Just a few years ago the high style of the young was punk—greased-back hair, torn T-shirts, Nazi jewelry and other symbols of adolescent defiance. Selling hostility in clothes presented obvious problems for the fashion industry, whose question from the beginning was: What would the violent punk look be when it grew up?
Enter Neke (pronounced Nee-kee) Carson, a Texas-born artist with no ready market for his paintings but a keen sense of where the bucks are. About a year ago he formed LaRocka, a 25-member modeling agency in New York City founded on the need for a high-fashion successor to punk. "I knew nothing when I started," he says, "but I sensed a new sensibility emerging. People who knew what the odds were told me I was out of my mind."
If so, it has been a most profitable madness. The new sensibility Carson intuited was the New Wave look, and he has become one of its foremost interpreters in the field of fashion. By outfitting his bizarre beauties in such New Wave staples as skinny ties, Flash Gordon jump suits and chunky Lucite jewelry, he has created a marketing resource to which even upper-crust clothing stores like Henri Bendel will turn, in racier moments, to appeal to their customers. In the past year his models have done TV commercials, print ads, fashion magazine layouts and runway work all over the world. Now, with bookings of $10,000 a week, the agency is finally in the black—and Carson has his sights set on the commercial big time. "I'm basically creating a market for what I'm selling," he says. "Our look is not the girl next door or the Marlboro man or the European beauty. And it's not punk. But it definitely comes out of rock 'n' roll."
Carson's choice of models reflects his taste—eclectic, personal, entirely unpredictable. "Actually, it's like casting a Fellini movie," he says. "I had a woman call me who claimed she was naturally bald. I told her to come on over." Adds Jennifer Jakobson, 25, one of LaRocka's models and a former rock singer: "Neke's got a peculiar way of looking at things. But if you can get past the eccentricity, you see that he's simply brilliant."
Born in Dallas, the son of an accountant, Neke ("My nickname was Ike, so I changed it a little") grew up on a small ranch with two older brothers—Kit, now 38, a screenwriter and estranged husband of actress Karen Black, and David, 35, a Los Angeles country-gospel composer. After graduating from a Jesuit high school, Neke attended the Rhode Island School of Design, then moved to New York City to paint in 1968. But finding a gallery that would show his work proved difficult. In protest, he staged a series of legendary antic anti-art events, including a demonstration of what he called "rectal realism"—holding the brush with, well, something other than his hand while painting friends' portraits. Says brother Kit: "He just decided that if they weren't going to give him a show, he'd give them one. His inspiration wasn't so much Van Gogh as it was Bugs Bunny." But Neke kept himself afloat as a free-lance illustrator for several magazines—and at the same time began staging live performances for underground rock clubs and art galleries. Thus LaRocka. "I needed models," he says, "so I started my own agency."
With temporary offices in a recording studio, Carson keeps expenses down by booking models himself. LaRocka has recently opened its own nightclub, and Carson plans to market a series of instructional videocassettes on New Wave fashion, hair care and grooming. Still, he's not committed to anyone's idea of the New Wave look but his own. "You can't really tell when fashion is changing," he says. "But if I have a different idea next year, you'll know it."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
