Uptown Fashion/Downtown Cool, or Antonio Lopez’s Reign at Fiorucci

Thu, Nov 5, 2026

6:30 PM–7:30 PM

Rooms 9206 & 9207, CUNY Gradaute Center. Free and open to all. RSVP required.

Join Uri McMillan, Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA, for his presentation “Uptown Fashion/Downtown Cool, or Antonio Lopez’s Reign at Fiorucci” on Nuyorican artist Antonio Lopez’s creative partnership with hip department store Fiorucci in the late 1970s. Known colloquially as the ‘daytime Studio 54,’ Fiorucci was a fashion emporium that also, coincidentally, served as a hub for various visual and performance artists, many of whom staged or showed work in the store. In this presentation, McMillan considers how Lopez’s artistic sensibility, heavily influenced by the street as well as hip-hop, pervaded the store’s ethos and collaborative atmosphere. McMillan also ponders Lopez as a locus of a specific, albeit often overlooked, artistic network in the 1970s that was dominated by folks of color, both celebrated and underrecognized. In doing so, McMillan occasions an alternative rendering of aesthetic praxis in the seventies, an avant-garde that proliferated outside of traditional arts institutions.

About the Speaker

Uri McMillan is Professor of English and Gender Studies at UCLA, where he serves as the Chair of the LGBT Studies Minor. He is a cultural historian and contemporary art writer. He is broadly interested in African diasporic artistic production, specifically visual art and performance cultures. Uri is the author of Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015), the first comprehensive study of Black women’s performance art, and Mavericks of Style: The Seventies in Color, which was published by Duke University Press in 2025.