Fashion is fun, particularly if you’re not in the fashion business. Meaning we got to play in the fashion world without the fashion world’s worries … Instead, we could play dress-up like children at a tea party. We could lure the stars of the moment, or the era, to play with us because Absolut had created and polished an image as a brand.
– Richard Lewis, Absolut Sequel
There might have been a time when flipping bottles in a bar really was a thing for Rolling Stone magazine. But this is the 1980s, get that straight, and here’s a bartender who is looking for some new kind of buzz. Brian Flanagan gets up on the counter at the Cell Block nightspot in New York City (filmed in a vacated half-rotunda-shaped prison in Toronto) to reel off his ad-lib poem about the blithe spirits of cocktails and dreams.
“I am the last barman poet / I see America drinking the fabulous cocktails I make …” A few opening lines before the poem shifts gears into an inventory of the cocktails of the day, the vivid concoctions, the Pink Pussies galore, and then the finale: “America you’ve just been devoted to every flavour I got / But if you want to get loaded / Why don’t you just order a shot?”
The hot-hotter-disco era provided a revived sense for cocktail culture, founded on vodka, so in the following decade when the barman poet laureate Tom Cruise flashed a bottle of Jim Beam in one hand and a shot glass in the other in Cocktail (1988), he was simply way off the charts. What intoxicated Americans gulped in bars by then was pure vodka shots, and it wasn’t Smirnoff. As Dave Broom puts it in Spirits and Cocktails, “Absolut was right for its time. It tied itself to cutting-edge fashion and modern art. It was irreverent, weird, wacky, but it was never cheap.”
A few months before Cocktail premiered that year, women by the thousands phoned the 1-800-CHEER-UP number at the bottom of an ad in the February issue of American Elle. They all wanted that dress – this little thing with a boatneck and an exceptionally high hemline, and the entire Absolut bottle copy on the front, looked so special and gorgeous as a whole package on the twenty-year-old model (if there ever was a Silver Girl …) who had to pull it down to cover herself up while she was striking an Avedon pose.
“From the moment supermodel Rachel Williams donned a silver-lamé minidress designed by David Cameron and leapt across a set photographed by Steven Meisel, Absolut and the public were hooked on Absolut Fashion,” writes Richard Lewis (who was one of the imagemakers for the brand in those days) in his book Absolut Sequel.
“When you come in, you are greeted by this busty torso that we chose to start with because this was the first garment that was produced in this collaboration. And it was actually a saleswoman [Amy Harris] from Mademoiselle magazine in New York who had watched the success of Absolut Art and got the idea that you could do something similar with the fashion world. The photo was taken on the day which later became known as Black Monday [October 19, 1987] so by the time the picture came out, Cameron had already gone bankrupt,” recounts Philip Warkander, a fashion lector at the University of Lund in southern Sweden whose recent accomplishment is this initial presentation of the one-thousand-items-strong Absolut Fashion Collection. His plush and considerate slice of the cake at Spritmuseum (Museum of Spirits) in Stockholm is called Fashion Cocktail.
Rachel Williams looks like the-American-girl-next-door-who-never-lives-next-door in the ad that is alongside the deflated silver dress (and look! David Cameron signed it with a black marker just above the hemline after the photoshoot). Whereas dreamworld produced a deliriously sexy candy wrap, here is reality side by side with an obsolete foil wrapper. The dress and the dream are in a Claes Oldenburg-y magazine spread – there are a few of these oversized installation spreads in the exhibition that also project videos – and the information on this page includes a line by Roland Barthes from Le Système de la mode (1967), that “the magazine is a machine that makes fashion”. (Preposterously, this very French philosopher who saw signs in everything is quoted in English in the Swedish text. Pourquoi?)
That the fussy followers of fashion will dote on Fashion Cocktail is pretty obvious, but what really matters is that this show is for the dreamers too. The curator is spot-on when he suggests that there is something deep and enticing about our unfulfilled longings and desires, what we cannot have: “There is a difference between fashion in pictures and what you actually wear and what hangs in the closet. It is very efficient to produce this dreamworld that cannot really be realised, so they have made the clothes only for the photoshoots. Most of what is shown here is only in one copy, everything is produced by hand and much is even made in couture studios in Milan and Paris.”
Spritmuseum opened in 2012 in the two remaining galley sheds (adorned with a neon cocktail glass facing the waterfront) on the truly beautiful Djurgården island quite in the middle of Stockholm, and this young museum is located between a wreck and a wreck: the royal ship of the line Vasa that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 after less than a mile – nowadays a museum ship – and TV architect Gert Wingårdh & Co’s recent extension of Liljevalchs City Art Gallery, a totalitarian flak fortress of sorts which is a reminder of what American novelist Upton Sinclair expressed in The Wet Parade (published during the Prohibition in 1931): “We could never abolish the use of liquor, until we made reality into something people didn’t want to run away from.”
Museum director Ingrid Leffler explains that “This is the first time that Absolut Fashion is exhibited in a museum, these clothes have not been shown to the public in this way. So it has been quite hidden. And on the initiative of us, a couple of years ago, we wanted to get our hands on this collection and organise it, present a condition report and to find a common warehouse because it was scattered then. We wanted to do this to be able to make an exhibition, but also because they are such fine garments that need to be taken care of for the future.”
“Absolut Vodka and parts of Vin & Sprit’s other range were sold to Pernod Ricard in 2008. At that time, the art collection was not included in the purchase and remained in Swedish state ownership, but was handed over to Spritmuseum which administers and manages it,” clarifies Ulrika Lövdahl at the Absolut Company. “Before the sale, we had an art curator in New York and one in Paris who handled and administered the collection, that is, lending, warehousing and more. With the sale of Absolut Vodka, the collection was packed and shipped to Sweden. It arrived in 2009 and the art collection was inventoried and catalogued by Spritmuseum and stored according to current principles at an art warehouse south of Stockholm. The fashion collection, which remains in the possession of the Absolut Company, also came to Sweden in connection with this. We commissioned Spritmuseum to inventory and document the collection, including cataloguing and labelling.”
Fashion Cocktail is clearly more irreverent, weird and wacky than it looks at first glance. Philip Warkander’s composure is definitely reflected in this show, though the curator has likewise had the discernment to fully underline the rareness, significance and the communicative functions of these peculiar garments. The commercial imagery and the clothing are in tune, and those that are not are synched up by the clever scenography with pieces of cocktail paraphernalia and stock Surrealism – greatly exaggerated in size, fun, fetishy, splendid and too real to be true.
Warkander says that this is an exhibition that is made to provide some (“to use a disgusting word”) eye candy for IG, “but there should also be that second level where you are going to learn something about this period and the collaborations between these different creative forces. JoAnn Tan Studio and I have worked very closely with each other when it came to developing the scenography, we have been very consistent in our references and things like that. Then the JoAnn Tan Studio is very experienced so it has been very easy to walk the talk.”
JoAnn Tan, who is based in Stockholm and Milan, likes how these oversized objects “immediately make you feel like you have fallen through the looking-glass”: “Philip was exceptionally well-informed about the material. I was so surprised as we were at the very start of the process. What stands out in my memory of our first conversation is that Philip said that ‘Fashion is an energy and it is intangible.’ I think what happened from there was that we became absolutely aligned on the goal of capturing this intangible energy for the show,” she responds. “It was important that we represented the fantasy aspect of fashion. We chose to do this with the giant eye and lips because of the sensory relationship to the theme – taste and vision.”
As with Absolut Art and its Warhols and Keith Borings, Absolut Fashion collaborated with both the big names and the newcomers, and sometimes also with youthful fashion students. One such talent was Marc Jacobs whose piece from the Absolut Jacobs ad really should have been included in the exhibition. The 1989 ad shows a model in contrapposto, bare legs, “kinky” over-the-knee boots and Jacobs’s wonderful white knitted sweater – perfectly long enough to work as a dress – with a mirror image of the Absolut Vodka logo and a turtleneck that make the whole thing look as if she is wearing a soft bottle. It is lovely.
There are in fact more pieces from the Absolut Art Collection than the Absolut Fashion Collection in the show. As a whole, there should have been a few more from the latter (what about the twisted designs from Japan for example?), and since the title of the show is Fashion Cocktail, it would have been fine to see just one or two cocktail dresses poured out of the shaker. But nothing in here is “traditional” and one might very well argue that there is enough of the ballroom glitz in Anthony Ferrara’s unapologetically blingy, sleeveless dress of eighteen-karat gold mesh, and sterling silver for the text and the famous medallion from the bottle. When the seven-kilo dress arrived in an armoured vehicle one night for its first ever photoshoot on the streets of New York in 1990, it was valued at well over half a million dollars. (Consider the other extreme when it was lying in a FedEx box outside the office door of Absolut’s US importer Carillon for a whole weekend.)
The 1990s were the rapturous decade for Absolut Fashion. “It must be remembered that this was a project at an exceptionally high level, both in terms of prestige and budget. Absolut Vodka in the 1990s had a different position than it might have today because then Absolut Art was in full swing. And they had had the big advertising campaign since 1980, which is the longest running in the whole world, so Absolut was enjoying an extremely high position internationally,” assures Warkander. His selection for Spritmuseum spans from the year of Cocktail to 2002, and there’s a cogent reason for that: “Fashion had a special position in the 1990s where there was a different energy in the industry. After that, fashion began to lose its relevance and it is something that is still seen today, I think. And besides, Absolut Fashion had been going on for fourteen years at that time and it can sometimes be difficult to maintain focus. Although there are treasures after 2002, there have been no investments at this level with someone like Gaultier being brought in.”
“Absolut until you’ve had Absolut enough” – as a large patch on a trouser suit proposes – is like a signature for the whole Fashion Cocktail show. How charming and appealing it is to experience an exhibition in Stockholm that for once is void of the merry jingles of social issues grandstanding and the walking-dead wokeness that is more Swedish than anything else today.
Weeks of unpacking a thousand boxes of surprises, all alone in a huge industrial premises next to the Mall of Scandinavia just outside Stockholm’s city centre, made the curator realise another thing about the essence of the Absolut Fashion Collection – “the Swedish theme which you can actually be blind to as a Swede. I did not see it until I had sat down with the material for a long time that it was actually a story about Swedishness and that this is important abroad. And you can also discern, if you go through the archives, that many of the garments are based on the combination of blue and yellow, which I chose to tone down because I think that Swedes can get fed up with it.”
Fashion Cocktail does indeed present a range of very interesting interpretations of this thing called “Swedishness”, like the immaculate Absolut Newton series of eight square pictures in black and white, shot in 1995 around (and inside) the Absolut plant in Åhus in southern Sweden. And then there is the Götterdämmerung of Absolut Legends (2002). Jean Paul Gaultier is a master couturier and the sweetest man in fashion, but everything is wrong and tacky about the outcome of this series. What’s on this ESC-y dish (photographed by Jean-Baptiste Mondino at Sandhamn farthest out in the Stockholm archipelago) is supposed to be a narrative of the creatures of Swedish folklore, the pagan mistresses, the ho-ho Vikings and the ketchup tears of Lucia.
Even Grace Jones is embarrassing in Gero von Boehm’s Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful (2020), a documentary full of strong, independent women with feeble personalities, weak arguments and silly excuses for once appearing in Newton’s pictures where they all shine with puissance. Helmut Newton, who hated all forms of thought control, would have laughed at the irony of this film. Nine years before he had his final heart attack in 2004 and crashed the Cadillac into a wall on the short strip between Chateau Marmont and Sunset Boulevard, Newton was in Åhus to photograph the blonde Kristen McMenamy in pieces by seven different designers for this series of high-art ads that would run in Vogue later that year.
On one side of the grid with the photographs, over a big splashy martini glass, are Manolo Blahnik’s black stiletto boots with dominating cut-out Absolut letters in silver on the shafts. The model is wearing them together with a swimsuit while she floats about on an air mattress in the moat around the Vittskövle Caste not far from Åhus. Newton snapped her just at the moment when the reflection of the spire pointed at her abdomen. (What the picture spares us is that the Kermits of the area filled up the boots.) The other designers are John Galliano (as generous with the use of fabric here as the overladen designer would later be with his bigot slurs), Azzedine Alaïa, Martine Sitbon, Victor Alfaro, Anna Molinari and of course Helmut Lang. The advanced simplicity of his dress graces the exhibition.
Philip Warkander voices that “This dress may not be one of the most striking – there are only two pieces of fabric, one sitting on the front and one on the back – but it is my absolute favourite from the collection and it is because Lang is the master of minimalism. Minimalism was so dominant in the mid-1990s, and this was what made me happiest when we went through the archives.”
Lang built his aesthetics on the timeless costume of the waiter/waitress with the wite shirt and the apron, and the two long sheets of sleek acetate satin of this black pinafore are only held together by two pairs of side straps and the neat gold beige-coloured shoulder straps, the only kind of extravagance that Lang would allow his designs. The dress is depraved and delicious, as terse and merciless and sensuous in its minimalism as Shellac’s album At Action Park (1994). Newton keenly photographed this temper with the model gravitating under towering vodka storage tanks of steel.
In Fashion One Hundred and Fifty Years: Couturiers, Designers, Labels, Charlotte Seeling delineates how the dawning of the internet led to some altered terms for designers who would all of a sudden find their new pieces copied and mass produced: “Young fashion designers learned a lesson from this and began churning out new designs every six weeks, and in so doing, caused the fashion carousel to spin faster and faster. Established couturiers could not get a look in. On the other hand, individual fashions made from expensive fabrics and involving elaborate cutting techniques, which were less easy to copy, gained additional cachet. The couture in question had to be modern, however, and stretch with the body. After all, it was important for women to be able to flaunt their well-toned bodies.”
Versace was for the flaunters. Gianni Versace habitually “perfected” the irksome intricacies of the harlot/Madonna polarity and pumped it up for the bold and the beautiful. The traumatising slits-and-cleavage package that the then-almost famous Elizabeth Hurley wore for a 1994 film premiere in London is a veritable eyesore secured by golden jumbo safety pins (and for those who feel the need to relive the nightmare, check out “Black Versace dress of Elizabeth Hurley” on Wikipedia). That said, the odd times when Versace was good, his designs could be like Italian grand tourer cars with brash American V8 powerhouses under the hood.
Thank goodness that the Absolut Versace garments aren’t his usual Miami vices but two rather agreeable dresses with a rather agreeable pattern of raining vodka bottles (Absolut Hallelujah?) with matching bottle-shaped handbags. In addition, there is also a boyish two-piece swimsuit for men with pouring A’s all over the place. And though the curator claims that Fashion Cocktail comprises all of the few collaborations that were made for men, that is not entirely true since Absolut Fashion generated a larger line in 1991 devoted to men even though it wasn’t that special.
There is a bottle-shaped portal through a magazine spread that you can walk into, do a face swap in Versace’s kitschy Medusa logo and be famous for fifteen seconds. But the real deal in this part of the exhibition are the eight electric-blue photographs from Jukkasjärvi in the northernmost part of Sweden, shot by Herb Ritts in December 1996 – not 1997 as stated in the exhibition (there is an overall lack of editing in these texts, and rule number one is that people’s names must be correctly spelled) – for each and every April 1997 edition of Vogue. By the summer, half a billion people across the world had seen the Absolut Versace/Absolut Ritts campaign.
(It is more than strange that Fashion Cocktail fails to mention that Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his palacelike mansion Casa Casuarina in Miami Beach on July 15, 1997. He was fifty years old when a serial killer ended his life.)
The models are the dull names of the decade, but these glacial images are utter classics. One of the finest depicts K Moss up in the hollow triangle of a big-letter A, a purpose-built sculpture made out of solid chunks of ice. She wears a blueish, glittering Versace dress with what looks like a purple bodystocking, and this is the cocktail dress that should have been materialised in the show. Fashion photography in the pre-digital era involved meticulous planning and an eye for the decisive moment, and there was no other way for the models than to endure these photoshoots by the Torne River in –32° C and arctic winds with nothing more than those skimpy little pieces covering their bodies.
Ice was an unexpected keyword during the development of Absolut Vodka. Americans put their vodka bottles in the freezer – something a Russian would never do – but since Absolut was designated for the US market, it was Vin & Sprit’s duty to yield to a ridiculous demand on fake authenticity: “What would become Absolut seemed almost ready for production when the prospective American importer arrived and stated that no vodka in America would sell unless it passed the ‘ice test’. When a bottle of freezer-stored Stolichnaya was poured, the liquid slipped out slowly like thick oil, and any new vodka would have to emulate this or it would not be accepted as true vodka,” writes Geoffrey Elborn in The Dedalus Book of Vodka. “The vodka had been deliberately stripped of some Russian characteristics, but impurities such as fusel oil, which had been removed, were returned by degrees until the potential Absolut importer felt that the icy flow was slow enough. The formula for Absolut had been created and the vodka was ready to be bottled.”
American writer Thomas Hine argues in The Total Package: The Secret History and Hidden Meanings of Boxes, Cans and Other Persuasive Containers that “The whole vodka isle is a bottle beauty contest” and that Absolut “has successfully made its package an icon”: “This war on the beautiful bottles results both from vodka’s lack of distinctive flavour and from its longtime association with modernity […] Among liquors, gin can occasionally be modern, but vodka alone has the license to be avant-garde.”
The Absolut Vodka bottle’s bearded man on the medallion over the transparent label is Lars Olsson Smith (1836–1913), a rebel of his day who spent his childhood making vodka – and at the time that he had established his distillery on the small island of Reimersholme in his early teens, he was producing one-third of all the vodka in Sweden. L O Smith’s free ferry line to Fjäderholmarna in the inner archipelago where Stockholmers could purchase his ardent spirits was known to be fired at by his competitors, who did not stand a chance against his nose for business and the quality of his vodka. L O Smith would eventually move his operation to southern Sweden where he could find the winter wheat that he required. In 1879 he introduced the famous Absolutely Pure Vodka, Absolut.
Swedish thought and craftmanship created the bottle (based on an antique Swedish pharmacy container) for the booze when Absolut Vodka was reintroduced in 1979. The precipitous success of the brand was the work of TBWA agency in New York together with the ingenious Michel Roux at Carillon Importers. At the time when Roux’s friendship with Andy Warhol led to the very first piece in the Absolut Art Collection in 1985 (Absolut Warhol), Absolut Vodka was already bigger than Smirnoff and all the other vodka brands in the United States.
“Here we have an Absolut Pepper and an Absolut Lemon. It is partly the kitsch factor that I thought was fun to highlight, but also how Absolut Fashion follows the brand's development,” says Philip Warkander in front of a yellow, 1950s-shaped dress by Eric Gaskins decorated with red hot chili peppers, and a sequined minidress with a lemony theme and a vegetative state of mind which appears to have been implanted from a Tim Burton film. Bradley Bayou has placed the Absolut Lemon bottle from the crotch up as a reversed tie. Both of these dresses are from 1993.
Around that time, someone responsible for something at the Absolut Company wrote an anal-retentive protest to the Swedish monthly Nöjesguiden for their cover shot of a pretty young woman who smiles like the sun while she is pouring the contents of a bottle of Absolut over her head. The editor-in-chief’s epic two-word reply was “Absolut Humourless.”
The curator explains that “The selection for Fashion Cocktail was not made because the designs are so famous, but because they say something about the time or the project. Other things have been chosen because the person behind is so respected and enjoys such an elevated position. An additional criterion is that certain things are simply flippant or funny and say hey in a way that we thought would be good for the exhibition.” One of his personal favourites seems to be the effervescent section with the over-the-top combo of the embroidered motorcycle jacket and the matching jeans, together with the silvery handbag, bikini and the boots, caught up by the bubbles of 1999 when Tom Ford was the creative force at Gucci.
“Jeanette Kastenberg’s jumpsuit [1993] with transparent sequins was chosen because it converses with Absolut Art, and here we see works that we recognise from the Absolut Art Collection – even though she has chosen to present herself advantageously larger,” he says. “Side by side is a design duo that is quite unknown today, Van Buren, and during the 1990s they collaborated a lot with music artists with this more spectacular type of aesthetics adapted for videos. If anyone remembers Cher’s video ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ and the V-shaped bikini dress she wore, that was as design by Van Buren, and they also made the costumes for Prince’s ‘Cream’.”
Absolut Zodiac (1999) and Absolut Ephemera (2000) are two photo series in the exhibition which both look like expensive art director excursions. On top of two giant ice cubes are Dr Martens’ late-1990s rendition of an Absolut collaboration. These boots are just too Elton, but get your mind off Captain Fantastic because this would be him when he lost it with the Donald Duck suit in Central Park in 1980.
A beautiful garment is Hussein Chalayan’s cap-sleeved dress in white synthetic voile from the mid-1990s. It has the blue Absolut letters displayed under the bust, printed blue ocean waves below the knee and a hemline finale mimicking black and yellow barricade tape – the effect is sensational yet subtle. The standout piece in the show is by all means Jean Paul Gaultier’s yellow (and green and pink and brown) halterneck dress (made the same year as the abovementioned sauerkraut) that seems to have been created for Liv Lisa Fries’s strange and absolutely delectable flapper Charlotte Ritter in Babylon Berlin.
The big eye above gives us a wink, Salvador Dalí’s Mae West lips a kiss – it is the good life to be free and explore the unknown. This exhibition has the ken of the “First Manifesto of the Cocktail Nation” (and yes, it is from the 1990s too): “We, the Citizens of the Cocktail Nation, do hereby declare our independence from the desiccated horde of mummified uniformity – our freedom from an existence of abject swinglessness. We pledge to revolt against the void of dictated sobriety and to cultivate not riches but richness, swankiness, suaveness and strangeness, with pleasure and boldness for all. Be fabulous.”
The birth of Absolut Fashion is recounted by Richard Lewis in the first of his Absolut books, and he was the one whom Amy Harris approached in the summer of 1987 with the suggestion: “‘Why not have a fashion designer create an Absolut dress?’ I had visions of a tiny little frock draped over an Absolut bottle as if it were a Barbie doll. She quickly set me straight: ‘A fashion designer will put the Absolut bottle imagery on a dress – logotype, medallion, blue and silver colours, that stuff – and then you’ll put it on a beautiful model and photograph it for an Absolut ad.’ I think I got it then.”
Thirty-one years later the company introduced its spoofy “Absolut – The Vodka with Nothing to Hide” commercial in the form of an “employee introduction film”. Twenty-eight human bodies and not a garment in sight.
Fashion Cocktail at Spritmuseum in Stockholm through January 23, 2022.