Fashion Month's Must-Read: 'Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano'

The Fall 2015 fashion month cycle is in full spin, but designers, who are permanently at their action stations, are already onto the next season. For them, the shows are just a formality. Sure it’s important to present your clothes in a favorable light, but they are already thinking about what’s coming down the road (in this case Resort, which shows in May and hits stores in November). For them, there is no break in the cycle. The rise of globalization and demise of artistry is the cornerstone of Dana Thomas’s ' Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.' The well-researched, thoroughly insightful read provides a 360 glimpse at the designers’ similarly difficult upbringings, their determination to be artists, and how, as Thomas so eloquently puts it, their rise to top meant that “the bottom line became more important that the hemline.”

Those familiar with media circles will definitely recognize Thomas’s name. A long time chronicler of fashion and the arts for the likes of Newsweek and Washington Post (among many others), she also wrote the New York Times best-selling book, ' Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster,' which pulled back the curtain and took a good hard look at the inner workings of marquee brands such as Prada and Gucci. It was touted as the 'Fast Food Nation of the fashion industry.' “My editor at Penguin told me that generally you find your second book in your first, but you just don’t realize it,” she told us on a phone call last week. “I was working on a story for the Washington Post [about Galliano’s downfall] right as it was happening. This wasn’t the first time this happened, drug issues, depression. I sat back and looked at this. There was more going on here. It was more than Galliano being drunk and fussy. So I called my editor in London, and asked is this a book? We both agreed it was worth exploring.”

Let us issue the caveat that while this book does present a well-rounded scope of his life, no one is giving Galliano a free pass for his egregious behavior. His penance has seemingly been served—fired from Dior and his own eponymous label, rehab, ostracized from the only community he had ever known—but in a way he will never be fully forgiven or able to move on. Even Thomas admits that his most recent stint, as the creative director of Maison Margiela, seems to be more a PR stunt more than anything else. “Going to Margiela was a way of tiptoeing back in,” she says. “Something really small that hardly anyone buys. He had the show in London, and it home field advantage. He invited 200 of his friends and most faithful followers. It was more PR than business.”

Thomas’s central thesis contends that brands ultimately destroyed these artists. At the time of his downfall, Galliano, an alcoholic and abuser of barbiturates, was designing 32 collections per year, all with the pressure of each being better than the last. Thomas questions his desire to be at another label. “I don’t understand why he put himself back with someone who had all of the purse strings,” she says. “He could have found a new name and do something different. Do it very small and off the radar, do what he what always wanted to do. Instead he put himself back into the machine.”

‘The machine” in question is of course the fashion industry. More specifically, LVMH, which owns Dior and Givenchy where Galliano and McQueen were first hired back in 1996. (Thomas sagely also notes that the umbrella organization also hired a young Marc Jacobs to design Louis Vuitton and Tom Ford, at Gucci. Both men also battled their own demons—substance abuse for Jacobs and depression for Ford following his dismissal from the brand.) “The issue was globalization and the war between art and commerce,” says the author. “They had loads of assistants—creative assistants [in the studio], [chauffeurs] driving them, [personal assistants] paying bills for them. Nobody ever bothered to see these guys crumbling in front of theireyes.”

The book is a real page-turner for anyone who is interested in fashion and its less glamorous side effects. Worth noting is the similarities between the two men. Both McQueen and Galliano came from working class backgrounds and were bullied as children for being different than their peers. Young artists in the making, they found refuge in design. Both were driven creators who wanted to revolutionize fashion. In the early days, everyone—top models, hairstylists, makeup artists—would work for them for free because they believed in their artistic visions. Their landmark collections came only a year apart. First was McQueen, who at 23, invented a new silhouette called the Bumster in March of 1993. The low-slung pants caused a complete uproar because they revealed the top of the pubis and derriere. After several false starts, Galliano’s seminal moment occurred with the help of an American banker. He showed a Japanese-inspired collection with kimonos and jewels borrowed from Harry Winston.

While their stories were similar, their aesthetics were decidedly different. “McQueen was all about confrontation and raw sex,” writes Thomas. This was evidenced in his later collections, which were themed around “Highland Rape” and “Nihilism.” Galliano, meanwhile, became known for his “sensual bias-cut gowns and romantic storybook-like settings.” Both were considered to be unbridled geniuses in their field, making their downfalls that much harder to take. (Galliano’s firing occurred almost exactly a year after McQueen committed suicide.) But as troubled as they were, their influence in fashion is undisputable. ' Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty' which showed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, is the eighth most successful exhibition in the history of the institution. And aside from Galliano’s curious new role with Maison Margiela, you can expect to see some of his original works—beautiful silk chinoserie pieces—in this year’s 'China: Through the Looking Glass' exhibition at the Costume Institute.

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