Discover the individuals that, like Patti Smith, have shaped the Firm’s creative director and designer’s aesthetics, philosophy and work in the series ICONS.

Patti Smith considered herself more of a writer than a musician. She lived in the New York of the 70s. She slept on the subway and in graveyards. Muse of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, intimate of Bob Dylan, couple of Fred “Sonic” Smith of MC5, inspiration of PJ Harvey, The Smiths, Sonic Youth, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. or Garbage. Patti Smith is one of the most important female voices in rock and music history. Although “I don’t know how to play,” she always claims. She understands her gigs as a performance, rather than a concert.

Smith met the new currents of performative art in Paris during her brief stay with her sister in 1969, where she came into contact with artistic groups and acted in the street. Thus, back in New York, she entered the 70s writing, painting and acting on the St. Mark poetry project. During the following years, she published poetry books, of which she used to make public readings. As an assiduous to the city’s concert halls and clubs like the CBGB or Max’s Kansas City, she began collaborating with the bands and putting music to her writings.

In 1974 Patti Smith made history with her first album Horses, a punk poetry album. Her lyrics and her influences from beat poetry brought intellectuality and feminism to the genre, predominantly masculine. Her androgynous, scruffy, “unfeminine” style, was challenging and revolutionary.

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Patti Smith & Robert Mapplethorpe
Images: Robbert Mapplethorpe

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