Douglas Ferguson

Douglas Ferguson (born 1951) is a multidisciplinary artist mainly known for his fashion designs using enamelled metal mesh and hand-painted leather which received widespread exposure in the 1980s. Since starting out in the 1970s as Diana Vreeland's voluntary assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, he has also worked as an interior designer and film-maker.

Early life and education Douglas Richard Ferguson was born in 1951. He studied fine art in Rome, and in Philadelphia, but dropped out after three years, saying that he wanted to 'try everything' rather than focus on painting as his tutors wished.

Among other jobs, he worked as a model, a stitcher-in of labels, and a taxicab driver, but most notably worked as a personal assistant to Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute.

Career Ferguson launched his career at the turn of the 1970s/80s with hand-painted leather goods and furniture. One of Ferguson's first successes was a decorative wooden flapper doll for the Mudd Club, which attracted the attention of the designer Patricia Field and led to her commissioning his hand-painted leather and chiffon dresses for her boutique. Although his hand-painted suede and chiffon work was described as initially seeming 'more like rags than fashion,' once it was on a figure, it came together to create a look that 'seemed at once ancient and modern'. a 1984 cover for New York Magazine, and a Vogue supplement showing a mesh dress emblazoned with the Statue of Liberty.

In 2012 Ferguson was designing for private clients. Full Quote Bergman (2003), a collaboration with Brock Labrenz and Richard Siegal, commissioned and produced by William Forsythe's Ballet Frankfurt, and premiered in Frankfurt in January 2004. 1989: The Historical Mode: Fashion and Art in the 1980s, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Mesh evening dresses. 2003: Goddess: The Classical Mode, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three of Ferguson's 1985 enamelled mesh outfits. 2004: Goddess, MoMu, Antwerp, Belgium. Travelling version of above exhibition.