Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas

Description

How fashion really works. Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano — by acclaimed fashion journalist Dana Thomas — goes inside the great houses at the moment of maximum drama: the creative geniuses and the conglomerates, the ateliers and the boardrooms, the art and the money.

Thomas, who covered fashion for decades for the International Herald Tribune and Newsweek, reveals an industry at a crossroads through its two most brilliant and most damaged stars: McQueen’s tragedy, Galliano’s flameout — and the system of impossible pressure, relentless acceleration, and very human cost beneath luxury’s glittering surface. The reporting is superb; the access, remarkable; the judgment, humane and never salacious for its own sake.

Sharp, gossipy, and substantive, this is the definitive account of modern fashion’s golden age and its discontents — The Devil Wears Prada with real reporting, real stakes, and real consequences for everyone involved.

In the 1990s, two working-class British boys conquered Paris fashion — and then fell spectacularly. Gods and Kings, Paris-based journalist Dana Thomas’s 2015 double biography, chronicles the parallel lives of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano: the era’s most brilliant, most volatile creative forces.

McQueen, the Savile Row-trained designer who turned runway shows into dark theater, took over Givenchy in 1996 while building his own label; Galliano, the romantic maximalist, revived Dior the same year with a vision of old-Hollywood glamour. Thomas traces how both men rode the luxury industry’s 1990s boom to the top of the fashion world — and how the machine consumed them: McQueen’s death in 2010, and Galliano’s dismissal from Dior in 2011.

What the book delivers:

n
• A parallel narrative of fashion’s most famous rise-and-fall story
• Inside accounts of the 1990s luxury boom and its human cost
• The creative geniuses behind Givenchy, Dior, and their own labels
• A journalist’s unflinching look at fame, addiction, and creative pressure

n

For readers of fashion history, biography, and cultural journalism, Gods and Kings remains the definitive account of the decade when fashion had gods — and watched them fall.