Touch Nothing is a column in which William Van Meter takes a fabulous person into a remarkable exhibit to talk about the show and his ongoing projects.
It was a packed house at the Brooklyn Museum for the last days of “Thierry Mugler: Couturissimeand one of the late designer’s muses and frequent catwalk stars was in attendance.
Connie Fleming – perhaps better known as “Connie Girl” – was ending an eventful week marked by several full-circle moments. So far, new York the magazine presented her as a It Girl, and Mugler’s current creative director, Casey Cadwallader, seemed to agree. Fleming drew cheers as she stormed the runway as part of the H&M+ Mugler blowout at the Park Avenue Armory days before. Oh, and yes, it’s also Connie Girl featured in the collaboration’s insanely fabulous viral campaign alongside Jerry Hall and Arca, currently broadcasting from a larger-than-life Times Square billboard (the collection fell on Thursday).
Fashion, nightlife, showbiz, art. It all comes together for the Jamaican-born, Brooklyn-raised Flatbush designer, whose understated museum look consisted of a brown leather jacket over a black dress and a purple Telfar bag to match her heels. We took the elevator to the fifth floor to see the show.
Left: Connie Fleming at Thierry Mugler’s fall 1992 couture and unisex ready-to-wear show. Photograph by Wade Watson/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images. Right: Fleming on the H&M Mugler catwalk on April 19, 2023, at the Park Avenue Armory. BFA Photography. Courtesy of H&M.
In addition to being New York’s most famous porter (she was her sitter at the Met Gala afterparty), Fleming is also an accomplished fashion illustrator. She came there in a roundabout way, a passion for fine arts for Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso led her to Antonio Lopez. His connection to Mugler also followed a circuitous route.
The downtown Connie Girl star was already on the rise in the late 1980s thanks to The Boy Bar Beauties, a rousing East Village cabaret-drag revue in which she starred. “The Boy Bar Beauties made us famous under 14th Street,” she said. “People started asking me to model for them, like Andre Walker, Patricia Field, and all those young designers downtown. So, I had already had this kind of experience, and then I started to be photographed. She had already been shot by Steven Meisel before entering Mugler’s orbit.
Fleming stopped to admire a model dressed in a rather outrageous couture mesh catsuit paired with a sequin-embroidered faux fur coat, then continued, “I met Thierry’s publicist on the dance floor. of the Paradise Garage just before it closed in 1987,” she explained. “He said, ‘Are you a model? If you’re ever in Paris, come see me. and I was like, ‘Okay,’ puff, puff, puff [she mimics smoking a cigarette]. I never thought this would happen to anything. Then in 1988, Susanne Bartsch had her first [AIDS benefit] ‘Love balloon.’ Thierry did his segment and I was a model for BodyMap. He saw me walking and said, ‘Oh, it’s you that everyone is talking to me about.’ The next stop for the two would be the Fall/Winter 1989 show. She had become a regular collaborator.
Left: Detail of The Chimera © Emil Larsson (L). LAW: Back, 1979. Fall/Winter 1979-80 Ready-to-Wear Collection. © Peter Knapp (right). Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
Showman and couturier at the same time, Thierry Mugler was as skilled with chrome, PVC and plastic as with traditional fabrics. But it wasn’t just the house founder’s creations that were ahead of their time. His aesthetics and appreciation of beauty beyond the norm were decades ahead. The culture is still catching up with what Mugler was doing 30 years ago. It’s also catching up with Fleming. It’s hard to quantify the effect her presence had during this time and in the years that followed – a proud and powerful trans woman of color who established herself in the age of supermodels. It deeply marked the following generations who saw it as a beacon. “He wasn’t afraid to shine the light,” Connie said of Mugler. “Even though he was mocked and called a subversive.” Today’s fashion landscape would be very different without both.
It wasn’t the first time that Connie had taken part in “Couturissime”. She is the lawyer Lower East Side Girls’ Club (she organized an exhibition of her drawings there in 2022 and she will give an art course there this summer). She took a group from the youth organization for a private tour of the exhibition and was to be an expert guide. Walking the runway, Connie doesn’t have to read labels to tell you what year and collection the pieces are from. Her in-depth knowledge of fashion extends far beyond Mugler and is completely self-taught.
Jerry Hall and Connie Girl in an H&M Mugler campaign photo. Imaging by Torso Solutions. Courtesy of H&M.
“I am an encyclopedia,” she says. “It wasn’t the information age in the 80s. You had to look for things to find a photograph and an art book and then one artist would bring another. As a teenager, I liked Guy Bourdain and Helmut Newton.
Connie Girl also has a long career behind the scenes of fashion. She is an in-demand runway coach and has taught fledgling models how to walk at agencies like New York Models and Ford. Many models owe their careers to him. She acquired this expertise through her own research.
“My heroes, Pat Cleveland, Mounia, Katoucha,” she explained, “all those great YSL muses. They taught me by watching them. I saw myself in them and I could dream seeing another African-American reflect on me. They taught me finesse and regularity in your gait. You don’t have a voice, but you communicate and you express emotions. You send messages to the public.
Thierry Mugler, Back, 1979. Fall/Winter 1979-80 Ready-to-Wear Collection. ©Peter Knapp. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
Fleming’s catwalk ethos is intertwined with many of his creative endeavours. Underlying this ability to experiment with personas is a performance art aspect. The icy height of her velvet rope night job, glamazon catwalk, and explosive showgirl are all magnified aspects of her that contrast with the sweet, sweet, everyday Connie Girl.
Walking through a Mugler exhibit with the sculptural Fleming is a bit like escorting part of the exhibit itself. Matthew Yokobosky, the museum’s senior fashion and material culture curator, came over to greet her, and during our tour of the salon, she was stopped by about a dozen people. She posed for photos with many. Some were fans, others she had known in various clubs or fashion scenes (or combinations thereof) over the years. “She was a backup dancer for John Sex,” she remarked of a teacher-looking woman who stopped by to say hello. “She was one of Maripol’s muses,” she noted of another.
An installation view of “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime”. Courtesy of Brooklyn Museum.
“Oh, all the plastic molding and metal work, everything for the car bustiers, was done in the workshop basement,” she said, admiring a hot rod-style bodice. Thierry Mugler is often known for his space-age aesthetic, but he’s riffed on a wide range of tropes. The look Connie is most synonymous with is a red sequined cowgirl ensemble she immortalized in George Michael’s “So awesomevideo alongside models Linda Evangelista and Tyra Banks. “Naomi couldn’t do the fittings, so I was like, okay,” Fleming said.
We pass a wall of monitors playing his western dress vamp moment. Two versions of the video exist because Mugler and Michael argued during filming (there can’t be two alphas).
Thierry Mugler Collection Spring 1992 Ready-to-Wear Show, October 1991, Paris, France. Photograph by Daniel SIMON/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
The crimson look is in the show – inexplicably, the model is holding a sparkly cheeseburger. “Theoretically, I can still fit into it,” Fleming said, looking sideways.
As we walk out, Fleming observes a page of Mugler’s illustrations for a spring collection she hadn’t noticed before. “Connie” is scrawled in pencil below the image of her in a black and white cow print bodysuit with tassels. “He really had a strong belief and pushed for innovation,” she said, “Not just with fashion. It was a single entity to him, his personality, and his artistry. He was fearless.
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