Interview

Portrait of Ray Petri, Courtesy Arena Homme+

The Winter/Spring 09/10 issue of Arena Homme+ is dedicated to stylist Ray Petri and Buffalo, the visual imaging company (and subsequent myth) he created that just so happened to overlap with his close-knit group of friends. Looking up Ray Petri, Google returns very little helpful information beyond speculation by Armand Limnander that the legendary stylist informed some of the major spring 2007 collections, and a piece (also by Limnander) written for the Times in tribute. Buffalo was named for Jacques Negrit, the bouncer at nightclub Bains Douches whose employees wore a jacket that read "buffalo," a rather fearsome homage to the race-conscious Bob Marley's song "Buffalo Soldier." Buffalo, in the 1980s, was a look often involving radical, excessive juxtapositions of tribal prints and rough, American West-inspired materials; and street casting with a flare for the androgynous. Buffalo also involved a rather prolific clique of stylists, photographers, artists, and models—a veritable industry of self-sustaining UK talent, most of whom have survived Petri to occupy very many pages on Google.

The present issue of Arena Homme+ is the most comprehensive tribute to date, and it comes from the estate, as it were, from a magazine that branched out from now-defunct Arena. The latter magazine was founded by Nick Logan, who previously opened The Face, where Petri made probably his most enduring mark. Arena Homme+ Editor-in-Chief Joann Furniss collaborated with creative director Neville Brody, who commissioned much of the initial Buffalo work, beginning with The Face, on the issue; she claims that in fact Petri and Brody were the reason Arena was founded.

The tribute re-unites Petri's crew, among them photographer Jamie Morgan, who co-founded Buffalo; stylist Mitzi Lorenz, Petri's longtime assistant; designer/stylist/muse Judy Blame; and a young model/Jehavah's Witness, in front of whom no one dared swear, named Naomi Campbell. Furniss sees the continuing awareness of Petri in the fashion industry, particularly in the continuing elevation of stylists, represented by Nicola Formichetti. She also sees broader relevance to the cult of Buffalo in a renewed optimisim about pop culture's global-improvement mission, embodied in the body of one much Gossiped-about cover star:


FURNISS: Have you seen the Ed Westwick cover?

GARTENFELD: I did. Why was Ed the cover that you chose to match up with Ray?

FURNISS: There were two covers—a limited one, which is really very limited, that's the Buffalo cover, which features the Bains Douches bouncer Jacques Negrit; and the other with Ed.

GARTENFELD: So you've done the limited edition, and that seems like a natural choice because Jacques Negrit was somebody who was crucial to the Buffalo set, but what about the choice of Ed?

FURNISS: Well we thought, "What would be a cover of The Face for an issue like this." We decided it's Ed Westwick.  And I worked quite closely with the Alasdair McLellan, and he said he wanted to photograph Ed Westwick.

GARTENFELD: So what's interesting about him?

FURNISS: Basically, I think it's the way he looks. He looks like a Buffalo boy. He's kind of white and English, sure, but he looks like one of the models from that time. He looks like a 1950s pin-up. That, for me, was really important, because in the '80s your see a reflection of '50s Americana. That's exactly what Petri did. I think he looked at a lot of American pop culture in that way, through the laundromats and 501s.

GARTENFELD: Ed's got a total 1950s body, that's Streetcar physique, with the barrel chest.

FURNISS: Exactly! I kept thinking of pictures of somebody like Kirk Douglas, and the way men's bodies were then. I think in some of our photographs Ed does look like a young Marlin Brando—at the same time, he's a total global pop culture thing, and that's what I was interested in. I think for boys, there are three key figures: High School Musical, and Zac Efron who Interview did so well; Twilight, with Rob Pattinson; and Gossip Girl with Ed. For me, those are the three big pop culture things at the moment.

GARTENFELD: Are those the same, do you feel like those are the same in England as they are here?  Do they have the same resonance?

FURNISS: I think they do. Gossip Girl is on iTV2, which is attached to iTV, so you have it relentlessly advertised, and I think that people are very aware of Gossip Girl, like everyone's aware of it, everywhere.

GARTENFELD: In London, do you have that same culture of private schools that do in New York?

FURNISS: Oh, yeah. It might be the Upper East Side for you lot, and we have all the kids who live in West London.  But I don't even think we even have to relate it to being British.  I think it's the kind of exoticness of it being so American, which actually is what we're looking for. And I thought, well, it feels kind of big and disposable, but so of the moment. And the title of this issue is "Propaganda," so it's you know, p-o-p...

GARTENFELD: And so did he feel like a political (or politicized) choice of cover for you, Ed?

FURNISS: He's not political at all! I quite like the "XOXO" on the cover, which was a mock Constructivist think. Neville Brody, who designed this issue, amongst his credits, he did of course The Face but the he did Living Marxism, and I quite fancy that cross. That's the thing about Ray Petri and his generation of people: there was still that idea that pop culture could serve a serious purpose in the culture. It can be fun and it can be great, but you can say something. For Ray Petri it was bringing different races into fashion and approaching masculinity in new ways, and not being so hung up about gay or straight. With Reality TV you have this idea that the more normal, the better. For Buffalo it's actually being an interesting character or an extraordinary person, without necessarily being famous.

GARTERNFELD: You sound so optimistic about Obama America. But why does Buffo feel relevant now? In 2007, people were talking about Buffalo again, and the inspiration for the shows was Ray and was Buffalo...

FURNISS: September's issue was the 20th anniversary of Ray Petri's death, and it's also the 25th anniversary of what they acknowledge as the start of Buffalo, 25 years since the first The Face covers. And then Armand Limnander wrote that piece in the New York Times a couple years ago, and he's a major Buffalo fan. But Buffalo has always been present for us, because this magazine stems from The Face. Somebody like Olivier Rizzo, who's our fashion director, he said his whole career is based on Buffalo. And I think that there's also, you know, I think you find at the end, I mean, because this is what the issue is about, that at the end of the '80s, beginning of the '90s, a lot of significant gay men just die, and the whole course of pop culture just changes. And that was a big thing about doing this issue is that after, you know, you have Petri, Derek Jarman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Herring, a few years later, Leigh Bowery, you know, the list goes on, and certainly in Britain, you feel the shift in the culture.

GARTENFELD: What is that shift?

FURNISS: In the 1980s, you have a particular kind of pop culture that is really insane. You have Boy George on Top of the Pops, and everyone asking, "Is that a girl or is that a boy?" And in the end, no one gives a shit, really. You have a very strange dominant pop culture, and Derek Jarman is really widely known as a film maker—I can't imagine somebody coming along now like Derek Jarman and everyone knowing who he is. When a lot of these men died, there's a shift. You get another, wider thing in pop culture, a mass culture where irony is the prevailing tone, which would have appalled somebody like Ray Petri, and you have a barrier between gay and straight. Everything becomes niche.