Gods and Kings

December 22, 2014
Fashion columnist Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster) paints a grim portrait of the fashion industry in this dual biography of John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, two influential London-born designers who came of age in the world of high couture in the early aughts and whose careers hit critical tipping points with devastating results. “If Galliano was a Romantic, McQueen was a pornographer.... He accepted the brutality of human nature,” writes Thomas, who rarely compares her two subjects so succinctly elsewhere in the book. Galliano suffers by comparison to McQueen, appearing the lesser—and less likeable—of the two talents. For all of his hard work and creative vision (not to mention the way he cut a dress on the bias and tailored a frock coat) Galliano seems dramatically out of touch with others, reacting with revulsion to people wearing sneakers on the London underground, and regarding himself as the paradigm of beauty “and everyone else as being ugly.” McQueen is the book’s more tragic talent, filled with self-hatred that fueled his spiral of depression, drug use, and ultimately self-annihilation. Despite this, the sections on McQueen are more upbeat and richly reported. While Thomas never strikes a fulfilling symmetry between her subjects, she nevertheless offers an alluring look at two edgy, gifted, famous individuals who famously burned out midcareer.