“For many years, large parts of Andy Warhol’s artistic output [late 1940s – early 1950s] – comprising drawings and commercial and fashion illustrations – have only been accessible to visitors and researchers at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Although these early works on paper have long been the most marginalized, undervalued and critically neglected component of the artists oeuvre, they demonstrate how fundamental drawing was to Warhol at the beginning of his career. Drawing was his sole method of artistic output and also provided his livelihood.” (Matt Wrbican in Adman: Warhol Before Pop, at page 35.)

Warhol’s drawings of shoes earned him his first job in New York City, as a commercial illustrator for Glamour Magazine. While he continued drawing shoes throughout the 1950s, he also captured handbags, jewelry, perfume bottles, and gloves. His attention to detail and intrinsic understanding of consumer culture allowed him to turn his subject matter into objects of desire. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Warhol would create these illustrations for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and other publications– this particular drawing was published in the New York Times on June 14, 1958. [The back of the piece bears markings from its tenure at the New York times; photographs are on record with the gallery.]

His interest in fashion was not limited to these illustrations and advertisements, however. As the decades went on, Warhol would befriend, collaborate with, and create portraits of designers including Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, and Diane von Furstenberg. Models, especially in the 1960s, were a new kind of celebrity, and Warhol capitalized on this notoriety. He is recognized as one of the first artists to print his work onto clothing and sell it exclusively to high profile clientele. Warhol may have captured it best when he said that “[f]ashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.”