Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano - Couverture rigide

Thomas, Dana

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1594204942 ISBN 13 : 9781594204944

Editeur : Penguin Press, 2015

Synopsis

Physical description; 422 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of chiefly colour plates : portraits ; 25 cm. Summary; Analyzes the ends of two preeminent fashion designers to demonstrate how they were casualties of the war between art and commerce, chronicling their rise and achievements while sharing insights into how art has suffered at the hands of economic demands. More than two decades ago, John Galliano and Alexander McQueen arrived on the fashions scene when the business was in an artistic and economic rut. Both wanted to revolutionize fashion in a way no one had in decades. They shook the establishment out of its bourgeois, minimalist stupor with daring, sexy designs. They turned out landmark collections in mesmerizing, theatrical shows that retailers and critics still gush about and designers continue to reference. Their approach to fashion was wildly different--Galliano began as an illustrator, McQueen as a Savile Row tailor. Galliano led the way with his sensual bias-cut gowns and his voluptuous hourglass tailoring, which he presented in romantic storybook-like settings. McQueen, though nearly ten years younger than Galliano, was a brilliant technician and a visionary artist who brought a new reality to fashion, as well as an otherworldly beauty. For his first official collection at the tender age of twenty-three, McQueen did what few in fashion ever achieve: he invented a new silhouette, the Bumster. Subjects; McQueen, Alexander 1969-2010. Galliano, John. Fashion designers - England - London - Biography.

A propos du livre

Extrait :

 

Tangier is a city as ancient as the gods, the point where Europe and Africa meet, where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean kiss. It is a labyrinth of narrow streets “thronged with the phantoms of forgotten ages,” Mark Twain wrote in 1869, and “a basin that holds you,” Truman Capote observed, where “the days slide by less noticed than foam in a waterfall.”
 
In the early 1960s, a young boy from Gibraltar named John Charles Galliano passed through Tangier by ferry with his Spanish mother, Anita, on his way to and from school in Spain—an exotic commute made necessary by a long-standing diplomatic feud between his father’s homeland and his mother’s. Galliano delighted in their stopovers in this strange, curious place. “The souks, the markets, woven fabrics, the carpets, the smells, the herbs, the Mediterranean color,” he reflected years later. This, he mused, was “where my love of textiles comes from.”
 
Galliano was born on November 28, 1960, the middle child of three; sister Rose Marie was five years older, and Maria Inmaculada, three years younger. His father, John Joseph, was a plumber who “came from a long line of rather serious and practical men, such as tailors and carpenters, all of whom traditionally began to earn a living from the age of fourteen,” he said.
 
His mother, Ana Guillén Rueda—known as Anita—hailed from La Línea de la Concepción, the Spanish town across the border from Gibraltar. The Guillén family had long lived in the rural farming region next to the British territory. “They were renowned for their passion for flamenco and a temperament that was utterly fiery and wild,” Galliano said. She grew up under Spanish dictator General Franco’s totalitarian regime—a pro-nationalist and ultra-Catholic society where anti-Semitism flourished. After she married and moved to Gibraltar, she maintained close ties to her homeland, and made sure her young son was educated in the same culture as she had been.
 
The Galliano family resided at 13, Serfaty’s Passage, a small lane named for the local Jewish population, where the Esnoga Grande, Gibraltar’s principal synagogue, has been located since the early eighteenth century. Gibraltar has had an uneasy relationship with the Jewish community for centuries. Following their expulsion from Spain in 1492, much of the Spanish Jewish diaspora—known as the Sephardim, after the Hebrew word for Spain—passed through Gibraltar on their way to settlements in North Africa. They were given the right to a permanent settlement in 1749 and the population flourished quietly until World War II, when all its residents were evacuated from the two-and-a-half-square-mile territory.
 
The Gallianos were devout Catholics who attended mass regularly. Galliano was baptized at the Cathedral of St. Mary the Crowned, the baroque seat of the Roman Catholic diocese of Gibraltar, before the same altar where his parents wed. He adored growing up in Gibraltar, mesmerized, he said, by the “bright alleyways, sunshine, blue skies and a main street bustling with sailors.”
 
But John Joseph wanted more for his children: in 1967, he moved the family to South London, so six-year-old Galliano and his sisters could receive a better education. Galliano remembered thinking how brave his mother was “to depart with three young children to a completely foreign country where she did not speak a word of the language.” They eventually settled in the middle-class neighborhood of Peckham, where they lived in a tan brick Victorian row house at 128, Underhill Road.
 
London was in the throes of the Swinging Sixties, when the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other British Invasion bands were topping the pop music charts; fashion designer Mary Quant was liberating women with the miniskirt and hot pants; film directors Tony Richardson and Richard Lester were turning out cool, ironic comedies like The Knack . . . and How to Get It; and photographers David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Harry Benson were capturing it all for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Life. “In a decade dominated by youth,” Time magazine pronounced in its landmark cover story on the city’s cultural renaissance, “London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene.”
 
The Galliano family wanted no part of that London. Instead Anita, a striking redhead with an olive complexion and a good figure, did what she could to keep the scents, the colors, and the music of southern Spain alive in cold, gray, rainy England. She cooked traditional Mediterranean meals and encouraged her young son to sing—he had a lovely, pitch-perfect voice—and to dance the flamenco. “On tabletops,” he later explained, because “it makes more noise.”
 
“I knew pretty soon that I had inherited this whole Spanish pride thing from my mother—the way you look and the way you walk and dress,” he admitted. “I never knew anyone with more outfits than her. She was the sort of woman who would dress herself and her children up to the nines and scrub us all with baby perfume until we sparkled just to go out down the road for a coffee. I can still remember all the heads turning as she walked by.”
 
John Joseph—a fairly short and stocky, fair-skinned, balding man—ran his own plumbing business, and taught his son some of the basics, like how to use a blowtorch. “I would sometimes go out with him on jobs and I was struck by how he always had to have the most perfect finish and the cleanest joint, and how sad it was that all that craftsmanship would never be appreciated,” Galliano said. His father’s profession—which was very low on the English class scale—eventually became a sore spot for him: “People are always talking about how I am a plumber’s son,” he complained. “I am my father’s son primarily. What he chose to do as a career was his choice and he did it very, very well.” Galliano’s mother worked as “dinner lady” in a local school cafeteria. He never made mention of it publicly.
 
Throughout the home there were souvenirs of their pre-London life, such as a Spanish fan and pictures of Gibraltar. Galliano spoke Spanish with his mother and English with his father. “Other boys’ houses always seemed to smell of dogs and musty carpets,” he said, “whereas ours smelt of garlic and clean laundry and fresh flowers.”
 
As in Gibraltar, the Galliano family attended mass regularly. On some Sundays, Galliano would serve as an altar boy at the 9:30 service and play guitar for the Latin mass. He was particularly captivated by “all the pomp and ceremony, the clouds of incense, the Holy Communion outfits,” he recalled—an infatuation that would later surface in his fashion shows. For his first communion, he said, “I arrived in this dazzling white suit, bedecked with rosary beads and gold chains and ribbons with all the saints on.” The other boys were in their conservative school uniforms. “I knew I was different,” he admitted, “and I ended up being photographed with all the girls. But it didn’t bother me. I always liked being with the girls, and I also liked looking cool.”
 
Galliano readily allows that his parents instilled a strong set of values, “like the need for discipline and honesty, the notion that things were only worth doing if you did them to the best of your ability, and the importance of a deep religious faith,” he said.
 
Later in life, however, Galliano disclosed that underneath the appealing veneer, there lurked unspoken darkness and fear. His father “was pretty strict and I was always afraid of him,” he said. “If I went a little bit too off—slap! It was Dad’s upbringing and it was Victorian, and that’s the way he was.” One time, when he found his father’s authority too suffocating, he said, “I flew into a rage [and] took the guitar I had been practicing on and smashed it down the stairs, just missing my father’s head. Everyone looked utterly horrified, and . . . I can remember the sick feeling I had, until I could finally go to confession and get rid of all the badness that I felt.”
 
 · · · 
 
GALLIANO WAS A GOOD STUDENT and passed the entrance exams for Wilson’s Grammar School, a state-run boys’ middle and high school. Back then, grammar schools were a cross between private school and public school: students wore uniforms and the education was a rigorous, advanced curriculum, but the tuition was state-funded. Students came from all backgrounds, particularly what one Wilson’s alum described as “hardcore middle-class families who pushed their kids to do well on the exams.” For the less privileged, such as Galliano, attending grammar school was a ticket to a better life.
 
He quickly discovered “what the whole place was going to be about,” he said. “The first-year pupils were bullied by the sixth-formers; they would do it very slyly, like suddenly winding you with a blow to the stomach, which would leave you gasping, on the way to assembly, while the teachers would more or less turn a blind eye.” Eventually, he made a small circle of friends and participated in creative school activities, such as theater.
 
Small and thin with a dark Mediterranean complexion, he had little in common with the other boys in such a heavily Protestant culture—a gypsy-looking imp in the midst of a clan of freckle-faced roughhousers. He wasn’t much of an athlete—he only excelled at tennis, a sport he’d keep up in adulthood. He wasn’t too masculine either, opting to sass up his conservative uniform with mod shoes and cut his hair in a stylish wedge. “John stood out and was camp,” says a former schoolmate. “He definitely got picked on.”
 
“I developed cunning because of it,” Galliano later said. “I would work out what earlier trains to get and what carriages to ride in to not be beaten by the boys. Hiding the bruises, hiding the cuts, going home and not being able to talk about it, because if I did I would get another good beating.” Instead of complaining he escaped, he said, “into my own world of daydreams.”
 
He also fought back—with words. “Some of the boys, I think, found [Galliano] a bit of a challenge to their gender identity [and] they did make his life difficult,” says David Jefferson, Wilson’s school chaplain at the time. “He responded with spirit. I thought he was a brave boy, [though] not always particularly wise. . . . It may be that it is sort of his character that when he’s provoked, he retaliates.”
 
 · · · 
 
DURING THE MID-1970S, Britain was seized by social and economic upheaval: in 1975, inflation reached a record 26.9 percent; the following year, the world’s once-greatest empire humbly accepted financial aid from the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment was on a steep rise, reaching 1.6 million in 1977.
 
Out of this upheaval emerged “punk”: a pop-culture movement driven by the rejection of all things bourgeois and establishment. Contemporary historians believe that punk was born in the early 1970s downtown Manhattan music scene—in particular rockers Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine, their band Television, and the New York Dolls, most of whom played at the rock club CBGB. But punk hit its stride in Britain, thanks to a relentless, press-savvy English entrepreneur named Malcolm McLaren, who, after a visit to New York, put together and managed a new band in London called the Sex Pistols. Their music was aggressive and, at the time, shocking; twenty minutes into their first concert—at St. Martins School of Art in Soho in November 1975—they were thrown off stage.
 
London punks were far more raw, primal, and combative than the New York breed. They came from all classes—a social revolution in itself—since everyone, from the East End council-housing kids to the private-school-educated posh set, suffered from the country’s economic woes and general malaise. Their look was vulgar and violent: safety pins through cheeks; gothic eye makeup; bleached spiky hair; torn, disheveled clothing often with offensive statements blasted across the front. It was an utter rejection of all that was considered aesthetically beautiful or appealing, of all that was English reserve and gentility.
 
The epicenter for the movement was SEX, a shop that McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood had on King’s Road. There they sold Westwood-designed clothes that combined Third Reich style and symbolism with bondage, Dickensian poverty, Surrealism, Dadaism, and downtown New York rock and roll. There were T-shirts with outrageous slogans and rude images; trousers in shiny fabric with zippers on the sides or along the crotch seam; and shirts made of parachute fabric, with straps and rings. “They were powerful, those clothes,” said Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook, who regularly dressed in Westwood’s designs. “You had to have balls to wear them. You’d get confronted in the street and you’d have to stand up for yourself.”
 
At Wilson’s Grammar School, this all played out gently. Since it was a school with uniforms, the boys couldn’t really rebel in their manner of dress or appearance; they followed the movement by reading Melody Maker and New Musical Express, by listening to the music, by partying on weekends—for them it was more part-time recreation than a life philosophy. As immigrants, the Gallianos cautioned their children not to renounce their new culture and instead taught them to earn respect through hard work. For Galliano, that meant attaining good grades, helping his father on plumbing jobs, and working at a car wash.
 
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister after five years of political and economic crises under leftist Labour Party rule. During her three terms in office, the Iron Lady introduced a series of reforms, such as deregulation of the financial business and privatization of state-owned companies, all of which she deemed necessary to modernize Britain and lift it out of its economic morass. Simultaneously, the policies opened doors for social mobility and created opportunities that encouraged entrepreneurialism.
 
Galliano, the son of a working-class immigrant, was coming of age in this era. In pre-Thatcher Britain, chances are he would have been stuck in his station for the rest of his life, unable to move up the social or economic ladder. Thatcherism and punk changed all that by boosting the economy and breaking down Britain’s entrenched class barriers. Galliano wasn’t a Thatcherite and he wasn’t a punk. But he benefited from both movements: they provided a way out of Peckham, gave him a sense of possibility, and would allow him to fulfill his potential.
 
 · · · 
 
AT SIXTEEN, Galliano left Wilson’s, having passed several of his O-level—or Ordinary Level—exams, the British standardized tests for the basic level of the General Certificate of Education. He thought of studying foreign languages—he was quite gifted in language, so much so that his mother hoped he “would become a great interpreter in a courtroom somewhere,” he said. But a quiet passion for art tugged at him, so he enrolled in the design and tex...

Revue de presse :

San Francisco Chronicle: 
“One of the most anticipated fashion reads of 2015 ... explores the complicated minds of the two designers. From their brilliant early collections and career highs to McQueen’s tragic suicide and Galliano’s public meltdown, Thomas pays equal heed to the darkness and the light of both men in this gripping story of fashion Icaruses who flew too close to the sun.

Christian Science Monitor: 
”Those familiar with Thomas, author of "Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster," are well aware of her abilities to break down the illusions of the fashion industry. She believes there were several reasons that contributed to the two designers’ downfalls: the crushing pressures in the new corporatization and democratization of fashion, the use of substance abuse as a coping mechanism, and the personal loss of family and close friends.”

The Huffington Post:
"Even if you don't follow the world of high fashion, Dana Thomas' dual biography of British designers John Galliano and Alexander McQueen is one of the nonfiction titles of the year. Thomas probes the torrential world of haute couture as she chronicles the lives of fashion superstars whose meteoric careers read like a modern Faustian tale of tragic dimension." 

The Lady: 
Entertaining and deliciously exhaustive...This is the book that the fashion world was waiting for. Thomas's eloquence is compelling, her prose fast and feisty." 

National Post: 
"[Gods and Kings] is fast, moving from various thrills and despairs with cinematic pace....It is revelant 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."

Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson and American Lion: 
“Dana Thomas has written a real-life saga that is as engaging and compelling as a work of great fiction. By taking us inside the fascinating world of fashion, she gives us a startling tale of ambition, creativity, fame, and ultimately tragedy. This is a terrific book.”

Michael Gross, author of Model and House of Outrageous Fortune: 
“Comprehensive, detailed, coldly accurate yet extraordinarily sympathetic, Dana Thomas’s Gods and Kings is a fascinating double biography of two dressmakers of genius. But it's also a riveting, definitive history of the three decades in which fashion devolved from a coddling cottage business to a cutthroat industry quite capable of killing its young. As commerce triumphs over art, you can only cringe, but you also have to admire Thomas's exhaustive account of what fashion folk would no doubt refer to as a moment that will never, and can never, be repeated.”

Teri Agins, author of Hijacking the Runway and The End of Fashion: 
“John Galliano and Alexander McQueen raised the bar creatively and theatrically with their high-impact fashion shows. In Gods and Kings, Paris based fashion writer Dana Thomas digs deep with the zeal of a historian, to chronicle the parallel dramas of the British fashion wunderkinds, whose careers ended tragically, way too soon.”

Praise for Deluxe by Dana Thomas

“A crisp, witty social history that’s as entertaining as it is informative.”
--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

“What Fast Food Nation did for food service, this book does for fashion, exposing the underbelly of the $157-billion luxury industry and the lockstep consumer psychology behind its glamorous veneer.”
--Los Angeles Times

“Richly reported.... Deluxe is a melancholy meditation on the fate of the handbag in the age of mechanical reproduction.”
--Washington Monthly

“A scathing exposé demystifies the luxury-goods industry, detailing how venerable fashion houses have traded quality for profits.... Painstakingly researched and deftly written, valuable to fashionistas and fashion victims alike.”
--Kirkus Reviews

"Meticulously researched and elegantly written.... Lamentation hangs over this book like a perfectly tailored sheath. ... The story Ms. Thomas tells is a fascinating one, filled with surprising details, and she tells it well..... The mini-biographies that dot the book are its most engaging feature. Business buffs will relish more tales of buyouts, product placement, marketing and globalization. Prada wins points for some of the most audacious marketing moves while Vuitton loses points for its caving into Vichy and the Nazi regime, gestures by the way that cost them nothing in sales.... [A] wonderful book."
--The Washington Times

“Thomas’s astute social history argues convincingly that accessibility has forever tarnished long-cherished status symbols.”
--Vogue

“Thomas does for high-end handbags what Eric Schlosser did for the Chicken McNugget in Fast Food Nation... Consider it required reading for anyone who has ever maxed out a credit card at Bergdorf Goodman.”
--Details

“[Thomas] writes with authority, and she knows the players...  Unlike many of the authors on this crowded shelf, presumed experts whose intramural tone is aimed directly at executives looking to market their products more successfully, Thomas talks directly to the shopper – the teenager at the mall, the tourist in Vegas. ... Thomas is at her best as a reporter, accompanying police in Guangzhou, China, on raids to bust the manufacturers and sellers of counterfeit goods.  There is real drama in these scenes, and vivid characters, including tough-talking cops and rock-tossing child laborers angry that their work has been disrupted.”
--The New York Times, T Magazine

“Meticulously researched and written with authoritative finesse, Thomas' book creates a devastating survey.”
--Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Humorous, informative.”                         
--The Kansas City Star

“A Paris-based Newsweek writer casts an impressive net over fashion...  Thomas’ passion and egalitarianism stand out.”
--Entertainment Weekly

“Dana Thomas spins a yarn the way Pucci spins silk.”
--The Washington Post Express

“The stories of the artisans whose names became big brands – including the likes of Salvatore Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton, and Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel – are fascinating.  Thomas...tells these tales beautifully, with rich reporting detail. ... Luscious...  Thomas has done a marvelous job of chronicling how brands once known exclusively to the super wealthy have become just another item in a shopping mall.”
--San Francisco Chronicle

“Lively and incisive.”
--Bloomberg News

“Uncompromising and intriguing.”
--Fashion Week Daily

“[M]eticulous research...  [Thomas] manages to make the manufacturing process seem absolutely riveting.”
–The Washington Post

“The story of luxury goods today is really about globalization, capitalization, class and culture.  Dana Thomas has a feel for all of this and more and has written a fascinating book.  A luxury product about luxury.”
--Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek

“If you have ever wondered why a woman absolutely needs to buy a $3,000 handbag, or why she might perish without a certain shade of lipstick, this book explains it all in empirical, evolutionary detail. Dana Thomas has brilliantly dissected the fashion phenomenon while the healthy beast still thrives luxuriously on the operating table. Deluxe might make some women pause before spending the rent money on their Manolo Blahniks.”
--Richard Johnson, editor of the New York Post's Page Six  

*

“Dana Thomas is a brilliant reporter with a sharp eye for detail. In Deluxe, she provides an illuminating account of how the multi billion dollar luxury industry and the corporate giants that dominate it prey on, and bamboozle, consumers in the United States and the rest of the world.”
--Michael Isikoff, co-author of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War

“Deluxe is delicious if you know about fashion; fascinating even if you don’t. Dana Thomas is a fearless reporter who shows how so many designer goods have gone to hell in a handbag. This is a page-turning yarn about the men and women who have transformed luxury into an off-the-rack, global commodity.”
--Joel Achenbach, Washington Post columnist and author of The Grand Idea

“Miss J. says don't buy the shoes, buy the book. Perfect front row reading when the shows are late during fashion week. Deluxe is a luxury to read.”
 --Jay Alexander, America’s Next Top Model

“Through exhaustive reporting and personalized storytelling, Dana Thomas has delivered a historical survey of a business that truly keeps the world going round. She may never again be so readily welcomed in some quarters of this beau monde, but the trade off is an essential reference for any student of fashion, finance or culture.”
--Rose Apodaca, former west coast bureau chief, Women's Wear Daily

"Those who have read Deluxe, Thomas's fashion-world exposé, will know she tackles subjects many steer clear of. She's done it again with Gods and Kings, a dual biography of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Their rise is a romp to read but most fascinating is their fall." 
--Monocle

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Press
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1594204942
• ISBN 13: 9781594204944
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 432