Editor’s note: This story was first published on March 16, 2016, about a week after a total solar eclipse occurred in Indonesia. In anticipation of the upcoming solar eclipse, the first in the United States since 2017, this piece has been edited and expanded.
At his fall 1999 show, Stephen Sprouse debuted prints he made using NASA photos taken by Pathfinder on Mars for an audience wearing 3D glasses. Although some critics understood Sprouse’s futurism in the context of the millennium, his use of these prints was not merely a stylistic gesture. Like Patricia Morrisroe wrote The designer’s motto was to ‘combine downtown cool with uptown luxury and space-age fabrics’. It wasn’t the designer’s first collaboration with NASA either. In 1984, the ever-progressive (and variably solvent) designer presented an unforgettable large-capacity show at the Ritz nightclub. There, as a video showed spacecraft in ascent mode, Sprouse’s muse, transgender model Teri Toye, joined catwalkers wearing “interplanetary prints” based on NASA images, which the designer enlarged and printed with backward graffiti spelling out the name of the planet spelled. . “Stephen loved music and space,” explains Sprouse’s co-biographer Mauricio Padilha. “While looking through his archives, I came across a handwritten quote that read: ‘Too far is not far enough.’ I think if Stephen had been alive, he would have been the first to contact Elon Musk to get a ticket to space!”
Stephen Sprouse, Fall 1984
