“Jean-Paul dug into me, bit into me, scratched and stretched me, and made very clear what the colour of my skin was” – Grace Jones
Grace Jones met French designer/illustrator Jean-Paul Goude in New York in the late 70s when he was working as the art director of Esquire magazine. At the time she was a model turned singer with three albums of swishy disco under her belt that had gained her cult status on the gay club scene. While the two partied together and became romantically involved, Goude saw her as a muse with the raw materials he could re-shape in a way that would help her become an iconic star in the coming new decade.
Grace’s previous albums had been designed by Richard Bernstein who was the art director of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and had the same glittery and airbrushed, Studio 54 style of it’s covers at the time, but the first sleeve Goude designed for her — 1980s Warm Leatherette — marked a huge change: Stark black and white, with Grace (pregnant at the time) looking sternly at the camera with a fuck you stare, while sporting her new severe flat-top hair style and cheekbones you could cut diamonds with. If looks could kill this photo would be banged up for life.
It was the follow-up album Nightclubbing that really established Grace’s new image and brought her wider fame. Wearing a man’s Armani jacket, Grace looks like some androgynous alien creature, all bones and angles, with a perfect white cigarette contrasting against her smooth purple-blue skin.
Such perfection can’t be achieved only in camera though, and the original photo is so heavily retouched and manipulated by Goude that it’s credited as a painting on the album’s back cover. This was Goude turning Grace into a work of art herself, and you wonder where the real person begins and ends. She’s become the “sleek machine” she sings about in “Pull Up To The Bumper.”
Goude called his style “French Correction”: stretching, distorting, exaggerating features, and the most extreme remixing he did of Grace was probably the picture that was used on the cover of the 1985 Island Life compilation. This was actually the first image Goude made of Grace when it was created for a profile of her in New York magazine in 1977 (you can see that she still has her old hairstyle) and these slides are a good window into his technique.
First he photographs Grace in a variety of poses, using transparent boxes to hold her legs up.
Then he slices and dices the transparencies together to achieve the “impossible” pose he wants.
Paints in the gaps by hand (no Photoshop then of course), adjusts the colours, burnishes her skin look like polished ebony, changes the background and, voila.
Goude has been accused of fetishizing Jones’ blackness and portraying her as some exotic jungle creature, and images like the one below might be seen as “problematic” today.
But Grace was always a willing collaborator and partner, saying “It was about rejecting normal, often quite sentimental and conventionally crowd-pleasing ways of projecting myself as a black singer and female entertainer.” Certainly what Goude was doing was radical in terms of the representation of black women in pop culture. Grace always looked strong in his images and more like a predatory panther than a sex kitten.
It helped that her music underwent a makeover at the same time too. Goude’s sharp visuals fit perfectly with the new, harder-edged music she was making in Compass Point with the crack rhythm section of Sly and Robbie from Warm Leatherette onwards. Disco was on the way out, New Wave/Post-Punk was the new thing, and remaking songs by Iggy Pop, Joy Division, and The Normal as cool, sexy, funk and reggae was a genius move that fit Grace like a leopard-skin glove. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it ended up being one of the most perfect ever marriages of music, image, and artist.
It takes some balls to take on a song like this, but that’s one thing Grace has never been short on.
Download: She’s Lost Control (Long Version) – Grace Jones (mp3)
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