Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Tobie Giddio

Tobie Giddio’s favorite cafe on the Lower East Side is Pause Cafe, where she stops first for coffee and an acai bowl. She tells me about her life in New York, how she moved here from New Jersey after high school, yearning for the glitter and music and nightlife the city had to offer.

She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, studying fashion illustration. Upon graduating, she joined the team at Bergdorf Goodman, producing advertisements that ran in The New York Times. Mid-conversation, a friend, a famous drag queen, calls. She laughs and her mala beads shiver as she holds the phone. Tobie met this queen at the Pyramid Club a few years into her New York life. Seeing performers every night who inspired her, Tobie says it was more formative than art school.

Tobie’s work as a fashion illustrator is heavily influenced by the color and glamour of fashion, but with an abstract viewpoint. Her elegant and bold work has appeared everywhere from The New Yorker to Harper’s Bazaar. She includes among her clients Tiffany & Co., Crest 3D Whitestrips, Cartier, Marc Jacobs, Amy Sedaris (specifically her book I Like You) and more. Tobie has moved into fine art now as well.

One series of black, abstract charcoal drawings, reminiscent of her fashion work, is on display in her bedroom. Her Bengal cat, Rae, saunters by and shines her big green eyes at me. A shrine sits not too far away, decorated with images of Tobie, her mother, and her daughter as young children as well as images of respected gurus. Tobie has been practicing meditation for over 20 years and often visits an ashram in upstate New York. There are various shrines throughout her home on the Lower East Side, in which she has lived and/or worked for about 30 years. To say the neighborhood’s cute cafes and shops couldn’t exist when Tobie first moved in is a wild understatement, but god bless rent stabilized apartments and those who have them.

Tobie’s studio is decorated with her works in progress and a wall of inspiration that includes everything from pictures of Tori Amos and Kate Bush to printouts of paintings by Hilma af Klint. Tobie is especially jazzed about Klint’s work these days, having recently seen the artist’s show at the Guggenheim and attended a symposium about her work. While producing her own work (for decades she has been using the exact same Polly-O ricotta container to dip her brushes in), she listens to Aerosmith and Sia. Also on the walls of the studio are works by Malian photographer Seydou Keïta, Tobie’s favorite, and Tabboo!, another drag queen from the Pyramid Club.

Tobie takes out her laptop and for a while we watch videos from the Pyramid years, my favorite of which is one taken by the late Nelson Sullivan. It’s Leigh Bowery’s birthday, and among the guests are RuPaul, Sister Dimension, Lahoma Van Zandt and, of course, a smiling Tobie. Her hair was just as dark then.

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