Adam Kimmel has built his creative life—most notably as a menswear designer, interior designer, photographer, and innovative set designer for his shows—on collaborating with other artists whose work he loves. This was never truer than when, as an emerging icon of classic but highly original and uber-high-quality American menswear, he drew his inspiration from Semina, a cult magazine that became a bible and a visual archive of the West Coast Beat movement.
Wallace Berman’s world
Beat artist Wallace Berman (1926-1976) kept a journal. And that journal became Semina. The Grey Art Gallery in New York has called Berman “the quintessential West Coast visual artist” among the Beats and “a crucial figure” in the development of art in California during the post-war years.
Semina, published over nine issues between 1955 and 1964, was a loose-leaf, hand-printed publication that included art and poetry—in its pages appeared work by some of the best-known names in the Beat movement, including Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and William Burroughs. Berman’s personal heroes of European culture, the mythopoeic film maestro Jean Cocteau and the deeply introspective novelist Hermann Hesse, also graced the magazine.
Semina also offered work by lesser known but highly individualistic creators like John Altoon, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, Robert Duncan, and even Berman himself. Actor and photographer Dennis Hopper was associated with Berman’s social circle. He later served as a model for Adam Kimmel. There’s an intense, chiaroscuro 1963 gelatin silver print of Hopper on a motorcycle, taken by Berman years before the actor found fame starring in Easy Rider.
You couldn’t buy Semina on a newsstand or subscribe to it. Berman personally distributed it by hand or by mail to a chosen few.
The past as a prologue
Kimmel first learned about Berman and Semina when he studied at New York University with Kenneth Silver, a magisterial historian of modern and contemporary art. Kimmel has noted that Berman’s work seems “so personal and rich” because of his free-form use of multimedia encompassing poetry, drawing, and photography. The overall aesthetic and atmosphere of Semina, with the sense of freedom inherent in its diverse forms, inspired Adam Kimmel’s Fall 2008 collection. While working on that collection, he also wrote a piece about the Semina movement for The New York Times.
Adam Kimmel’s homage to a living legend
While assembling the collection, Kimmel contacted Dennis Hopper, whose photographs he admired. Kimmel established a connection with Hopper, who subsequently introduced him to the Semina-circle artist George Herms.
Herms, an icon of the Southern California art scene who died in 2020 at age 88, bore the nickname “Godfather of the spiritual unknown.” His work centered not on traditional artistic techniques but on assemblage art. This means he took the refuse of modern civilization and turned it into art distinguished as much for its conceptual contradictions as its visual poetry. “I turn sh-t into gold,” he once said.
After tracking down the notoriously reclusive Herms, Kimmel and art writer-curator Neville Wakefield met the artist for tea at Chateau Marmont, then spent the one-hour drive to Herms’ studio being inducted into the lost world of Semina.
Herms even agreed to accompany Kimmel to Florence to appear in the designer’s show at Pitti Uomo. The then-72-year-old Herms’ puckish gravitas was on full display as he was photographed wearing Kimmel’s Semina-inspired workwear: a rich earth-toned swirl of a DB three-in-one greatcoat over an all-black corduroy jumpsuit, another all-black look with a wide-lapel DB blazer accented with a sweep of a charcoal scarf, and a short, knitted work coat over a full-legged pant and engineer boots. In addition to honoring Herms with a dinner before the show, Kimmel made sure the artist’s work would grace the walls around the Pitti Uomo exhibit.
A lost subculture that still resonates today
Wallace Berman died tragically in a car accident in Topanga Canyon on his 50th birthday. Most of the other counterculture icons he knew are gone, too. George Herms is still around—or at least we think he is. At least he still occasionally emerges from his spiritual unknown, introducing new generations of devotees to the power of total creative freedom that he, Berman, and their friends knew. Kimmel officially left fashion in 2013, putting his design energies into other projects but leaving behind a visual and conceptual treasury of work that continues to provoke inspiration.
Semina, and Berman’s many photographs of the underground art community around him, are a window into a culture that has largely fallen off our collective popular map.
Berman’s poetic visual expression is showcased through the striking collages he produced using a verifax copier, which he distributed to friends. These pieces offer a window into the spirit of their time—an era seemingly lost and longing, situated between the war years and the social-political-cultural upheavals of the fully realized 1960s. The anguished, intense, searching, and hopeful atmosphere, characteristic of perpetually youthful spirits, is only thinly veiled by the modes of living and creating that define our contemporary existence.
