Antony Price and Jerry Hall at 'Fashion Aid', 1985. Photograph by Richard Young.

Price's women are so strong they almost become macho, his masculinity so exaggerated it borders camp - Barbie doll meets action man, fusing polar opposites together into a glorious sexual confusion.

Alternatively referred to as rock's favourite couturier, an unparalleled master of modern made-to-measure occasionwear and the most criminally overlooked designer in British fashion, Antony Price and his eponymous creations are the stuff of fashion legend. Revered and referenced by both his contemporaries and the generations of talent that followed him, both Price and his distinctive brand of unabashed glamour and sex-appeal have defied the vagaries of fashion to consistently appeal to new audiences. Quite simply, Antony Price is one of the greatest designers Britain has ever produced.

A statement like that requires serious foundation. Luckily, the stellar trajectory of Price's creativity more than justifies the moniker. In the sixties and seventies, Price combined mass-production with niche aesthetic, selling erstwhile extreme art-school taste en masse and forming the look of the eighties a decade before it became mainstream. He defined the look of Roxy Music, the decade's most visually literate rock band, along the way inventing the sartorial template of Glam Rock and the marriage of music, fashion and retail a good half-decade before Westwood, McLaren and The Sex Pistols. In the eighties, he trussed Steve Strange in shiny shiny leather for 'The Anvil', wrapped Duran Duran in pastel taffeta for 'Rio' and staged a show-stopping, dam-busting 'Fashion Extravaganza' at the Camden Palace which sent him bankrupt. Later in the decade, Price invented 'result wear', boned and bombasted evening frocks for women who go to serious parties, slapped a four-figure price-tag on it (during the harshest economic downturn since the Depression) and effortlessly picked up the British Fashion Council's award for Glamour in 1990.

Rightly so, as glamour is Antony Price's stock-in-trade. But Price is a purveyor of decidedly modern glamour, a slick, chic, hard vision of men and women culled from Hollywood movies, Pulp novels and the postwar visual language of Allen Jones' fetishised sexuality and Alberto Vargas pin-ups synthesised for the here and now. This came to the fore in the images created for Roxy Music - he has been credited as the chief illusionist of what he dubbed “the Roxy Machine” and the female archetypes he created in the Roxy cover girls reflect and amplify those offered in his boutiques, epitomising Price's enduring vision of glossy, predatory female sexuality.

To generations of style-obsessed teenagers old and new, those Roxy Music LP sleeves were a thousand times more iconic than any Vogue cover: Kari-Ann sprawled across a gatefold in Price's kitsch reclamation of a showgirl's costume; Amanda Lear veiled, cinched and teetering on sex-shop heels; and Jerry 'Ferry' Hall, the ultimate Siren, part harridan part mannequin, sprayed metallic blue, with fins at her ankles, crawling across the Welsh coastline. The manner in which Price dressed - or in many cases, undressed - the Roxy girls served to define the band's trademark pop retro-futurism. From the first cover, his obsession with a certain brand of 1950s nostalgia linked the band intrinsically to rock history while the interpretation of these sources projected into the future - arguably transforming Roxy Music into as much an aesthetic as musical experiment.

Naturally, men too are subject to Price's whims: one need only look at Bryan Ferry, the perfect 'Pop Artefact' in Price's acid-bright suiting, tightly-waisted and square-shouldered, a template for the eighties quickly ripped off by just about every Italian fashion house. Price's clothes helped transform Roxy Music concerts into fashion statements, combining style, art and music in the Roxy cult of Pop glamour - a glamour which, fundamentally, was accessible. A series of boutiques - first Stirling Cooper, then Che Guevara and finally Plaza - offered Price's clothing for sale across London in the 1970s. Consistent with his obsessive perfectionism, everything from the shop fittings, to the mannequins' maquillage, to the carrier-bags themselves were devised by Price.

To paraphrase Richard Hamilton, what is it that makes Antony Price's clothes so different, so appealing? Passion. Pure, unadulterated passion, incomparable drive and an unwavering conviction of his own talent and aesthetic. Indeed, Price's aesthetic remains as distinctive and focussed today as it did upon his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 1968 - men's and women's wear built to flatter the form, squaring the shoulder, cinching the waist and girding the loins. Price's women are so strong they almost become macho, his masculinity so exaggerated it borders camp - Barbie doll meets action man, fusing polar opposites together into a glorious sexual confusion. If Price had been born in a different age, his extreme, theatrical vision would have stood him in good stead as a costume designer at the height of the Hollywood studio system. His pleated lame could stand in for Adrian, his tailored tuxedo a counterpart to Travis Banton's creations for Dietrich.

Today, the iconic, magnetic boutiques on South Molton Street and the King's Road may have closed (victims of the recession he so assiduously ignored), but Price is still in demand, creating custom-built clothing for a discerning international clientele hankering after his sensational cutting skills and arch sense of theatre. Likewise, he has leant his hand once more to the mass-manufacture with which he first made his name, and its appeal proves to be no less potent: witness his recent sell-out 'Priceless' range for Topman (a second collection is already on the cards for 2009). Antony Price's clothes represent a world of glamorous fantasy, escapism in extremis, and an awe of the power of fashion to transform even the most mundane into a walking work of art.

Fashion is like trying to create a number one pop hit every season. But designers achieve that success only once, maybe twice if they’re really lucky.

He styled Roxy Music and Duran Duran. His best customer is Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. From rock aristocracy to the royals, Antony Price has dressed them all. Friend and muse Jerry Hall talks to the British fashion designer about Joan Crawford, Flash Gordon and toilet roll.

Jerry Hall: Antony darling, do you remember the first time we met?

Antony Price: We were doing the Roxy Music cover for Siren with Bryan [Ferry]. I had made you a mermaid costume and painted your body blue. It was the hottest day of the year. We shot it in the middle of the day in bright sun and we had to use umbrellas to get ride of the shadows. It was quite a performance. After the shoot I had to wash the paint off you in the bath very quickly so we could catch the train.

One of my favourite runway moments was at one of your fashion shows. It was the late 70s and Marie Helvin and I were both modelling as British Vogue cover girls at the time. We wore leather zip skirts and motorcycle helmets to the sound of motorcycles revving up. We threw off our helmets and let loose our hair to a huge roar from the crowd.

Jerry Hall: How did you plan the shows?

Antony Price: They were always planned at the last minute because we never had any money. It was a monstrous panic as that was my first big show. Everybody turned up for it because I was kind of the Christopher Kane of the moment. I opened the show with the music from Close Encounters and had an incredible crash sound effect. We hadn’t had any rehearsals and there weren’t any cues. Backstage, I could hear the music whirring up and thought, "Oh my God, the crash is any minute now and they’re still standing here!" You got out just on the nick of time and pulled the helmets off right on the crash. It’s not that long ago but the business has changed so much. The public never saw fashion shows. Now there are banks of cameras and it’s straight out on five million fashion TV programmes. In fact, my music and fashion spectacular at the Camden Palace three or four years later was the first time the public had actually seen a show, much to my horror of the fashion business as suddenly they lost control of what the public saw. But removing the power of editorship cost me dear because Jagger was there and I remember the publicity went out as the ‘Mick and Jerry show’. My name never even got mentioned!

Jerry Hall: I once had a black sequin suit by you called ‘Joan Crawford’. What do you love so much about the golden era of Hollywood?

Antony Price: I think my interest in that Hollywood thing is the culmination of a quest for perfection. I was always fascinated by Travis Banton’s costumes for Dietrich in her films for Josef von Sternberg. At the time they worked in the Hollywood system where clothes were made in huge costume departments. It was all done on site, like a temple of illusion. When Mommie Dearest, the film about Joan Crawford starring Faye Dunaway, was released we did a fabulous window display in Plaza, my King’s Road shop. The dummy wore my Crawford suit, had a giant 1940s victory roll hair-do and held a red coat hanger in her hand. There’s a scene in the film where she beats her daughter saying, "No wire coat hangers!". It’s a hysterically funny scene. Joan Crawford was a monstrous witch. We sold loads of those suits.

Jerry Hall: Your clothes had a futuristic, Flash Gordon look to them...

Antony Price: Definitely. The adverts for my shop Plaza, which I drew myself, had a recurring sci-fi character in them called Zonda. She was an extremely camp woman with an hourglass figure and bullet breasts. Everything looked very film and modern in Plaza. We used to display the clothes as photographs in the windows, which was shaped like a big letterbox movie screen. I remember one display of a model with sprayed-on black hair and a skirt with gold zips revealing blue skin. She looked like she was from another planet.

Jerry Hall: Your cap sleeved T-shirt was copied by the world…What inspired it?

Antony Price: I loved all the camp drawings by the gay fashion artist Tom of Finland. They were a big influence. I dressed the guy on the back-cover of Lou Reed’s Transformer album in one of my cap sleeve T-shirts. He ended up looking like a Tom of Finland figure. He wasn’t a model: he was actually Ernie, the tour manager. He had the perfect body for that T-shirt – wide shoulders and a miniscule waist. The girl opposite him in the shoot was model Gayla Mitchell. Everyone thought she was a drag queen.

Jerry Hall: You spent your winters in the Caribbean…Did you get a lot of your ideas by sitting on a beach there?

Antony Price: I sure did. Especially when I was camping it around Mustique with you. I’ve got a great photo of us in front of Colin Tenant’s Gingerbread House, which Bryan [Ferry] had hired and we were all staying there. Watching you swim and Gayla dive was very inspirational. Gayla was so white underwater that she went blue and she used to wear this sort of red jam on her lips that didn’t come off in the water. She was a ballerina so the shapes she made under the water were so elegant, quite astounding. I’ve always been inspired by nature and Mustique has the most gorgeous flowers, especially the blue water lilies.

Jerry Hall: Who taught you how to cut fabric?

Antony Price: A woman called Mrs. Betts taught me at Bradford Art College. Every week she used to give us a drawing, usually something from Balenciaga or Givenchy, and we’d have to cut the pattern for it. I was brought up on a farm in Yorkshire so I was good at dry walling, which is all about looking at a pile of stones and guessing what shapes would fit into what gaps. It gave me an early grasp of curvature. From that I understood exactly how shapes look when they are cut flat and when they’re sewn up how you create things to curve around the human body. By the time I got to the Royal College of Art I was an expert and could show the machinists how to do it. The only other person I met who was as good was the milliner Brian Harris, who made hats for me. He was a friend of Cecelia Birthwell’s. That was during the golden period when we all lived in the Ladbroke Grove area. Roxy music was being formed and Ossie Clark used to drive around in his silver Buick Riviera stinking of ganja. It had the first car sound system that played tapes the size of kitchen sinks. Very camp.

Jerry Hall: Did you feel a lot of peer pressure turning out your collections?

Antony Price: Absolutely. Fashion is like trying to create a number one pop hit every season. But designers achieve that success only once, maybe twice if they’re really lucky. I did it once when I was working for Stirling Cooper in the 1970s and designed the whirly skirt. I got the idea sat on the toilet looking at the paper’s spiral cardboard tube. The skirt was a one-piece pattern repeated eight times. It sold in the millions. Everyone copied it. So you do something like that and it’s fantastic but then you become your own worst enemy. It’s like Robbie Williams going fucking nuts after Angels because he’s expected to do it again. You go into crisis. Shows are really hard, especially when you don’t have the financial back up, which was always my problem. I couldn’t even afford assistants. After a show, when everybody else was at the party, I was still bagging the clothes and loading them into a van. Every penny I had was tied up with them.

Jerry Hall: You now have a couture business and make one-of-a-kind clothes for Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and do the best weddings. How do you like these commissions compared to the rest of the fashion business?

Antony Price: Well, the first thing is that they pay 50% up front. It’s fascinating now I fit people at their own homes because I see what other clothes they’ve bought. You see which designers they buy alongside you and it gives an idea of why they want a dress from you and what’s missing in the market that forces them to come to you. Knowing what influences people and knowing what they want is crucial. I know when my customer is pleased because they’re stood right in front of me. When you make something for the public that hasn’t yet bought it, you have to do a lot of guesswork. Also, I’ve never really understood about watering something down. My partner Rick used to say, "do what you want Tone, just do it half the size". Being a showman, I’ve never really understood half the size. I leave that to other people. I think it limits your imagination but doing clothes directly for people means that they take some of the responsibility.

Jerry Hall: You’re also known for your men’s clothes. What is your favourite shape for a man’s shape?

Antony Price: Menswear stays very much the same. It’s really just the fabric choice that changes and how the clothes are worn: tucked in or rolled up or pushed down, collar up or down. When men look at a garment in the mirror they only look at the collar, the chest and the sleeve. The real sale is made around the face and the shoulder area. I like highly padded shoulders as they were in the 1950s but now we are in a period of thin suits because it’s fashionable for the men to be incredibly skinny. That’s dictated by the shape of the male models that are being used. Using a massive muscled, athletic male looks wrong now. A minute ago, during the 1980s and 1990s it was totally right to have lots of chest and arm muscle. Now it’s Pete Doherty thin. So, all the collars and everything are very thin. I’m sure that the 40s shoulder thing that is happening to womenswear will creep into menswear. But nothing happens suddenly in menswear.

Jerry Hall: Would you ever consider working under contract for a big design house?

Antony Price: I’ve never been offered it. Last year I was put up by the Fashion Council as top couturier behind John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood, who’ve had endless shows paid for in Paris for 10 years. I’ve never had a single show in Paris. I’ve not had a penny given to me ever so I don’t think I’ve been given a fair crack of the whip. I’ve never met the right people and I’m not a hustler. I’m just not pushy and always found it deeply embarrassing to push myself on somebody. I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t ask for a date. They’d have to ask me. But they never would – I’m too tall.

Originally published in Wonderland, April/May 2008

At the 1989 British Fashion awards Janet Street Porter delivered the most memorable fashion quote in years. What she was interested in, she said, was 'result' wear; the kind of frocks that don’t beat around the bushes, the sort of thing that leaves a bloke no room for doubt. To illustrate her point, she was wearing a short, curvy, off-the-shoulder cocktail dress in wine-coloured crushed velvet by Antony Price and, naturally enough, it was to him she handed the award for Glamour Designer of the Year. Trotting up to receive the award, in a grey suit with a bumfreezer jacket designed by himself, Antony Price waved the trophy aloft and said, 'Thanks. It’s been a long time'.

Antony Price makes saucy dresses for women who like to tease - and he has been doing it for some time. They are clothes, he says, 'designed by a man for a man.' If you’re worried that his dresses might be demeaning to women, you only have to look at those who wear Antony Price to be quite sure of who is in control of what is meant by them: Jerry Hall, Joan Collins, Paula Yates, Francesca Thyssen, Marie Helven, Janet Street-Porter herself. Not exactly a bunch of doormats.

'I don’t profess to dress radical women,' asserts Antony, with typical downrightness. 'I know from experience they don’t want the radically new. If I want to know what’s a seller, I get in a typical client, show her a rail of dresses and say, "Which would you wear?" They always want the same dress, and the reason they end up buying the same one is that they - the dresses - answer the right questions. Does the neckline look good above the table level? Can you life a glass, eat in it? I’m not embarrassed if they sell. This is commercial art built around a twenty-two-inch zip!'

Antony Price has a shop in South Molton Street, a studio in SW15, supplies collections to A La Mode in Hans Crescent - who can hardly get enough of them - and is now selling healthily in Europe. He is big, forthright, funny and nearly forty-five, his conversation an endearing mixture of Yorkshire spade-calling and flamboyant hyperbole. As disconcertingly observant as he can be about flaws in the looks of others, he is doubly acutely conscious of his own imperfections. Caught up in the social whirl that he sees as part of his job, he admits, 'I’m not one of those people who can just go straight out in the evening. I have to spend time on myself, otherwise I can easily appear a bit knackered and northern-looking.' Spruced up, however, he cuts an imposing figure at parties, often wearing his military cap and something big-shouldered and narrow-hipped, a Star Captain beamed down to earth for an evening’s rock ‘n’ roll.

The generous scale of the Price genes has cast its own influence. “We were not a straight up-and-down family,” he says. 'My sister Judith was a poor man’s Sophia Loren - I’ve always loved that curvaceous type, even when thin and flat were in. My designs were born from my own physical type.' It’s a long way for a boy of strong Keighley stock to the bright lights of London at the height of the sixties, but Antony was no ordinary lad. 'Look at these hands; like a labourer’s,' he exclaims. From an early age they were turned to all kinds of practical and creative uses, dry-stone walling was one. 'At ten, I was always gardening, digging up the place to put in lily ponds.'

Antony’s mother - an ace on the sewing machine - was separated from his father when he was five. ('A Welshman called Prince in the RAF. She was attracted to uniform - so am I.') She took the family - an older sister, Antony and a pair of younger twins - to live in a quiet stretch of the Ribble valley, where the main excitement was the railway line. 'There were thirteen children at the local school and four of them were Prices. It was like a cross between The Railway Children and Whistle Down the Wind; a fabulous, happy life of waking up to a million birds singing, working carthorses, home-made lemonade, hand-milking cows - it was beyond the Hovis ads.'

Among young Antony’s obsessive hobbies was an interest in birds - in watching and drawing wild ones and breeding bantams and pheasants: 'They were the most beautiful, elegant things, like women in fabulous hats. When they held themselves up to strut around they looked just like models on a catwalk.' (Aficionados will remember the dresses with tail feathers that had pranced on Antony’s catwalk in past years.) When he was sixteen, his affections shifted from birds to people. 'My sisters had to be pushed and pummeled into clothes I’d made for them, and I’d spend ages doing their hair, and then take photographs of them'. Coming across a copy of Vogue, he remembers a moment of revelation that propelled him towards fashion and dreams of glamorous women: 'It was a spread of hair by Alexandre de Paris, and the girl was Fiona Thyssen. I was transfixed'.

In 1962, Antony Price arrived to study fashion at Bradford College of Art, a place whose obscurity had just been forever expunged by the legend of David Hockney, who had recently passed through. Fashion design, however, in those pre-swinging sixties, was still much a dressmaker’s discipline, for which Antony is eternally grateful. 'A Miss Betts taught me how to cut flat patterns for Givenchy and Balenciaga dresses and I got quite good at it. By the time I arrived at the Royal College, I was considerably better than the others, technically. They thought I was weird to like those old lady things- but construction has always been crucial for me.' (Until recently, he has cut the patterns for all his dresses, a factor that has given him their fit and flattery a particular reputation amongst his clients.)

He graduated from the Royal College of Art in menswear - 'unheard-of then' - and has perfect recall of each outfit in his degree show, an early manifestation of the nostalgic spirit of seventies glam, of which he was to become one of the authors. 'It was seriously thirties and forties: hair scraped back and ears showing - revolutionary in those days of long hair - and wide shoulders - also new. There was a ginger snakeskin jacket and a divine, long, narrow leather coat, lined in tweed, and fat ties. They were clothes people wanted to wear. They were all bought by people in the David Hockney set'.

By 1968, Antony was designing menswear (and later women’s) for Stirling Cooper, but not before another formative experience- a part-time job with the film, theatrical and TV costumiers Bermans & Nathans. 'We’d be dealing with wardrobes for Hammer horror films, all sorts of things. I’d have the chance to examine the construction of these fabulous things - the flapping wings, the Roman centurions’ uniforms.' From time to time, a ghost of that past drifts through his shows, like the dress with vast pantomime panniers, or the velvet one with a bow the size of wings on the bottom; the snake dress with an incorporated scaly headpiece, or the blood-red velvet dress, fit for a vampire, in which Christy Turlington va-voomed her way around the stage at the British Fashion Awards.

While making 'obscene amounts of money designing hideously commercial dresses that sold in their millions to Miss Selfridge', at Stirling Cooper, Antony began to connect with the pop world. He met the Rolling Stones and, at an Ossie Clark show in 1974, Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. 'Bryan wanted me to do his album cover. We would meet in nightclubs: he was secretive and artistic, yet he didn’t dress particularly outrageously. When we did shoots, it would be half the pictures with the band in their own clothes, and half in mine. Bryan always wanted to have another option, but he always liked mine in the end. All this business about me manipulating his image is nonsense. No one bossed or pushed; he’d asked everyone’s opinion. He was the batsman, I was the bowler.'

Roxy Music became the art school intellectuals of glam rock. Their self-conscious construct of outrageous spivvy dressing, greased-back hair and gorgeous, curvaceous backing singers - chosen more for their looks than their voices - began, with Antony’s help, an obsession with appearance and pose that has escalated in the pop industry ever since. In the search for improbably glamorous women for Roxy Music covers, the seventeen-year-old Jerry Hall was procured to pose as a blue mermaid, dressed - if that’s the right word - by Antony Price on Holyhead beach. Thus began an ill-fated romance between Hall and Ferry, but a firm friendship between Jerry and Antony.

So life went on into the late seventies, with Antony (now owner of a King’s Road shop and a label called Plaza) happy, but ignored by the fashion world. 'We made so much money, but there was no snob value in the clothes, and they got no coverage in the magazines. I wasn’t particularly ambitious - I was having a great life, I knew everyone, was asked everywhere, would spend my holidays on Mustique and Mikonos. But the link with Bryan and pop music was doing me no favours. In those days, fashion people were snobby about pop music. They thought it was sweaty.'

And he was not playing by the fashion rules. His shows were held erratically, and in unconventional places like The Camden Palace, and once he made the mistake- wholly innocent in the breach of protocol he was perpetrating - of not putting Vogue in the front row, thinking they would be able to see better further back.

The final blow that made Antony realise he could not stand apart from the system came in 1985. At Bob Geldof’s instigation, a committee was set up in London to mount the world’s biggest international fashion show, Fashion Aid, to raise money for Ethiopia. Everyone who was anyone was asked to take part: Yves Saint Laurent from Paris, Giorgio Armani from Milan, Issey Miyake from Tokyo, and all the significant London designers. But not Antony Price. A rumour had reached him that the committee had written off his clothes as 'Not really fashion'. In the event, he did have his moment at Fashion Aid - Jerry Hall bursting out of a hat box in a vast black velvet pouffe dress - but from that time he was a man with something to prove.

So, to be standing in front of TV cameras, on the podium of the Royal Albert Hall, being applauded by the British fashion establishment on their biggest night out, meant a lot to Antony Price: acceptance at last.

Over the past three years, his show has become one of the most eagerly-awaited in the London Fashion Week calendar. Everyone knows it will be fun; he knows what he’s doing and won’t disappoint. Frequently, as one preposterously sexy number follows the last, a noise unfamiliar in fashion shows bubbles through the applause - it is the sound of laughter, and often it is coming from the models as well as the audience. In the scheme of fashion, Antony Price’s show in London has something of the spirit and significance of Azzedine Alaïa’s in Paris: the models clearly adore the designer and want to have the dresses themselves straight away. At his last show, the girls made great flirtatious play out of flipping their sixties wigs, Yasmin Le Bon risked an uncharacteristic grin and Denice Lewis, with a ridiculously Monroe-esque wobble in her walk, owing to an ankle injury, brought the house down.

Antony, vindicated at last, may not, however, remain content with playing the small London stage. He has always kept an eye on Paris, often feeling a kinship with the work of Thierry Mugler and Alaïa. 'In terms of design, I was where they were, and often before. I was always hoping someone would see it; it used to upset me not to get the recognition.' He has no plans to show in Paris, but sees it as an inevitability. As the women line up at the till to buy his frocks at £1,000 apiece, the next step, he says, is to become more European-minded. 'People believe in Paris now, you’ve got to go with the winner. In this country we’ve become more international. I don’t want to end up numbered amongst the quaint.'

Originally published in British Vogue, March 1990

I love putting together videos for Roxy... I can play Cecil B. de Mille on a small scale. It’s a bit of old Hollywood.

Antony Price… modern couturier. His shop is a salon, very stark, very simplistic, lit in soft violet. A radically new concept of buying in today’s tendency to mass consumption. The salon has two sofas; the clothes for men and women are displayed on showcards together with illustrations; the approach is personalised, and individual service. Antony Price believes in quality...

'It’s an insult to people’s intelligence to charge them for bad quality; the public has become more quality conscious and it has a right to be so. With the desire for quality comes the desire for service, and that’s what the shop is all about. I believe the public is ready for it.' Who does Antony Price dress? Just about everybody in the world of glamour, rock and media. He trained at Bradford School of Art, where he did a general art course, then moved on to the Royal College of Art where he studied fashion under Janey Ironside. In 1969, he began as a designer for Stirling Cooper, later moved on to Plaza, which he recently left to step up his own independent shop. His clothes are body-conscious, constructed, tailored, and he sells not exclusively to the rock world but to anyone and everyone who wants to dress for the best. 'The thing to concentrate on is the fit - after all, everyone wants to look physically attractive. My clothes do things for people who might not have the perfect body... who does? ...because they’re structured, to support themselves in certain places. The definition of shape changes from year to year and we make it change. How? By moving lines around, shapes around, that’s where highly technical cutting comes in.. Antony Price is above all a technician. He builds stage-sets for Roxy, designed his own shops, designs his clothes. 'What’s different about covering something with cardboard or with fabric? It's all origami.'

How does he see fashion today, in the future? 'Fashion... the word is exactly that. Fashion is becoming a thing for leisure. I don’t think what we’re faced with today is glamour becoming more glamorous and function more functional. By day we need utility: workable, easy-action clothes. We’re never going to see people dressing in wonderful little hats to go to work, much as I’d love it. You have to be able to run for a bus... soon you’ll only be able to take a bus to the city centre because of pollution laws. Fashion is very much influenced by the environment. I rather like that whole thing about looking very functional and business-like during the day and seeing someone in the evening and not recognizing them. That’s what glamour’s all about... it’s really exciting, the whole creation of an image. Rock music is all about image, glamour. I love putting together videos for Roxy... I can play Cecil B. de Mille on a small scale. It’s a bit of old Hollywood… all the glamour and the frocks the posing. I love it... but I only expect people to wear that at night. I make the most practical clothes to wear in the day. I think fashion now is more about colour and fabric than ever before. You have to take away the over-design. Little fashion notes have completely had it, they’re just not important any more. What you’re selling is the quantity of the fabric, cut and finish... design has become stark simplicity.'

Originally published in British Vogue, 1980

Price, the man who fused rock and fashion long before Gaultier discovered conical brassieres. Price is the designer who put a capital G into Glamour.

It’s Christmas Eve, 1990, Antony Price (with Rupert Everett) is sitting on Madonna’s bed watching rough cuts of In Bed With Madonna. Next day sees the three of them having lunch at Herb Ritt’s Malibu place. ‘I got to know her well when we were watching a famous film, and though everybody else didn’t like it, she and I were mesmerised by it. The film? It was Pasolini’s Saló, which is one of the weirdest, most bizarre films ever made. I first saw it in Soho in the early 1970s, before it was taken off by the police. It’s the story of three prostitutes and they tell their fantasies and Madonna’s looking at me and going, "Where was he coming from?” and I’m going, “I know!”, so we struck up a rapport, She’s fabulous! I love her desire to top the worst enemy she has- which is herself. I’ve met her lots of times now because she always sees Nick Kamen when she’s over here and my partner manages him.'

We’re talking serious stardom here, serious decadence and serious glamour, but then you wouldn’t expect anything less from Price, the man who fused rock and fashion long before Gaultier discovered conical brassieres. Price is the designer who put a capital G into Glamour.

Roxy Music were Price’s first vehicle on the road to stardom; he not only masterminded the band’s album covers and outfits for the girls on tour, but also made suits for Bryan Ferry, establishing the lead singer as the ultimate lounge lizard. 'Yes, I suppose most people do connect me with Roxy Music,' admits Price, lazily. He’s a big man in his mid-forties with a strong jaw and a short haircut, dressed in denim jacket and jeans; black shoes with white socks; his Bradford accent is still detectable and his approach is refreshingly direct. 'Well, the men remember me for Roxy. Women are not aware of Roxy Music in the way that men are. It’s a man’s band. It’s always been a man’s band. And he (Ferry) is a man’s idol; the young men have always admire him, he’s what they aspire to, to have taste like that, to be in the rock business but still have taste and credibility, which is very thin on the ground in the rock business, darling, let’s face it.'

Price should know. His association with Ferry goes back 20 years, back in the days when, fresh from Bradford School of Art and a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, ‘I went straight into Stirling Cooper, which wasn’t happening at all then, with Jane Whiteside and we made Stirling Cooper. I did menswear, she did womenswear. It was very successful.’ Price then opened Plaza, the cheap chic outlet, but it was his shop near World’s End, under his own name, that carried the form-fitting, theatrical fantasies for which he is famous today- divinely desirable constructions for shapely sirens, made up in satin, taffeta, velvet, lame, all drop-dead visions of the peerless party dress. The shop itself was an exercise in pure stylistics.

'It was ahead of its time,' says Price. 'It was the new uncluttered way of presenting clothes which is now standard, but then people would say “Where’s the stock?”. Clothes were presented as an art form, plus passers-by didn’t know if it was a sex shop or a betting shop. It had great lighting - everybody looked fabulous.'

We’re back to Glamour again. 'It’s the shows I do,' smiles Price. 'I always use all the girls who are going out with all the guys and most of the audience at my shows are boys anyway, who whoop and whistle throughout. I’m the only designer who gets the place full of guys who want to watch what I can do with girls, because what I do is a man’s ideal of women’s clothes. They’re clothes that men would choose to wear if they were women. I have a lot of straight male friends and I listen to their sexual scenarios and what exactly is going on in their minds.' Price laughs mischievously. 'I don’t think many women designers know about that and a lot of men don’t actually speak about it but I can get it out of them.'

'There’s still an enormous rift between the male and female psyches - of what the sexes require of each other - and there doesn’t seem to be much of a bridge between them but I can make a bridge and they come to watch the shows to cross over that bridge. You should see the smiling faces on the men looking at my clothes. They grin, watching their dreams come true.'

Price has dressed most of the world’s dream women - Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Jerry Hall, Marie Helvin, Yasmin Le Bon, Lucy Ferry - as well as designing for the organisers of the current London fave venue, Kinky Gerlinky. 'I’ve dressed royalty, yes, but we’re not allowed to mention that, and I dress a lot of those LA girls - Anjelica Huston, Melanie Griffith, Cher, Diana Ross buys a lot of my stuff. I’ve dressed just about everybody. They’ve all come to me at some point or another.'

One name is conspicuously absent from Price’s list. 'Ah yes, Madonna,' he drawls. 'That’s the one who hasn’t'. Surprising really, as Madonna would be perfect for Price’s aggressive, sexy elegance. What is his ideal? 'I love those Olympian women with big shoulders and long bodies.’ Maybe Madonna is too tiny for his clothes then? 'No, no, no!' says Price. 'Please! Her ego! Let’s talk about her ego! It’s monumental. That’s what I’d be designing for.'

Originally published in Time Out, 18 December-1 January 1992