crecia who flees from danger at home to Scotland. ... She’s a couture. What made the designer-as-rock-star worth his salary very sensuous woman, in complete control of her own destiny”). for Arnault was the sale of accessories—in McQueen’s case, In the old days, at Christian Dior, collections were shown to just a scarf with his logo (a skull) on it. A million dollars for a clients by models who entered the room with a little card bear- fashion show got Dior 25 million dollars in publicity. There was ing the number and name of the dress. By the time Galliano and no such thing as bad press—until Galliano’s meltdown. In short, McQueen were hired, the fashion show had become a theatrical what the “gods” (the business tycoons) did was to use the production where props, venue, special effects, and music could “kings” (Galliano and McQueen) to imbue Givenchy and Dior cost millions of dollars. with enough glamour that the brand could go on after the de- If haute couture was the province of rich women who went signers had vanished. to Paris to be fitted for gowns in the 19th century, by the latter But it was all about sex. “My goal,” Galliano said, “is really half of the 20th, according to Thomas, businessmen were buy- very simple: when a man looks at a woman wearing one of my ing up the individual fashion houses and folding them into con- dresses, I would like him basically to be saying to himself, ‘I have glomerates. (Exactly what has happened to publishing.) The to fuck her.’ I think every woman deserves to be desired. Is that idea was to turn the individual ateliers into brands whose glam- asking too much?” McQueen said he wanted women in his our would sell handbags and perfumes, where the real money is clothes to feel powerful, not abject—though when he introduced made, since by the 1970s very few women were buying haute “the bumster,” which was nothing more than pants cut so low in the back that the ass-crack Alexander McQueen and John Galliano showed, you’d think, reading this book, that he had discovered radium. (He also spoke of some- thing called “the cuntster.”) Mc- Queen was admired for the technical skills he honed as a tai- lor on Savile Row—he won over the staff at Givenchy when he in- stalled a sewing machine next to his desk. Galliano was praised for his theatrical imagination. Both men were charged with “degrading” women when their shows bombed, accused—as gay men have often been—of misog- yny. On the other hand, when the audience loved the new collec- tion, it was extremely emotional. Jesus—if not Anna Wintour— wept. There was, of course, a dark side. “I love what I do,” Mc- Queen said, but after seeing a TV documentary on Thomson’s gazelles, he remarked: “I watched those gazelles getting munched by lions and hyenas and said, ‘That’s me!’ Some- one’s chasing me all the time, and if I’m caught, they’ll pull me down. Fashion is a jungle full of nasty, bitchy hyenas.” “He knew,” said one of his as- sistants, “that success was going to take so much effort to main- tain that one day he would be like every other famous artist and have a dip in popularity. That scared him, the fear of going out of fashion.” Most people will never en- counter the world this book is

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