A Total Eclipse of the Art: Stephen Sprouse Developed Prints With NASA Imagery

Editor’s Note:  This story was first published on March 16, 2016, about a week after there was a total solar eclipse in Indonesia. In anticipation of the coming solar eclipse, the first in the United States since 2017, this piece has been edited and expanded.

At his Fall 1999 show, Stephen Sprouse debuted prints he created using NASA photos taken on Mars by Pathfinder in front of an audience wearing 3-D glasses. While some critics understood Sprouse’s futurism in the context of Y2K, his use of these prints wasn’t a mere stylistic gesture. As Patricia Morrisroe wrote the designer’s m.o. was to wed “downtown cool with uptown luxury and space-age fabrics.” It wasn’t the designer’s first collaboration with NASA, either. In 1984, the always-forward-thinking (and variably solvent) designer presented an unforgettable, to-capacity show at the Ritz nightclub. There, while a video showed spacecraft in takeoff mode, Sprouse’s muse, the transgender model Teri Toye, joined catwalkers wearing “interplanetary prints” based on NASA imagery, which the designer enlarged and printed over with backward graffiti that spelled out the name of the planet. “Stephen loved music and outer space,” explained Sprouse’s co-biographer Mauricio Padilha. “In going through his archives, I came across a handwritten quote that read: ‘Too far is not far enough.’ I think if Stephen were alive he would have been the first to contact Elon Musk to get a ticket to outer space!”

Stephen Sprouse, fall 1984

Stephen Sprouse, 1985 resort

Stephen Sprouse, fall 1999