Work In Progress

Peter Hujar: Woolworth Building:1976

The Electric Spectre
Wayne Sterling

“I saw a Polaroid of you and that's how I knew you were here,” said the Swan, mouth arching upwards to solicit the most conspicuous kiss of the evening thus far. She parted her lips, wet already in anticipation and grazed her mouth against mine for that split second for it to seem intimate. In a room where every glance, every gesture was semaphore, Swan's kiss was having its desired effect. Because it was not the kiss of ex-lovers. It was not an invitation to love. It was the kiss of benediction. It was kisses dispensed to the chosen few now left behind in the wake of her ascension.

The Swan you see was going to Heaven. She was leaving all of us mortals behind while she was being swept up in the rapture of her rise to Hollywood. She was flying away, never to come back, to her first role in a major studio release, to a 4000 sq foot house on Doheny Drive in the Hollywood Hills , to the breathless dedication of her ICM agents and publicists. The Swan was in the throes of a transformation where she was to change and become an electric spectre shimmering only on film and television screens and computer screens, rarely ever again to be seen in the flesh .

Day for night.

"Every time I come back to America I'm infused with pure pure optimism,"

Chad White and Peggy Lipton The Swimmer L'uomo Vogue June 2006 PH: by Steven Klein

But Wagon! My idea of LA is very specific. Not general. In details. The minutiae. I'm seeing sex and jewels, not ice but rubies and sapphires and skin and sex .

Photograph by Patrick McMullan Stephen Sprouse, Steven Meisel, Terri Toye, 1982

theimagist has been becoming too much of a formula for me recently so I decided to look for a new challenge in writing. The only thing I can think of that is grueling but rewarding was long form prose. So here's the first excerpt from a burgeoning attempt to "fictionalize" some of my adventures in fashion. The following is an introduction to a seminal figure I met very early on when I first ventured into the business.

miumiu.com is a genius bit of work in progress