Jimmy Webb, the New York stylist who helped dress the likes of Debbie Harry, the Ramones and Iggy Pop, has died aged 62.
Webb was a salesman and a buyer at Trash and Vaudeville, a shop located in New York’s East Village, which came to define a punk rock style with skinny silhouettes and leather goods.
Iggy Pop called him “Proust in streetwear, showing his ass crack,” in an Instagram tribute post. Debbie Harry told the New York Post. “We are all going to miss our wonderful friend Jimmy Webb. There goes a lovely unique NYC character. I feel lucky to have known him.”
Trash and Vaudeville opened in 1975 and became synonymous with punk and new wave looks. It was the first shop in the US to stock Doc Martens.
“When punk was at its height it was the only place to go at the time and still is,” the Ramones drummer Marky Ramone told the New York Times.
The Ramones, Blondie, the Heartbreakers and the Dead Boys all shopped at the store. The pink and plaid shirt that Bruce Springsteen wore on the cover of The River album was purchased at the shop.
Nicola Formichetti, a former stylist, told the New York Times: “For my first Lady Gaga job, I went there and got her amazing stripper shoes and created an entire wardrobe for her dancers.”
Webb also helped style looks for Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus and Madonna, and gave his own style preferences to the New Yorker in a 2007 profile. “Anything pink rocks. Anything animal-print rocks,” he said. “Anything skintight.”
Webb added: “It’s not rock’n’roll if your pants don’t hurt.” He believed in a “lower and tighter” view of how jeans should be worn. “There’s something so sexy on a female or male about those jutting-out hipbones and skintight jeans,” he told Vogue in 2011. “But I don’t want leggings.”
In 2017 Webb opened his own boutique, I Need More, named after an Iggy Pop song, in New York’s Lower East Side. “It was his dream to have a store-as-theatre like this, in the tradition of Let It Rock, Manic Panic and Trash and Vaudeville,” Pop wrote.
Joan Jett tweeted: “Our friend Jimmy Webb, stylist of the punks, famous and not, has passed. I’m so very sad and we’ll all miss your energetic, warm soul. The city will not be the same without you.”
The fashion designer Pam Hogg wrote in the comments section of I Need More’s official Instagram: “One in a million, actually no one like him.”
