Antonio Lopez 1970: Sex Fashion & Disco is a feature documentary-based time capsule concerning Paris and New York between 1969 and 1973 and viewed through the eyes of Antonio Lopez (1943-1987), the dominant fashion illustrator of the time, and told through the lives of his colorful and sometimes outrageous milieu. A native of Puerto Rico and raised in The Bronx, Antonio was a seductive arbiter of style and glamour who, beginning in the 1960s, brought elements of the urban street and ethnicity to bear on a postwar fashion world desperate for change and diversity. Counted among Antonio’s discoveries – muses of the period – were unusual beauties such as Cathee Dahmen, Grace Jones, Pat Cleveland, Tina Chow, Jessica Lange, Jerry Hall and Warhol Superstars Donna Jordan, Jane Forth and Patti D’Arbanville among others. Antonio’s inner circle in New York during this period was also comprised of his personal and creative partner, Juan Ramos (1942-1995), also Puerto Rican-born and raised in Harlem, makeup artist Corey Tippin and photographer Bill Cunningham among others.
Lower Manhattan in the late 1960s was a cauldron of creative talent, extremely selective, but inclusive of and tolerant to the seemingly disparate creative camps that cut a broad swath through culture; music, fashion, the visual arts, film and entertainment. The film explores this vertiginous period, and Antonio’s charismatic role therein, through archival footage and stills of studio life in Carnegie Hall, infamous venues such as Max’s Kansas City and Hotel Chelsea, with original interviews with principal characters on the scene at that moment. The tumultuous late 1960s were rocked by the Vietnam war, political assassinations and unrest and the student protest movement, all of which create a high-contrast backdrop to Antonio and his entourage, blithely on a quest for beauty and pleasure in the vortex of fashion and art of the time.