Gods and Kings

December 22, 2014
Fashion columnist Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster) paints a grim portrait of the fashion industry in this dual biography of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, two influential London-born designers who came of age in the world of high couture in the early aughts and whose careers hit critical tipping points with devastating results. “If Galliano was a Romantic, McQueen was a pornographer.... He accepted the brutality of human nature,” writes Thomas, who rarely compares her two subjects so succinctly elsewhere in the book. Galliano suffers by comparison to McQueen, appearing the lesser—and less likeable—of the two talents. For all of his hard work and creative vision (not to mention the way he cut a dress on the bias and tailored a frock coat) Galliano seems dramatically out of touch with others, reacting with revulsion to people wearing sneakers on the London underground, and regarding himself as the paradigm of beauty “and everyone else as being ugly.” McQueen is the book’s more tragic talent, filled with self-hatred that fueled his spiral of depression, drug use, and ultimately self-annihilation. Despite this, the sections on McQueen are more upbeat and richly reported. While Thomas never strikes a fulfilling symmetry between her subjects, she nevertheless offers an alluring look at two edgy, gifted, famous individuals who famously burned out midcareer.

December 15, 2014
A juxtaposition of the storied arcs of two of fashion's most celebrated, and ultimately doomed, geniuses. The lives of fashion designers Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) and John Galliano (b. 1960) have certainly been explored before. However, by comparing the victories and defeats of the two and adding in her own contemporary remembrances of each, T: The New York Times Style Magazine contributing editor Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, 2007) has crafted a compelling drama about the high-stakes world of couture culture. Strangely, both men came from virtually the same background. Galliano was the son of a plumber, and McQueen was from London's rough-and-tumble East End; they both landed at Central Saint Martins, the much-lauded art school. Thomas tracks the arc as Galliano parlayed his bad-boy reputation into the leading role at Dior. His is a strange portrait; he is a self-styled romantic who has admitted he doesn't like designing for women because their breasts "spoil the line." And then there's the force of nature that was McQueen, who was driven quite mad by the pressures of his role at Givenchy. "If Galliano was a romantic, McQueen was a pornographer," writes the author. "The Larry Flynt of fashion. He didn't believe in frontiers. He didn't believe anything was off-limits. Nothing was taboo. He accepted the brutality of human nature, didn't try to suppress it. He didn't want to put women on a pedestal like untouchable, unreachable goddesses. He wanted to empower them. He wanted to help them use the force of their sexuality to its fullest." Anyone who even skirts this strange atmosphere knows the story ends badly with McQueen's suicide in 2010 and Galliano's long banishment after a drunken, anti-Semitic rant in France. This is a dark story about excess, commerce, aristocracy and fashion as high theater that is as operatic as the dizzying shows it describes. A deep dive into the provocative art of creation and the toll it exacts from those touched by its gifts.

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March 15, 2015

This biography tells the story of two maverick designers from England who transformed fashion through the originality of their daring, sexy designs while at the same time falling victim to their own success in a world that had become about big business and consumption rather than artistic creation.

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