Maison Margiela : Spring 2016 Couture

It was early this morning when I first started flipping through the images from John Galliano’s latest Maison Margiela haute couture effort.

Pre-coffee and pre-shower, I wasn’t entirely sure if my eyes were deceiving me—but even after a goodly dose of caffeine, what I saw was the same: a pair of knee-high boots printed (in part) with an image that has been the subject of considerable fascination for me.

It’s a picture of a cleanly cut, pie-shaped wedge of a record, skewered on a fork, with a super-saturated red background and viscous, glossy globs flying off of it. It’s right in the wheelhouse of a specific kind of luridly hued and lacquered-up 1980s airbrush art of which I’m particularly enamored (think Peter Palombi, or Paper Moon Graphics’s racy greeting cards), and even blown up and wrapped around a boot, I recognized it instantly.

Despite my best efforts, my searches haven’t yielded much information on Vinilo Sabroso (“Tasty Vinyl”).

Anywhere you find it on the Web links back to the Flickr stream of one Pepe Cardoso—though it’s unclear whether he is the artist behind it or just a particularly avid fan and archivist of these deliciously garish airbrush designs.

Google “Pepe Cardoso artist,” and you’ll find other fans wondering whether he’s the guy behind the image.

We’re not the only ones, apparently. One wonders if Cardoso, whoever and wherever he is, will clock the work on Galliano’s latest runway.