Trends till the end
Author Dana Thomas tackles the forces behind fashion’s cycles in bio of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen Taking fashion seriously doesn’t require a definitive index
Fashion is, the saying goes, cyclical. Trends don’t just appear; they surface, again and again, when we need them the most. Historians and trend forecasters point to Laver’s Law, an index created by the museum curator James Laver to loosely guide our understanding of what is considered fashionable when and why — 10 years before a trend reaches peak fervour, for example, it’s considered “indecent,” 30 years after it’s “amusing,” 150 years the length of time it takes for a trend to be considered “beautiful.”
There are other indicators: much is made of the so-called Hemline Index, the correlation between the length of skirts and the rising and falling stock market. Good economic times, perhaps paradoxically, result in miniskirts; recessions bring hems back down. I understand the reasoning — our skirts fall with our stocks — but shouldn’t less money lead to less fabric?
Well, no matter; this is fashion, not science, and an attempt to quantify fashion as though it were a science is a thankless task. Taking fashion seriously, both as an art and a multibillion-dollar industry, doesn’t require a definitive index. Taking fashion seriously requires a writer like Dana Thomas.
Thomas is the author of my favourite book about the fashion industry, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (2007), her complex yet eminently readable analysis of the modern luxury fashion industry. She began writing about fashion for The Washington Post in 1987 and has since written about it for T, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, amongst others.
Her second book, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, is a sequel of sorts. Like Deluxe, Thomas points to the singular elements of the fashion industry that best demonstrate its underlying structure; like Deluxe, she finds precisely the right people who embody the best and worst of the industry. Gods and Kings zeroes in, as the title says, on the respective rise and fall of the two British designers who have dominated runways and retailers for the past 20 years.
Alexander McQueen and John Galliano are the right people to look at if we want to understand the current state of fashion: their family backgrounds are similar, the impact they had on the fashion of the mid-’90s to early 2000s crucial, and they both spent time working under Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, both as creative directors for Givenchy and Galliano at Dior. They both struggled with drug addiction, were notoriously difficult to work with, and they had wildly unpredictable relationships with fashion critics, sometimes hailed as revelatory geniuses and sometimes dismissed as inflammatory provocateurs.
Still, despite the similarities, the book’s comparison of McQueen and Galliano as equal made me pause; after all, McQueen killed himself in 2010, and while Galliano was famously fired from Dior in 2011 after a video emerged of him spewing anti-Semitic hate speech, he is currently the creative director of Margiela, hardly an equivalent fall from grace.
But the book does not succeed because it is a precise, exact dissection of two identical figures. The book succeeds because Thom- as has been there since the beginning and knows that McQueen and Galliano are the best public figures to talk about fashion’s kingmakers: the gods, as it were, who attempt to control the fashion cycle within an inch of its life, and who work non-stop to quantify even the most unquantifiable art. In this case, that would be Arnault, the third character whose presence hovers above our two titular kings.
As a journalist, Thomas spent a significant amount of time observing and interacting with McQueen and Galliano, and shows us both how their work was received in its original time and what it means now, as part of our evolving cultural history, keeping the focus always on the fashion but without alienating readers who might not care about the construction of a particular corset. The book is fast, moving from various thrills and despairs with a cinematic pace. Gods and Kings could be seen onscreen: perhaps as an awardsshow baiting biopic about two temperamental geniuses, or as a corporate espionage thriller, or a modern retelling of Cain and Abel, a biblical allusion that comes up frequently as McQueen and Galliano fight for the attention of the distant father figure Arnault provides. But only Thomas could successfully tell a story that is so classically more fantastical, more tragic and so much stranger than any fiction.
Gods and Kings is a story that has precedents, but no direct forefathers; it is relevant to the current fashion industry, but has no exact contemporary parallels. Thomas has written a guide to understanding a certain kind of fashion designer without reducing either to stereotypes, a signifier for a certain kind of art without reducing the work to a footnote.
Fashion is as much about time and space as it is about fabric and cut. Clothing, like all other art forms, tell us what we need to know about decades, movements, and ideologies; trends tell us about values and goals. The story of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano will continue to reappear as we need it to — as a trend, perhaps, and a lens through which we can see the rise and fall of the artists who will follow in their footsteps.