My Mentor: Adrian Clark On Ray Petri
'It was Ray's influence that made me fearless in my decision-making'
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Your support makes all the difference.Even more interesting was that he went against the politics of fashion journalism. It's a niche market which relies on advertising sales more than on circulation and Ray turned his back on designer clothes. He said that you can re-create all of these looks from thrift shop clothes and stuff that you've borrowed from your grandad. In turn, that spawned a generation of designers who had that feel.
After college I went into styling for a trade magazine called Fashion Weekly and what I brought to the magazine was a real essence of risk-taking. I used to review the catwalk collections and I would score them out of 10 for creativity and commercialism. Nobody would have ever dared do that before. It was Ray's influence that made me fearless in my decision-making and that hadn't been seen before in trade journalism.
Ray was incredibly creative and pioneering. He created a new fashion phenomenon - Buffalo - and really shook fashion up. People like Jean-Paul Gaultier and John Galliano would be the first to say he was probably the most important fashion stylist and of the 1980s. Without him The Face wouldn't have become as iconic as it did, and without The Face he wouldn't have had a vehicle to vent his creativity. The two fed off each other and that created a complete scene which moved into the club world and eventually into the mainstream.
He died of Aids in 1989 and several beautiful books have been published about his work which sum up the1980s and what the Buffalo period was all about.
Adrian Clark is the editor of Fashion Inc
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