Those People We Know
Wendell Headley, New York City
When I met Wendell, I was young.
It was the early 80s in New York City
and my parents had just gotten divorced.
My father didn’t know how to do kid stuff with me on “his” day;
the closest he came were trips to Washington Square Park.
Decorated in monochromatic strips of fabric so fantastic, elaborate and bright, Wendell Headley was child-friendly among people and behaviors that certainly were not at that time. I sought his solace immediately. I asked him questions. He said he was a fashion designer with a European benefactor. He made my eyes big with wonder.
He comforted me before I realized I was scared.
I remembered those conversations when, almost thirty years later, Wendell appeared again. I wasn’t curious anymore; I was miserable and hopeless. I didn’t know how to express myself as an artist (which was all I wanted to be) and I was working one of the most deplorable jobs I’d had to date. I hated New York City. I couldn’t live happily in it anymore and I couldn’t figure out how to leave.
Everywhere I looked, I started seeing Wendell — reading on the edge of Central Park, communing in Union Square, changing on Lexington Avenue. When I bumped into him on a random subway platform, I decided to tell him about the conversations we’d had three decades prior. He hugged me. I blurted out that I’d like to photograph him for a year. Without hesitation, he agreed. But he had conditions: I would have to write to him to initiate our dates and I would have to address him as an “avant-garde fashion designer.” He would write back to confirm.
I dusted off my out-of-date cameras, polished up my penmanship, and didn’t look back. In a year and a half, we never missed or rescheduled a single meeting, and he was never late. I didn’t worry that he might disappear and it didn’t concern me that he knew exactly where I lived. In a world of untrustworthy and unpredictable people, flake-outs and cancelled meetings, we didn’t disappoint one another because we knew that our sanity depended on confirming that people like us still existed. Wendell taught me more about what a relationship should be than any man had.
Like I said, we started working together when I was struggling to be seen as an artist. Every time we met, he demanded that I was worthy of that title. He graded my letters. He chastised me when my equipment failed. He asked for my vision and plan, even though we both knew he would find the beauty for us no matter what. He requested photographs after each shoot to make sure I had produced work of a certain quality. If I had not, I would hear about it. If I had, I would be congratulated.
This process — documenting Wendell’s ability to find inspiration in New York (and me) at a time when I was tapped out — saved my life.
I can’t presume to have done the same for him, but he did tell me once that we needed each other — that he worked hard on his clothing designs in between our meetings because he knew he’d be seen.
Wendell meticulously crafts everything he wears. One might call what he creates “couture” without exaggeration.
He is a New York City icon
and this is a New York story.
Would that we were
all seen.
For more about this project, see The New York Times
