Australia – but I think the idea of it makes for a great story.
Spikes and spots, Flinders Street Station, Melbourne
Leo will be updating his hand-drawn STREET gallery over here throughout the festival. Keep an eye out to see whether he likes your outfit!