But over the past decade, Doonan has increasingly turned his hand to writing. Beginning with a run of autobiographical tomes—one of which, 2005’s Beautiful People, was even adapted into a BBC television series—Doonan has more recently shifted to studies in fashion culture that veer toward the anthropological, like his 2018 overview of the relationship between soccer and style.
It comes as something of a surprise, then, that his latest book is a biography of the maverick Pop artist Keith Haring. Even if Doonan’s mind-boggling erudition makes him more than qualified to tackle it, an artist’s biography wasn’t necessarily the logical next step—and that’s something Doonan was keenly aware of. Despite his enduring fascination with Haring’s life story, it wasn’t an immediate yes when his editors at Laurence King Publishing proposed the idea to him. “I had to go away and think about it because the question is always, ‘Why now?’” he says. “There has to be some kind of connection that puts it in the current context.”
After taking the time to mull it over, Doonan felt the added layer of knowledge he could bring to the project lay in his own experiences of the 1980s New York scene within which Haring rose to fame. “My goal was to capture the spirit of that period,” he adds. “I felt I had an opportunity, since I was there, to capture the energy—it was like being in a crazy pinball machine where all these aspects of culture were colliding for the first time.”
While Doonan is quick to note he was never close friends with Haring—“it was all very fleeting and frenetic,” he says of their few but memorable encounters—they fraternized in the same circles. Whether they were crossing paths at Danceteria or the Palladium or Doonan was greenlighting a hand-painted denim jacket worn by Iman to an AIDS benefit at Barneys in 1986, there are still a number of shared moments and personal anecdotes sprinkled throughout.
In one such memory, Doonan watches as Haring sets up one of his installations as a backdrop at Paradise Garage—although whether it was for a Grace Jones performance or a Larry Levan DJ set, he can’t quite recall. “Keith was a bit hurt because people ignored it and carried on dancing, but I remember standing there and watching him install it,” Doonan says. “It was a chaotic period, but it was always fun.”
All the same, for Doonan, the excitement in retelling Haring’s story lies less in the frisson of his interactions with the artist and more in highlighting the aspects of his practice that were, in hindsight, astonishingly ahead of their time. Haring’s radically democratic understanding of what art could be—realized through projects like the Pop Shop and the subway graffiti pieces he delighted in seeing members of the public snatch away before the police got to them—may be well-known now, but in his ’80s heyday, it was a blurring of high and low that scandalized the art world.
Not that Haring really cared. He loved fashion too, whether painting Grace Jones from head to toe (with accessories by the late David Spada to cover her modesty) or lending his prints to Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren on the other side of the pond to integrate into their chopped-and-screwed punk fashion fantasies. “Historically, art and artists have stayed very far away from fashion,” Doonan notes. “But this was a time when style, fashion, art, music, hip-hop, break-dancing, graffiti all fell into this blender of New York City, and it was a tremendously energized period.
“Everyone approached it with no preconceived ideas,” he continues, “so you ended up in a situation where Madonna, Keith Haring, Warhol, and Grace Jones were the new aristocrats of this movement, this new collaborative collision that was taking place in Lower Manhattan.”
Of course, Haring’s legacy as one of the most significant artists of the 1980s is now sacrosanct—but for Doonan, part of the fun of revisiting his body of work was imagining how keenly at home Haring would be in the campy, hyper-saturated celebrity culture of the present day. In the book’s epilogue, he pictures Haring working with Louis Vuitton in the same vein of the customized handbags created by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with artists like Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince, or hanging out with Kanye and Kim Kardashian West at their home in Calabasas. The strange matrix of celebrity, art, and fashion that Haring quietly predicted has now, very loudly, come to pass.
Of course, these latter-day dreams for Haring’s career were not to be: In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with HIV. AIDS awareness was a political cause he had already begun advocating for fiercely through artworks promoting both safe sex and the ACT UP movement. “It also feels timely to release the book because Haring was such a huge advocate for social justice,” Doonan says. “He dealt with subjects like the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, apartheid. He was an artist who wanted to communicate with people.” In 1990, Haring died at the age of 31.
When I ask Doonan about how he approached writing about that period, he takes a moment before answering. “What we went through was so traumatizing,” he says. “I lost two of my boyfriends and many of my friends. All the stories you hear are true. I had friends who died without anyone at their bedside; everyone had abandoned them. We were all in our 20s. It was horrifying to go through this thing and to go unnoticed by the rest of the population. You’d spend the evening at a hospital bed with different people who were dying and then go to work and pretend everything was normal. We all thought we were going to die, and it did produce a freewheeling creativity where people immersed themselves in their work. I’m lucky I didn’t die. I didn’t get it, but I assumed I had because so many people I knew had died. During Keith’s last period, post-diagnosis, he was ferociously productive. It’s impressive that he handled it with incredible dignity and verve at such a young age.”
Despite the weight of responsibility Doonan clearly feels to do Haring’s story justice, it’s his tenacity in ensuring Haring’s voice rings out from every page that makes this a more moving tribute than most. “It’s clear I’m not an academic, I’m just an enthusiast about Keith Haring,” says Doonan, with typical modesty. “That’s very liberating.”
But it’s exactly this—Doonan’s ability to dive right into the heart of what makes Haring’s art so viscerally joyful without the rarefied language of the art insider—that makes him the perfect man to tell Haring’s story. “If you think about art today or what sells for a high price at Art Basel, it’s so uncommunicative,” Doonan concludes. “Keith went in the other direction. He said, ‘I want people to have the art they deserve. I want strong communicative art that everyone can relate to.’ And people still do relate to it.
“The pictograms of his, the radiant baby, the barking dog, the man with the hole in his stomach, they bring people joy to this very day,” Doonan says, before pausing again. “That’s the greatest accomplishment of all.”
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