The ‘90s Vogue Illustrator Who Created My Logo and Captured My Nose
Maurice Vellekoop shares his Polaroids and his sketches from yore!
If you’ve been coming to Neverworns, you might have noticed that there has been a cartoon image of me marinating on my About Me page1. The illustration shows a sassy version of me, a waist delightfully suffocated by a belted jacket, where I haul a glamorously messy rack of clothing. A claw clip; a thick wisp of hair. And, yes, my nose is very much still there. The image is by Maurice Vellekoop, who illustrated for Vogue in the ‘90s and early 2000s. He is the author of several books and comics, including a beautifully bonerladen technicolor book titled Pin Ups, while his most recent release is a tender, sweet-and-salty graphic memoir titled I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together.
I first discovered Vellekoop’s images from Plum Sykes’ highly entertaining column, Fashion Fiction. The accompanying illustrated women were a fantastical image of fashion in the ‘90s: savagely arched eyebrows, pinched noses, and impossibly high cheekbones. The women are often soaked in a bacchanalia of messy-luxe situations, like a glamazon getting a manicure while still exhausted in bed or a bottle blonde screaming as pigeon carriers attack her with fashion week invitations. Vellekoop managed to convey the hypnotic stress, unbridled chaos, and well-heeled cattiness of ‘90s fashion—all with an aspirational skew.
While I remember Maurice from his Sykes years, he was initially hired by Vogue when Anna Wintour whisked Vellekoop off to Paris to illustrate a comic strip for couture week in 1994. In one of the strips, there’s an image of a puckered Prince next to a jowly John Fairchild, pre-diet Karl Lagerfeld, watching as a model gets fitted in a dress with, yes, a hilariously tiny waist, Hugh Grant, and then-wife Elizabeth Hurley, whose smashed cleavage begs to burst out of a blazer.
The decline of print media has certainly contributed to the waning of illustration, and the industry’s dependence on instant, cheap digital photography has not helped. And, of course, AI is slowly sinking its claws in. Yet, this digital encroachment forces us to look at what we need most: human-created imagery with an essence. Serena Morris of she's underrated has been commissioning and highlighting illustrations in her work for years. Viv Chen, who pointed out that Sandy Liang used animation in her Gap drop, later wrote a great piece for Highsnobiety about the rise of illustration. While AI devours, the world of illustration is curiously getting bigger.
Vellekoop has both a wickedly sarcastic and deeply tender hand when he draws. The slight incline of a smile is delightfully sinister, there’s a stroke of seriousness chiseled into a forehead wrinkle, while you can feel the searing judgment in just how a pointed finger is ever-so-slightly bent. There is fashion, there’s feeling, and even in the tiniest of details, there’s a whole wild world plump with fantasy.
Please see Maurice’s amazing polaroids from Couture Week in ‘94 and read my interview with Vellekoop below! (Also, you can follow Maurice here, and I highly suggest taking a look at his work further here.)
Where are you from?
I was born in Toronto in 1964. I’ve lived here all my life, except for a couple of years in New York City in the mid-nineties. For the last 35 years, I’ve owned a quaint little cottage on Toronto Island, a unique car-free community that’s a ten-minute ferry ride from downtown. It’s a bit like Fire Island, only much closer to the big city. So I’m a bit of a city-country mouse combo!
What was the first thing that you ever drew?
I’m not sure what the first thing I ever drew was, but I was lucky to grow up in a very artistic family. We were a very blue-collar family. My dad was a janitor in the public school system in the suburbs, and my mother ran a hair salon in our basement, and she was very stylish. Both of them were Dutch immigrants. They came over in around 1950. And despite this working-class blue-collar world that we grew up in, they were very cultured. My dad listened to opera records, and he took us to museums, and he had a lot of art books, which were a big inspiration growing up
I’m the youngest of four kids. My oldest sister, Ingrid, is a very talented artist who never quite made it as a career, but she was very inspirational to me. She had a big collection of books on commercial art. Her ambition was to be an illustrator, and because of her, I thought, “Oh, I want to be an illustrator too, because that’s what she wanted to do.” I was very encouraged to draw by the family, and there was all of this inspiration around, too.
Why did your parents immigrate to Canada?
They came to Canada after World War II. Things were very difficult in Europe, and there was a big wave of immigration that happened. It was very hard economically, particularly in Holland.
My mom was around 18 when she came over with her family, and my dad came by himself. They met through this church that we were involved with, the Christian Reformed Church. I grew up in this world of only Dutch Christian people. I went to a Christian school where all the other kids were like, Van Der this and Van Der that, and we were all part of this community. So it was intense. Very, very super Christian.
There was a real focus on Christian education. Looking back, too, there was this sort of distrust of pleasure of any kind. So, even food was suspicious, like, “Ooh, if it tastes good, it must be bad.” And sex is the same. If you’re enjoying it, there must be something wrong with it.
Can you talk to me about the emotion you put into faces?
There are a lot of artists in the world of graphic novels and comics who draw kind of expressionless faces, and my own face is very open…I just can’t help expressing very strongly through my face. I wanted to have that in my memoir because it’s such an emotional journey, and the reader needs to see that.
Who are your influences?
When I’m asked this question, it’s very hard, there are so many. It’s difficult to narrow down. But growing up, I had this wonderful book of Vogue covers from around the teens through the early fifties, when they stopped using illustration on the covers. I was obsessed with that book as a kid. If we’re just talking about fashion illustration, Antonio Lopez is a huge god of mine. René Gruau was a fantastic French illustrator from the mid-century, who did campaigns for Dior. Erté was a super gay illustrator from the teens and twenties all the way, I guess, to his death in the seventies.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Edward Gorey, but that’s somebody who was a huge influence, even as a kid. My partner and I were in Cape Cod recently, where he [Gorey] lived for many years. We got to see his house, which is now a museum. It was a very powerful experience for me.
How did you enter this Vogue world?
I’ve had this career as an illustrator and I think of myself mainly as an illustrator. My clients were mainly magazines throughout the late eighties and all through the nineties, and I did some advertising and books as well. I was also drawing comics during this period. People in the graphic design and magazine world were looking at the comics stuff, and it was starting to become big. A couple of big magazines commissioned me to write short comics for their magazines. I did a couple of full-page comics for Esquire, and I did one for Details.
The editor of Details was James Truman, and as I understand it, he and Anna [Wintour] were very close in those days. He’s the one who said, ‘Oh, you should get Maurice to do a comic for Vogue.’ So they called me up in the summer of 1994, and they said, “Would you like to attend the Paris Couture Week and write a four-page comic for us?” So I said, ‘Yes, of course!’ I spent these very bizarre 10 days in Paris with Kate Betts.
I guess she was kind of assigned to show me the ropes, because I love fashion and stuff, but I’m not part of that world by any means. She was a wonderful, wonderful guide, very calm and centered, and she explained everything very patiently. She was funny, too. Our first show, I think, was Versace at the Ritz. The runway was over the Ritz pool in those days.
So, this was my first taste of it, and she’s like, ‘Okay, you’re going to take hold of my hand, and you’re not going to let go until we’re seated, because it’s going to be a madhouse in there.’ That’s how it started, and it was a madhouse for that week. I started working for Vogue regularly after that, and then I guess that’s how I wound up with Plum. I agree with you, she’s a fabulous writer. In the course of meeting you and working on this, I was going back and looking at some of those features [Fashion Fiction], and she has such a great sense of humor, and she’s so wicked about her characters, too, about how lovably dim-witted they are.
What was it like being thrust into this world for 10 days?
Yeah, it was Couture Week. It was wild. I always described it as if I had entered a TV set for a week; it just didn’t seem real. All the characters are so over-the-top, like Karl [Lagerfeld] and Gianfranco Ferré. In the comic, there was this woman who I think was a German wife of a textile baron, so she was invited to all the shows, and she dressed in dirndls that she made herself.
She looked like one of the Gabor sisters. And she had her little boy with her at all the shows, too. This little blonde perfect doll boy, who was, if she didn’t turn him gay, she certainly tried her best! So they appear in the comic just because they’re such characters, and she would be everywhere in these crazy homemade outfits that made her look like a porcelain figurine…crazy, crazy people!
Talk to me about your books.
I’m a big opera fan, so I did a book of satirical pictures called A Nut at the Opera, and I’ve done a couple of books of homoerotica. And then this book called Vellevision from 1998. It’s a collection of comics and illustrations I did over the previous 10, 11 years. The Vogue story is in there.
Can you talk to me about your latest book I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together?
It’s a 500-page graphic memoir. The central conflict is between me and my mother, who couldn’t accept my being gay. When you attempt something as ambitious as this, I think you have to really dig into all of the muck of your life for it to work. It’s just part of the demand of the genre. I felt like my story was kind of eccentric and unusual, the whole Dutch immigrant thing, and the Christian thing, and the queer thing. So I just thought it could be an entertaining story, but also a moving story. Apparently, the publisher thought so too!
It helped in a way to have published two books of gay erotica, because with those books, you’re putting out your personal sexual fantasies for other people to enjoy and consume. To me, it seems like a small step to revealing more about your personal life and the joys and the difficulties of that, as well. So that would be my advice to a budding memoirist: publish a book of erotica first!
What is next?
I’m close to signing a book deal for a graphic novel for middle-grade readers. It’s a story I feel very strongly about: a very effeminate boy who lives in his head and imagination, and a very macho boy who is all about athletic achievement, are enemies. But circumstances force them to spend a summer together, so each has to learn to appreciate the other’s qualities. Can they overcome preconceptions? Maybe even become friends? It’s a boy’s guide to smashing patriarchy!
The “NEVERWORNS” text you see at the top of my page is by Zoé Albert of Pardon My French. I asked her to base the style on the text of Madonna’s “Erotica” album. She fused it with my head from an illustration by Maurice Vellekoop that appears on my About Page!
Maurice Vellkoop is one of the most talented and fun people I have ever worked with. So divine to see this illustrations again.
i really enjoyed this interview and your portrait logo is so cool :)