Feature

The Punk Glamour God

Wild style Sprouse creations in a 2000 fashion shoot for a Japanese magazine; Rachel Williams modeling his spring 1989 collection.

(Photo: Rainer Hosch; Jamie Boud.)

When Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened in 1995, Sprouse was asked to become the consulting fashion curator. He threw himself into it, working closely with a sculptor at Pucci International to make sure the mannequins had the right look. “He felt their bodies should be skinnier than normal bodies, because of the years of drug use,” says Ileen Sheppard Gallagher. “He knew exactly how they should hold their arms and tilt their hips. He was so uncompromising.” Sprouse’s vision even extended to the security guards, whose uniforms he insisted on designing.

In 1996, Sprouse won the rights to use Warhol’s imagery on his clothing, which led to a deal with Staff International, an Italian company whose stable of designers included Vivienne Westwood. Sprouse returned to the runway in the fall of 1997 with a collection that paid homage to Warhol: Models wore the artist’s vivid Pop images on dresses and baggy raver-style pants. But when Staff was later bought out by another company, Sprouse’s license wasn’t renewed—a cruel irony, as fashion was then experiencing a retro-eighties moment and Sprouse’s designs were fetching high prices at vintage stores.

In the summer of 2000, Marc Jacobs asked Sprouse to go to Paris to help with his spring collection for Louis Vuitton. Jacobs, who’d known Sprouse from his own club days, had long been a fan, and arranged for him to stay at the Ritz, where Sprouse, staring at TV static one night, came up with the idea of creating floral prints using huge digitized cabbage roses. But it was Sprouse’s graffiti bag, on which he’d written, in raw painted lettering, louis vuitton paris, that became the big hit, with long waiting lists. Sprouse confided to Boud that even he couldn’t get one. Months later, he could—on Canal Street, where counterfeiters were selling them by the hundreds. “At least the knockoffs were expensive,” says Boud. “Other bags by other designers were selling for $20; his were $90.” Friends bought the standard LV knockoffs and asked Sprouse to paint graffiti on them.

The experience with Marc Jacobs soured Sprouse on fashion; instead of coming away envious of Jacobs’s lucrative LVMH deal, he realized he’d never be able to work in such a rigid corporate structure. Though Sprouse was then in his late forties, he was still very childlike and loved sitting in Washington Square Park, watching the kids skateboard. “He really fed off their energy,” says Beyer. “I remember we were out at a rock club one night and these kids came up to him and said, ‘Hey, you wrote the last words.’ It made him feel really good.”

In 2002, Sprouse designed a lower-priced line of red, white, and blue clothing and accessories for Target. Everything had usa written on it in graffiti print. While some people viewed it cynically as a cheap way of cashing in on 9/11, Sprouse, who’d lost a friend in one of the plane crashes, felt an uncharacteristic surge of patriotism. “I hope people won’t misinterpret me,” he said to Christopher, who replied: “Stephen, when haven’t you been misinterpreted?”

For years, friends had noticed that Sprouse, who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, seemed frequently out of breath. Benjamin Liu recalls that when Sprouse came to visit him at his fourth-floor walk-up, he had to take a “breathing break” on the second floor. “Sometime in late 2002, he called me up and asked if there were any rehabs for cigarette smokers,” Christopher says. “He wanted to go to a place where they’d lock him up.”

Finally, Sprouse quit cold turkey, but in spring 2003, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. “When he called me on the phone, he was sobbing,” Boylan says. “They told him he had only three months to live.”

Sprouse kept his diagnosis a secret from all but a few friends. Andrew Cogan, who by then had become CEO of Knoll, had hired him to do textiles, and Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel, wanted him to design T-shirts and jeans. He was very concerned about losing those contracts.

Boylan took him to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and managed to get him admitted into an experimental drug trial, but when his breathing worsened, doctors wouldn’t let him continue with the protocol. Over the next eight months, he visited numerous oncologists and took various drugs, hoping to improve enough to be readmitted into the Dana-Farber program. One drug gave him such bad acne he didn’t want anyone to see him. In September 2003, though, he had to put in an appearance at the opening of the new Diesel store he’d helped to design on Union Square.

“We went to dinner with Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins,” Boylan says. “I’ve never known a man to be so jittery. He just didn’t want to go to the opening. By then, the illness was really contributing to his depressed frame of mind.” At one point during the evening, he looked at her and said, “I was Stephen Sprouse. Am I prostituting my talents?”

Yet he had his optimistic moments, as if cancer were just another business reversal from which he could stage a triumphant comeback. He put his energy into painting portraits of his friends and nephews. He was even working on a painting of the space station for NASA.

This January, he took a six-week trip to Buenos Aires to visit a friend. A few days after his return, he went to the Paradise Cinema to see The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film about three young film students in Paris during the 1968 student revolt. The next afternoon, Boylan got a call from him. He sounded exuberant and told her he’d do anything to get back on the Dana-Farber program. He pictured himself living in Boston and taking art classes at Harvard. “He didn’t care if he staggered into those classes,” says Boylan. “He was going to do it.”

That evening, though, Sprouse couldn’t catch his breath. He called a friend, Sean Bohary, who took him to St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, where he died early the next morning.

In Paris, the fall 2004 shows were in full swing, with people saying an emotional farewell to designer Tom Ford, acting as if he’d died when he was only leaving Gucci. On Sunday night at the Vuitton show, tucked inside the program, people found a slip of paper that read, “This collection is in loving memory of our friend Stephen Sprouse.”

Back in New York, Boylan arranged a small funeral service. On March 10, 25 friends gathered in New Jersey for the cremation. With pens and Magic Markers, they covered his wooden coffin in graffiti, writing messages to him on the inside and outside surfaces of the box. Then, before closing the lid, someone placed a Magic Marker in Sprouse’s hand, so he could write the last words himself.