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

by Dana Thomas Narrated by Elizabeth Sastre

Overview

In February 2011, John Galliano, the lauded head of Christian Dior, imploded with a drunken, anti-Semitic public tirade. Exactly a year earlier, celebrated designer Alexander McQueen took his own life three weeks before his women's wear show. Both were casualties of the war between art and commerce that has raged within fashion for the last two decades.
In the mid-1990s, Galliano and McQueen arrived on the fashion scene when the business was in an artistic and economic rut. They shook the establishment out of its bourgeois, minimalist stupor with daring, sexy designs and theatrical fashion shows.
They had similar backgrounds: sensitive, shy gay men raised in tough London neighborhoods, their love of fashion nurtured by their doting mothers. By 1997, each had landed a job as creative director for couture houses owned by French tycoon Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH.
Galliano's and McQueen's work not only influenced fashion; their distinct styles were reflected across the media landscape. With their help, luxury fashion evolved from a clutch of small, family-owned businesses into a $280 billion-a-year global corporate industry. Executives pushed the designers to meet increasingly rapid deadlines. For both Galliano and McQueen, the pace was unsustainable.

The same week that Galliano was fired, Forbes named Arnault the fourth richest man in the world. Two months later, in the wake of McQueen's death, Kate Middleton wore a McQueen wedding gown, instantly making the house the world's most famous fashion brand, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a wildly successful McQueen retrospective, cosponsored by the corporate owners of the McQueen brand. The corporations had won and the artists had lost.
In her groundbreaking work, Gods and Kings, acclaimed journalist Dana Thomas tells the true story of McQueen and Galliano. In so doing, she reveals the relentless world of couture-and the price it demanded of the very ones who saved it.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Alexandra Jacobs

…Ms. Thomas has produced…[an] addictive biography of two outsize personalities who seem less the gods or kings of her title than Captain Hook and Peter Pan.

Publishers Weekly

12/22/2014
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.(Feb.)

From the Publisher

Advance Praise for Dana Thomas's Gods and Kings

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.”

Richard Johnson, columnist, The New York Post
"McQueen and Galliano were two peas in a perverse pod who revolutionized fashion. No one but Dana Thomas could have explained with such insight how their fantasies became ours and directed our dreams."

Library Journal

03/15/2015
This biography tells the story of two maverick designers from England who transformed fashion through the originality of their daring, sexy designs while at the same time falling victim to their own success in a world that had become about big business and consumption rather than artistic creation.

Kirkus Reviews

2014-12-07
A juxtaposition of the storied arcs of two of fashion's most celebrated, and ultimately doomed, geniuses. The lives of fashion designers Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) and John Galliano (b. 1960) have certainly been explored before. However, by comparing the victories and defeats of the two and adding in her own contemporary remembrances of each, T: The New York Times Style Magazine contributing editor Thomas (Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, 2007) has crafted a compelling drama about the high-stakes world of couture culture. Strangely, both men came from virtually the same background. Galliano was the son of a plumber, and McQueen was from London's rough-and-tumble East End; they both landed at Central Saint Martins, the much-lauded art school. Thomas tracks the arc as Galliano parlayed his bad-boy reputation into the leading role at Dior. His is a strange portrait; he is a self-styled romantic who has admitted he doesn't like designing for women because their breasts "spoil the line." And then there's the force of nature that was McQueen, who was driven quite mad by the pressures of his role at Givenchy. "If Galliano was a romantic, McQueen was a pornographer," writes the author. "The Larry Flynt of fashion. He didn't believe in frontiers. He didn't believe anything was off-limits. Nothing was taboo. He accepted the brutality of human nature, didn't try to suppress it. He didn't want to put women on a pedestal like untouchable, unreachable goddesses. He wanted to empower them. He wanted to help them use the force of their sexuality to its fullest." Anyone who even skirts this strange atmosphere knows the story ends badly with McQueen's suicide in 2010 and Galliano's long banishment after a drunken, anti-Semitic rant in France. This is a dark story about excess, commerce, aristocracy and fashion as high theater that is as operatic as the dizzying shows it describes. A deep dive into the provocative art of creation and the toll it exacts from those touched by its gifts.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170908585
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/10/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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.”
(Continues…)

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