HAUTE COUTURE FINDS ITS PLACE AS WORK OF ART
'Until now, you've had a much better chance of seeing a Van Gogh up close than a Mugler'
What Paris, New York, and London couldn’t do, Montreal has done. Manfred Thierry Mugler has been persuaded to look back. The groundbreaking French designer had long disdainfully turned down anything resembling the sort of retrospective tribute that might, in the wrong hands, imply the end of a creative arc. It turns out he may simply have been waiting for the perfect opportunity, because three years ago, in a true coup, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Nathalie Bondil and Thierry-Maxime Loriot convinced him that the time was right, and that Montreal was the place to do it. The world-première result, Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, can now be seen, and it should not be missed. Mugler has history with Montreal — he lived here for several months in 2003 while working on Zumanity, Cirque du Soleil’s permanent adult-only Las Vegas show — and has an affection for the city, characteristically remarking this week that the crisp, clear winter conditions created “a colour combination of white and blue that I find beautiful. It’s a sexy city.” But it was MMFA director general/ chief curator Bondil and exhibition curator Loriot who clinched the deal. “Until now, you’ve had a much better chance of seeing a Van Gogh up close than a Mugler,” said Bondil. Implied is her belief that an haute couture designer can be every bit the artist a painter or sculptor can be. She didn’t have to say it out loud — the exhibition demonstrates the point just fine. The modern runway show is so embedded in the popular imagination that it can feel strange to think of it as the invention of one living person, but that is essentially what Mugler did, beginning in the late 1970s and peaking in the ’80s and ’90s. His early experience in the world of dance — he is trained in ballet, and went to India to study Kathakali, the classical dance form of Kerala — provides a clue to the performative aspect that distinguished his fashion work from the start. “Dance and fashion have a lot in common,” he has said. “Fashion is a production, and the runway gives you the opportunity to put on a real show.” The masterful mounting of Couturissime takes that maxim to its logical extreme. Structured narratively to resemble the acts in an opera, the show incorporates 150 pieces selected by Loriot and Mugler from among 7,000 in the designer’s archive, presented alongside multimedia installations.
This is not about a label or a house or a company. This is the work and vision of one person.
For all the head-spinning variety on display, the stamp of an individual sensibility is unmistakable. “This is not about a label or a house or a company,” said Bondil. “This is the work and vision of one person.” Do an informal word-association quiz with Mugler’s name and the term “power-dressing” may well come up: the broad-shouldered look he invented for working women in the ’80s was so ubiquitous and widely imitated that it sometimes became a figure of fun. Again, though, as with soundtracked runway shows and the use of African, Asian and transgender models, it’s good to remind yourself that 40 years ago that look was revolutionary, and for women a true step forward.
“I’ve often been told how much more self-confident people have become when they wore my designs,” Mugler has said. In the introductory essay to the exhibition’s lavish accompanying catalogue, a work he edited, Loriot elucidates that idea, pointing out that, at a time when Jane Fonda’s workout videos were imposing a cult of the body beyond the reach of most, Mugler had “looks for every woman.” Danielle Mitterand, France’s one-time first lady, was a client. “(His) talent lies in knowing how to conceal my flaws and show my good points to advantage,” she said. Given his abiding preoccupation with themes of metamorphosis, it shouldn’t be surprising that, once he’d plunged fully into the world of haute couture, Mugler took his ready-to-wear roots to a whole other level, conceiving a series of retro-futurist “fembot” looks whose spiritual forebear is Maria of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. “I’ve always tried to make people look stronger than they really are,” he said. “Like superwomen or supermen.” An undoubted highlight among many in the show is the display of Mugler’s big-budget designs for the Comédie Française’s 1985 production of Macbeth in Avignon. Combined with the muted lighting in the room, the disquieting items do full justice to that darkest of plays, even if you can’t help suspecting the actors wearing these heavy black creations outdoors in the heat of a French summer might have had an unprintable word or two to say. The presence in the show of several Helmut Newton photographs of Mugler creations is a reminder that Mugler is himself an estimable photographer. One of his signature moves in the medium is to deploy his models as part of a much grander composition, often dwarfed by nature or by monumental architecture. One indelible 1988 shot depicts a woman lying on her back on one of the chrome Art Deco eagles protruding from New York City’s Chrysler Building, 61 floors above the sidewalk. It’s enough to give you vertigo just looking at it. “That’s not Photoshopped,” said Loriot. “She really is lying there. You probably couldn’t get away with that now.” The deaths of Mugler-adjacent icons George Michael and David Bowie — the former represented in the show via the famously contentious Too Funky video, the latter seen in a Mugler dress in the 1979 Boys Keep Swinging video—as well as the recent passing of Karl Lagerfeld, lend the show a certain wistfulness: it recalls a different era, more optimistic, when big ideas could be underwritten by big money. Yet at the same time, the show feels uncannily contemporary, and that’s down to more than just the recent sporting of vintage Mugler items by Kim Kardashian at the Grammy Awards ceremony last month, and on a red carpet in Montreal last Monday. This is a man, after all, whose restlessness drove him in 2002 to step outside the world of haute couture and pursue personal reinvention in the most literal of ways, remaking his body via an extreme workout regimen and asking henceforth to be called Manfred. Since then, his greatest visibility has come from the revue shows Mugler Follies in Paris and The Wyld in Berlin, and his occasional role as go-to dresser to the megastar divas of the day: Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and the woman he cited on Tuesday when asked if he has a current muse. “Cardi B,” he replied without hesitation, counting the rapper-singer as emblematic of “beautiful and unique people who have the courage to be themselves. These people are the incarnation of my work.” “He’s not nostalgic,” said Loriot of the 70-year-old Mugler. “He looked at (helping put together Couturissime) as a new adventure.” That last word, you sense, is the key to understanding the work of a man who sees everyday life as a battle to be fought with defiance, humour, and flair. In the catalogue, Loriot quotes French Culture Minister Jack Lang ’s words of appreciation to Mugler for helping create a world “where dressing is less and less a formality, but rather a pleasure into which can be slipped a hint of wit.” Or in this case, a whole lot more than just a hint. Thierry Mugler: Couturissime runs March 2 through Sept. 8 at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St. W. A complementary show, Montreal Couture: 10 Contemporary Quebec Fashion Designers, runs on the same dates. For full information on both shows visit mbam.qc.ca.