Tamás Király
Tamás Király (13 September 1952, Gyöngyös, Hungary – 7 April 2013, Budapest, Hungary) came to light with his cutting-edge fashion performances at the beginning of the 1980s in the underground scene of Budapest. The counter-fashion designer, who mixed fashion with elements of the fine arts and of theater, gained his first international success in that decade. Already during the socialist era, he participated in fashion shows in West Berlin, Amsterdam, and New York. In 1988 in Berlin, he presented a refined, geometric collection alongside seven leading avant-garde designers, including Vivienne Westwood, Yoshiki Hishinuma, and Claudia Skoda. Király’s show, created under the motto “open doors,” was covered by prominent fashion magazines such as i-D and Vogue. Well before the German Stern magazine’s journalist named him “the pope of fashion” in 1990, Király had already been dressing the Hungarian alternative scene from his “punk boutique,” New Art Studio, renowned for its moving window displays. He staged his fashion performances of unwearable garments in the Petőfi Hall of Budapest, accompanied by the music of the most progressive Hungarian new wave bands. (2017)
Contents
Fashion walk on Váci Street, Budapest, c.1981.
From a fashion walk, c. 1982/83. Photo: Jonathan Csaba Almasi. Source.
Poster for Boy’s Dreams, 1986. [1]
At the pedestal of the Liberty Statue in 1988 wearing one of Király's geometric dresses. Photo: Jonathan Csaba Almasi. Source.
Tamás Király, 1988. Photo: Tamas Urban. Source.
Film[edit]
- Király Dreams, dir. Péter Müller, 1988, 15 min.
Publications[edit]
- Jan Kromschröder, "Folklor und Strenge Linien: Die Kreationen des Tamás Király", Stern Magazin, 29 Mar 1990. (German)
- Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. (English)
- Orsolya Fazekas, Csak vállfákat hozzatok!, Budapest: Alinea kiadó, 2014, 224 pp. Publisher. (Hungarian)
- Tamás Király ‘80s, eds. Gyula Muskovics and Andrea Soós, Budapest: tranzit.hu, 2017, 68 pp. With texts by David Crowley, Jan Kromschröder, Gyula Muskovics, et al. Publisher. Editor, [2]. Exhibition. Exh. review: Kata Balász (Balkon). (Hungarian)/(English)
- Gyula Muskovics, "Against Interpretation. On the Performance Art of El Kazovsky and Tamás Király", trans. Eszter Greskovics, artPortal, 2018. (English)
- Király Tamás. Out of the Box, ed. Katalin Tímár, Budapest: Ludwig Múzeum – Kortárs Művészeti Múzeum, 2020, 382 pp. Texts by Antal Csipes, Julia Fabényi, Veronika Hermann, Anna Keszeg, Zsolt K. Horváth, Iliász Király, Gyula Muskovics, Andrea Soós, Katalin Timár. Excerpt. Publisher. Exhibition. Exh. booklet (27 pp). Interview with curator. (Hungarian)/(English)
- Nicole Waldner, "Király Tamás: “To Beauty Is A Duty”", 2020. About the New Art Studio. (English)
- Pawel Leszkowicz, "Notes on Queer History of Art under Communism in Central Eastern Europe", in Bridge Over Time: Contemporary Picture of the Past, ed. Łukasz Guzek, Gdańsk: Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, and Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, 2023, pp 302-332. [3] (English)
