Leslie Winer

Leslie Winer (born December 24, 1958) is an American musician, poet, and writer. She began her career as a high fashion model before she transitioned into music.

Winer was born in Boston to a teenager and handed over to her adoptive grandmother in a hospital parking lot in what was an illegal adoption involving the exchange of money.^{[1] [2]} She grew up in Weston, Massachusetts.^[3] She relocated to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts where she studied with Hannah Wilke and Joseph Kosuth.^[4]

She is of Scots-Irish, Basque, Mi’kmaq, and Acadian descent.^[5]

Winer began her career as a fashion model in 1980. Fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier described her as "the first androgynous model."^[6]

Winer appeared in fashion campaigns for Valentino, Christian Dior and Chloé.^[7] She also appeared on the magazine cover of Vogue Italia Pelle, Vogue Gioiello, and Vogue Australia . She continued to model throughout the 1980s.

In 2014, Winer returned to modeling as the face of Vivienne Westwood's spring/summer 2014 campaign.^[8]

After her work brought her to London in the mid-1980s, she spent a great deal of time at Leigh Bowery's nightclub, Taboo. It was while in London she met musicians Jah Wobble, who was a former bassist for Public Image Ltd, and Kevin Mooney, former bass player for Adam and the Ants.^[4]

In 1987, Winer co-wrote the track "Just Call Me Joe" with Sinéad O'Connor. The song would appear on O'Connor's debut album The Lion and the Cobra , with Winer performing the backup spoken vocal.^[3] In 1988, she began recording under the name '©'. Winer recorded her first song, "Kind of Easy," with Karl Bonnie from Renegade Soundwave.^[3]

In 1990, Winer recorded the album Witch with Wobble and Mooney. BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel played some tracks off this white label and the record went on to become a small cult classic prompting NME to refer to Winer as "The Grandmother of Triphop".^[9]

In 1991, she moved to Miami and was working at Island Records founder Chris Blackwell's South Beach Studios, where she recorded her albums 3 Bags Full and Spider.^[3]

Helmut Lang did a small pressing of her album Spider that he released in his NYC shop sometime around 1999 to promote one of his shows.^[10] Winer occasionally records music with Swedish composer Carl Michael von Hausswolff and others.^[11] She has also worked with Grace Jones.

Winer had a friendship with writer William S. Burroughs and credits him with being a major mentor.^[5] Burroughs mentions his friendship with Winer in a number of interviews and books with French journalist Alain Pacadis and Burroughs’ own last book Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs .^{[12] [13]}

Winer dated artist Jean-Michel Basquiat early in her career.^{[1] [8]}

In 1986, Winer married Kevin Mooney for "the papers." "The British wanted me to leave the country," she said.^[3]

Winer currently lives in France, where she has raised five daughters and is the executor of the estate of writer and poet Herbert Huncke.^{[1] [14]}

• Leslie Winer discography at Discogs
• LW&c. @ The Tapeworm
• LW's Anthology @ Light In The Attic

• Living people
• Female models from Massachusetts
• Musicians from Boston
• 21st-century American women
• Singer-songwriters from Massachusetts
• Writers from Boston
• 1958 births
• People from Weston, Massachusetts
• School of Visual Arts alumni

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Date of birth not in Wikidata
• Articles with hCards
• Pages using infobox musical artist with associated acts