From 1982 - 1984 I was a teen-age club kid called Walter S. & I edited & produced a Xeroxed fashion magazine called The KEY while working on 7th Ave as an assistant designer for now defunct labels like Jack Mulqueen & Fenn, Wright & Manson. One day I got written up by the late, great style scribe John Duka in his legendary NY Times column Notes On Fashion calling me a purveyor of “fast food fashion journalism”. Within a day I was fielding calls from Andre Leon Talley, modelling for Stephen Sprouse and styling shoots featuring all my Danceteria girlfriends for Norma Kamali, who a year late convinced the publisher Stanley Harris to buy my little hand stapled rag on my 17th birthday and turn it into a real published magazine on 250 newstands with a print run of 10,000 copies. The first cover featured Teri Toye, the last Edwige in a Chanel name belt. A year later I was 18, The Key had run through $100,000 and was out of business after 4 still collectible on E-Bay issues. My future however was cemented and I went to work as a columnist for the original Details magazine under Annie Flanders careful & creative eye and began my career as a fashion writer, stylist, editor and eventually photographer. It was a golden time in NYC when kids ran the clubs, you could live at the Hotel Chelsea for $400 a month and anything & everything was possible as long as you were an original. Oh yeah, and as long as you always came correct. As my friends in Concern, the legendary style youth brigade led by teen-age design sensation Andre walker always said, “Come correct or don’t come at all.” Werd.
Angie Lieber photographed by Craig Barnes & styled by Walter S. in Stephen Sprouse for The KEY, NYC 1984