We chat with the author of "GODS AND KINGS: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano" about how the world lost one of it's most creative visionaries of all time -- and how it saved another from the same fate, just in the nick of time.
Will there ever be another Alexander McQueen or John Galliano? It’s a question that many have asked since the former committed suicide in 2010 and the latter was publicly sacked from his lofty positions at LVMH for an anti-Semitic public tirade. And it's the question posed in Dana Thomas’s latest book "GODS AND KINGS: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano" -- a more-than-300-page discussion about how we’ve “killed the soul in creative industries to churn out profits,” as Thomas, also the author of "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," explained over the phone Monday.
Unbeknownst to Thomas, the title of his book is even more fitting than he initially realized. “I was chatting with someone in the fashion industry and I told them what I was working on,” the author explained. “When I told them the name, they said, ‘Well, you know, at LVMH they call [Galliano] dieu!’ I asked someone else who worked at LVMH and they said ‘Yeah, yeah, we don’t like to talk about it, but we do.’”
In addition to exploring the complicated relationship between McQueen and Galliano's creative genius and the all-important pull of profit, the dual biography really pulls back the veil on the designers' creative processes. Though rumors are touched upon -- including McQueen's alleged HIV-positive status -- the book is a far cry from being gossipy. Those who assume otherwise, says Thomas, simply "haven’t read the book yet. The book that I wrote is about how you make things and how you make things beautifully.”
Read on for her thoughts on the industry post-McQueen and Galliano and why she found both so fascinating.
What was the jumping off point for this book?
I was working on a piece about John's downfall for the Washington Post, and I found myself writing this leading paragraph about how he wasn't the only designer who cracked under the pressure in recent years. I decided there was something more to it. There was Marc Jacobs having a hard time and going to rehab, and McQueen, who was the most famous. There was [Christophe Decarnin] at Balmain who ended up missing his show because he had be hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. It kept coming up, so I thought, ‘There's something going on here.’
When John and McQueen first started designing, they were only doing two collections a year -- but when Galliano left Dior and his own brand, he was overseeing 32 collections a year. He was no longer really designer -- he'd become a manager.
Designers are creative souls who are far more sensitive than number crunchers with MBAs. They didn't study business, they didn't learn how to be managers, they just had to do it and it became a bit too much. It also seemed like the perfect follow-up to Deluxe. That book really talked about the business side, and how it became global -- but I didn't really talk about how that affected the creative side. So I thought, this is the perfect way to look at the creative side of the luxury fashion industry, but to use the tales of these two men to explore a much bigger question -- which is, have we lost the human touch in the pursuit of these profits?
Continue reading the great article from Fashionista.com here
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