A new biography that
yokes Alexander McQueen and John Galliano is an exercise in muck-raking, says
Alexander Fury
Alexander Fury
@AlexanderFury
A callousness to Thomas's tales: Alexander McQueen on the catwalk
in Paris, March 2004 ( Reuters )
On 12 January, the
designer John Galliano – a former head of Christian Dior who was dismissed
after a drunken anti-Semitic rant in a Paris bar in 2011 – showed his first
collection for the label, Maison Margiela. Almost a month to the day, 11
February marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Lee Alexander McQueen, who
died by his own hand.
How best to
commemorate these events – marking the passing of one British fashion star and
the restoration of another to the industry following an intense period of
remorse and rehabilitation? By the publication of a glossy, gossipy tell-all
biography running their two stories side by side. Tasteless? Definitely.
Lucrative? Probably.
Dana Thomas, an
American fashion journalist based in Paris, seems to have no qualms about the
former, presumably in search of the latter. She publishes her latest work,
luridly labelled God and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John
Galliano, to neatly coincide with not only the anniversary of McQueen's
suicide, but also the launch of the Victoria and Albert Museum's exhibition,
Savage Beauty, a British incarnation of the blockbuster show originally staged
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That exhibition was the most
successful of the museum's annual Costume Institute shows (some 650,000 people
passed through its doors), becoming one of the eight most-visited exhibits ever
in the august institution's 145-year history. The V&A has already
experienced record-breaking advance ticket sales: over 30,000 have already
shifted. The number is only set to rise.
What does that
indicate? An enthusiasm for McQueen's clothes, certainly – motivated by a
number of factors. Not least of which is a morbid fascination with the recently
departed. As for Galliano? His spectacular fall from grace has proved tabloid
front-page fodder over the past four years. His rehabilitation and return to
the fashion fold has been dissected by broadsheets and red-tops, outside the
usual limits of said publications' fashion pages. Why not capitalise on the
curiosity surrounding both, and spuriously compare the two? I say spurious
because, despite both coming from working-class London backgrounds and being
educated at Central Saint Martins, there is little to connect the work of
Galliano and McQueen. Galliano was raised in Gibraltar before his parents moved
to London, McQueen born and bred in the city's East End. Galliano graduated in
1984, McQueen 1992. And while the theatricality of their visions may seem to
share a common thread of inspiration, Galliano was consistently more romantic
and sensual, McQueen savage and macabre.
All that, of course,
is incidental. The important part isn't drawing illuminating connections
between McQueen and Galliano's life and work, the parallels in their rise to
the top of the fashion game without high-born advantages. Rather, Thomas's book
is about the salacious Schadenfreude she and her readers can enjoy at their
mutual downfall. I feel there is a callousness to Thomas's telling of the tales
of these two designers, unpicking their shortcomings, their personal demons,
their failures, and exposing the unravelling seams of their lives and work for
all to see. Galliano, she tells us, was a man whose best work was behind him by
1994 – almost 20 years before his downfall. McQueen was his technical superior,
but a man enslaved by his carnal needs. She gleefully recalls an assistant
being advised that her job would involve washing McQueen's sex toys – the
Marquis de Sade meeting the surreal entitlement of the fashion world as
depicted in The Devil Wears Prada.
That book was a
bitchy, brittle and thinly veiled roman à clef. Thomas's characters in Gods and
Kings are real, but there's the same feeling. She seems determined to undermine
not only the legacy of McQueen and Galliano, but the entire fashion world, to
prick its entitled, elitist bubble and expose that it's nothing but hot air.
Despite the fact that, as her website declares, Thomas has worked in fashion
for over 20 years, beginning her career on the style section of The Washington
Post and working as a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris
from 1995 to 2011, she seems to have no affection or affinity for the industry.
Her last book, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Lustre (2007), ripped open the world
of hyper-luxe handbag manufacturing, exposing the conspiracy of high-fashion
conglomerates keeping prices soaring ever-higher whilst cutting on
manufacturing costs. Deluxe was pithy and pitch-perfect, the perfect debunking
of the contemporary fashion myth. Thomas crowned the French fashion house
Hermès – whose made-to-order handbags retail for upwards of £5,000 – as the
embodiment of true luxury. Her disdain for Louis Vuitton (whose parent company,
LVMH, own both the house of Christian Dior and 91 per cent of the John Galliano
label) is absolute.
I am a fan of
Deluxe, of Thomas taking the faceless conglomerates to task for their
commodification of luxury. It won't make any difference to their sales figures
– neither did a 2010 ruling by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority that
two of the brand's print adverts, depicting artisans hand-sewing Vuitton
handbags, were "misleading": "Consumers would interpret the
image of a woman using a needle and thread... to mean that Louis Vuitton bags
were hand-stitched."
But I am not a fan
of Gods and Kings. I doubt many in the fashion industry will be. Not because
the line between biography and hagiography is especially blurred when it comes
to fashion (although that is undoubtedly true) but because the fashion industry
interacts with John Galliano and Alexander McQueen as three-dimensional people,
not two dimensional labels. Thomas does, too.
Gods and Kings is
one of those odd books that makes you wonder why the author wrote it, so
obviously does she loathe her subject matter. You also wonder what she said to
urge McQueen and, to a lesser extent, Galliano's confidants, to share their
secrets and rip apart their legacies. There is a vengeful, spiteful tone to
this book, redolent of the unpleasant sniping and gossiping that is, alas,
endemic in the fashion industry. Thomas closes with a chapter plucking at the
heartstrings and bemoaning the demise of true creativity in fashion.
"There is no poetry," she muses. "No heart. No angst. It's just
business." Maybe that's how she justifies this sullying, sneering,
muck-smearing book to herself, alone, late at night. I hurled this book away
from me. I urge you to do the same.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/gods-and-kings-by-dana-thomas-book-review-exposing-the-seams-cruelly-10011203.html
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