October 9, 2024 |
On paper, Simon Foxton has ‘retired’ from fashion, but old habits die hard. Where once the esteemed stylist had been an avid scrapbooker, splicing together imagery from all corners of the earth – whether that was gay pornography, images from National Geographic or miscellaneous adverts – to inform his editorial concepts, he’s now embracing the world of web 3.0 to create inspired AI fashion imagery.
The difference these days? He doesn’t need a photographer, nor a steamer and a suitcase of called-in looks. Thanks to the wizardry of Midjourney, an AI generative art program, the Berwick-born creative can simply input keywords as prompts or feed it imagery from his own archives.
Introduced to the software by hairstylist Matt Mulhall, Foxton, now 63, was hooked, and for the past year has been sharing his results on Instagram. As is often the case with AI, it’s spookily attuned to instructions and, as a result, the very aesthetic Foxton built his name upon. Throughout the works, humorous juxtapositions play out: a beefcake American football player stands proud in broderie anglaise lycra, a young man with tribal markings wears a feathered ruff and a Latino gentleman with a skin fade smoulders in sparkly eyeshadow. You would be forgiven for thinking they are real fashion editorials – and many people do.
“It’s not like I want to become the next AI impresario,” says Foxton, video-calling from his home in the leafy suburbs of West London. “It’s just having a bit of a laugh, really, which is what most of my career has been.” Speaking with a light, Northumbrian burr, Foxton comes across as gentle, polite and charmingly shy. Among the fash pack he’s a living legend, renowned for his trailblazing work at i-D in the ’80s. There, he pioneered the use of sportswear and streetwear in fashion stories and, importantly, the casting of Black models long before the glossies caught up. Later, he went on to big commercial gigs, consulting for Levi’s, Stone Island and Nike. Throughout, he has remained forward-thinking, from his heady days (“out at Cha-Chas [a queer party run in a railway arch behind Heaven], or wherever”) to now, at home in Ealing.
from left: Pseudo fashion editorials starring Russian twins, Sportswear of the future
With that track record, it’s small wonder he’s embraced the bleeding edge of tech. But there’s more. Foxton is also, in his own characteristically modest words, a bit “workshy”. While the sheer glut of imagery he’s created suggests otherwise, there’s something to be said about his efficiency as an artist. For context, he graduated from the Saint Martins Fashion BA in 1983 before moving on to co-run the clubwear brand Bazooka – a sporty, zesty label stocked in Joseph, as well as Kensington Market, where he shared a stall next to Leigh Bowery. Soon tired of the laborious process of designing, ordering fabrics, producing and showing clothes, Foxton discovered that styling offered a quicker means of sharing his ideas. “Now, AI is quicker than styling,” he says.
Let’s not forget that Foxton, already a long-time collaborator of Nick Knight’s from the nascent days of i-D, worked as the fashion director of SHOWstudio – the zenith of tech and fashion – in the 2000s. Beyond surrounding himself with the right people and an open mind, Foxton’s magpie instinct towards imagery and objects alike has made AI (a hungry, archive-fuelled converter) a natural fit. “I’ve always collected,” he says. Foxton’s video background (his bedroom) is replete with curios spanning antlers and a framed drawing from the Philippines bought at auction all the way through to a metronome and solar-system mobile hung above his bed. “My partner [of more than 40 years, Donald, a tailor] goes mad because I’m constantly buying things. It’s a one-in-one-out policy now.”
This eclectic sensibility is apparent throughout his AI works. Religious iconography à la Caravaggio merges with a Derek Jarman-inspired homoeroticism. Elsewhere, Afro-haired glam rockers pose in paillette and satin trousers, replete with camp jewels and talismans. The thinking behind the latter? Foxton was simply listening to glam rock when it dawned on him that you rarely saw Black people represented in the genre. He dialled in his prompts, merging West African photography, such as the work of Malians Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, with glam and punk style. As well as accepting prompts, Midjourney can blend images that already exist, which Foxton has hoarded in boxes and under his bed. As such, many of his AI renders will feature the same poses, lighting and casting that you might recognise from his famous shoots.
“Street castings” in Tokyo and Los Angeles
On Instagram, Foxton builds a narrative around the photographs. In one, we see two dancers – one clad in only a leather choker, cuffs and wrestler shorts, the other in chic, sleeveless tailoring – in a small, shebeen-style nightclub. By all accounts, it looks like a real party, bar one slightly glitchy eye. The caption reads, “What a night! Just got back from the annual Northfields Community Spring dance. Slightly marred by people’s over indulgence at the free bar. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time.” While it’s complete fiction, this type of storytelling was essential to Foxton’s work as a stylist. Drawn to menswear because of its links to subculture, youth culture and gay culture, not to mention all the codification which comes with that, Foxton styled his subjects by juxtaposing disparate references. In this instance, they seem to be his local community hall and fetishwear. “I’ve never really been the sort of stylist who knows what the latest thing is,” he says. “It’s more about concepts and ways of seeing.”
Coincidentally, Foxton has found it tricky to replicate designer fashion on Midjourney. However, themes or tropes, whether that’s vintage skiwear or 1970s punk, are often fruitful and surprisingly novel. “In a way, I’m going back to my roots, to when I first started with i-D in the mid-1980s,” he says. “We didn’t have access to designer clothes as much back then. We had to just use what we had, what you could get off markets or what our friends were designing.” Naturally, the staging of his AI photographs takes cues from the candid, street-style approach he pioneered. In one instance, that might mean a handsome twentysomething sporting biker boots, shredded denim shorts and a patchworked jean jacket, backdropped by a Los Angeles-coded street. In another, it’s three cadaverous beauties, shot in black and white, sporting mid-century denim workwear. “Helping a friend do some research on men’s historic trouser volumes,” Foxton captioned it.
Another productive aspect to Foxton’s AI endeavours is what they teach him about his own work. ‘Styling’ was still a relatively new term when he was coming up, especially in menswear, and so being able to find a cohesive fil rouge in his work took a long time. The turning point happened in 2009, when editor Penny Martin curated an exhibition around Foxton’s styling at The Photographer’s Gallery in London, entitled When You’re a Boy (a lyric from Bowie’s Boys Keep Swinging). In it, the themes we can now pinpoint in his AI work – sexuality, queerness, masculinity, cultural heritage – were picked out for the first time by collating his work with Knight, Alasdair McLellan and Jason Evans, among other collaborators. “I always thought my work was all over the place and unrecognisable, but obviously I came to see that I had a certain aesthetic,” he says. “[Midjourney], I guess, is a refining of that.” Of course, Foxton has always found different ways to channel his aesthetic cues. When Tumblr was big in the 2010s, he would collate imagery there. Then, when the company was about to be sold, it took a prudish turn, which put his more explicit reblogs at risk of deletion. Foxton downloaded them for safekeeping. Today, the salvaged images inform his current practice, just as his original scrapbooks do. He even opened a second Instagram, @foxtonscrapbooks, to house AI work and visual references that inform his creative practice.
from left: Fantasy sportswear through a homoerotic lens; as with all the imagery in this feature, Foxton’s art has been created with generative AI, a soldier from an unknown army
Perhaps at odds with all this, he is also a proud gardener: his shed is stacked to the brim with “bits and pieces”. However, what sounds like two completely different vocations – the bold, sexy AI image-maker versus the green-fingered homebody – come together as integral parts of Foxton’s make-up. Both, in essence, are about accumulating beautiful things and then editing them down. “From the outside looking in, it’s quite mundane,” he says. “I do very suburban things, but then I’m a bit more, shall we say, expressive in the work that I do. It’s quite nice to have both feet on the ground and [your] head in the clouds.”
Foxton has always kept his personal life and work life quite separate. He is, by his own admission, a very private person. “I’ve never really been part of the fashion pack, although obviously I know a lot of people because I’ve worked in it over the years,” he says. But being creative isn’t something he can simply turn off. While he might not be running around on fashion shoots any longer, he still needs an artistic escape. AI does just that. “It’s just a really exciting new tool – I want to say a toy. It’s another string to your bow,” he says. From his bedroom, he’s free to concoct ingenious, otherworldly shoots, riffing on his illustrious backlog of ideas, yet aided by the newness of a program that is constantly learning and adapting to its users. Nonetheless, he does wonder whether there are limits to this given its reliance on what’s already out there. “Is it a worry that it all gets a bit samey?” he asks, before answering his own question. “I don’t know. Anyway, that’s not my concern.”
For the time being, Foxton continues to enjoy AI on his own terms, at home with a few glasses of white wine. “It’s not always a very specific or remembered process,” he says with a laugh. But that’s just it. The same easy-going, DIY creativity that drew him to styling draws him to Midjourney too. While there are talks of him doing album covers for musicians and serious essays are being written about his new work, he’s still, in his eyes, just having fun.
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