Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas

Author:Dana Thomas [Thomas, Dana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

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FIRST UP WAS MCQUEEN at Givenchy. The show was scheduled for Sunday, January 19, in the sumptuous early-nineteenth-century main hall of the École des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank. “Bloody hell, this is enormous,” Chaudoir, the lighting man, exclaimed when he saw it during their pre-show site visit. Since show producer Sam Gainsbury stipulated that it not “look like a commercial fashion show,” Chaudoir proposed to use huge film lights—twenty-four kilowatts each—all around the room. With them, he says, “You get a gorgeous soft highlight.”

For the soundtrack, McQueen told Gainsbury’s husband, the deejay John Gosling, that he wanted the 1978 disco hit “Take That to the Bank” by Shalamar, which Chaudoir found “very funny.” He also explained that the opera diva Maria Callas was another inspiration, since she had been the lover of the Greek shipping titan Aristotle Onassis and starred in Pasolini’s 1969 film version of Euripides’s Medea. In Greek mythology, the hero Jason was married to the sorceress Medea. Gosling suggested sampling some of Callas’s great arias in the music mix—and McQueen agreed. After the site meeting, they went back to Givenchy, where Chaudoir says McQueen “was working with the old ladies with white coats, he with his skinhead cut and his jeans hanging around his ass.”

As McQueen and his team worked on the collection, it became apparent to the assistants that he was relying too much on his poor man’s way of making clothes rather than taking full advantage of the ateliers and Paris artisans. “Some of the clothes were dodgy,” Pons says now. “Couture is about the details, and some details can kill a dress. There was a bustier dress with ivy coming out, and it was plastic ivy with gold spray paint. I said, ‘Lee, this is horrible, you cannot put plastic with spray paint on couture. This should have been three days of embroidery at Lesage, or a jewelry piece, or nothing. But not plastic with spray paint on a couture dress. That’s just not possible.’” McQueen simply shrugged. “People aren’t going to get wonderful things overnight,” he said. “I don’t expect everyone to love what I do right away.”

As guests arrived, including the designer Azzedine Alaïa, the New York socialite Anne Bass, and the German fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh, they spotted the male model Marcus Schenkenberg, dressed like Icarus with big wings, perched above. Isabella Blow took her seat in the front row, wearing a lavender and black lace outfit from the “Dante” collection and a big black Treacy saucer hat. She did not help out; she was simply a guest. McQueen’s mother, Joyce, was there too, but without her husband, Ronald. She explained that he had been undergoing chemotherapy treatments for cancer and was too tired to travel.

The show started about an hour late. After the first look came out—Jodie Kidd wearing a gold-embroidered white opera coat over a gold lace catsuit—one French fashion writer leaned over to her friend and quietly gasped: “Oo-la-la. If he continues with that kind of styling, he’ll lose them.

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