It began with a book. Thakoon Panichgul was at the Whitney Museum’s 2006 Art Party when a photo of a weathered hardcover, gilded ornamental scrolls covering its spine, caught his eye. The most striking part was the shapely legs sprouting from the bottom of its pages. A figure appeared to be wriggling in (or out) seductively, naked but for a pair of girlish undies. The image was part of a series of two-legged objects styled and shot by photographer Laurie Simmons in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Panichgul placed a bid on it during the evening’s silent auction, only to lose out in the end. “I was sort of obsessed with it,” Panichgul says. “I liked how it was quite erotic in a nerdy way. I was really upset when I lost.”
A look from Panichgul and Simmons’s runway collaboration.
Weeks later, Panichgul met Simmons at a New York screening of her film The Music of Regret, starring Meryl Streep, but Simmons doesn’t remember the encounter. “I have no memory of that night,” she says. “There were a lot of people, and I was never so nervous in my entire life.”
No matter, kismet would work in the designer’s favor. He and Simmons crossed paths again in 2007 at a dinner held by Simmons’s dealer, Angela Westwater, and this time the connection stuck. “I love to talk about fashion, and Thakoon loves to talk about art, so we were each trying to talk about what we wanted to talk about,” she recalls. “I was surprised he knew so much about my work.” Panichgul invited Simmons to his fall 2008 show, while she asked him to stop by her TriBeCa studio. It was there that a print collaboration was born. “He kind of shyly asked me,” Simmons explains. “A lot of people assume that artists don’t want to work outside their prescribed area, that making the jump into the commercial world is a step down. What they don’t know is that most artists are dying to collaborate with fashion people. It’s exciting that my work could have another incarnation in his clothes.”
Fast-forward to New York’s recent Fashion Week. Simmons is sitting front row at Panichgul’s Thakoon show watching models flit by in flowy frocks, chiffon cardigans and bandaged dresses. Of the various prints in the collection, hers are those featuring roses that, yes, seem to sprout legs. “Wow,” the artist says a week later. “The first dress that had my pattern on it was a black jacquard, so I couldn’t see if the roses were on it. Then the dress got close enough, and I almost jumped out of my seat! I was pretty pleased.”
