The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris - Hardcover

Drake, Alicia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074757037X ISBN 13: 9780747570370

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2006

Synopsis

[Read by Bernadette Dunne]

In the 1970s, Paris fashion exploded like a champagne bottle left out in the sun. Amid sequins and longing, celebrities and aspirants flocked to the heart of chic, and Paris became a hothouse of revelry, intrigue, and searing ambition. At the center of it all were fashion's most beloved luminaries -- Yves Saint Laurent, the reclusive enfant terrible, and Karl Lagerfeld, the flamboyant freelancer with a talent for reinvention -- and they divided Paris into two fabulous halves. Their enduring rivalry is chronicled in this dazzling expose of an era: of social ambitions, shared obsessions, and the mesmerizing quest for beauty.

About this title

About the Author

ALICIA DRAKE writes regularly for publications including International Herald Tribune, British Vogue, Travel and Leisure, and W magazine, for which she was a contributing editor. She has lived and worked in Paris for the last ten years.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The relationship between hedonism and decay and the understanding of excess as creative consumption are themes central to this glittering exegesis. Drake conducted more than 100 interviews in her scrupulous chronicle of fashion's most illustrious rivalry. Yves Saint Laurent, the charmed genius of effortless success, and Karl Lagerfeld, the patrician workhorse, engaged in a decades-long competition for hyperbolic headlines and jet-set celebrity, pitting their cliques against each other in bitch-slap feuds of sartorial splendor. Theirs is a world of glorious, hideous self-involvement, where heroin is an accessory, violent political unrest is an evening's amusement, and a close friend's suicide is, foremost, a contemptible blemish on an orchestrated image. Drake's subjects made their livings and their names dedicating themselves to the pursuit of surface perfection, and her comprehensive examination of their barbed, parallel arcs is appropriately superficial. These titanic designers crafted their personas as carefully as they put together their luxurious collections, and we come to know them as reflections in the mirror houses they built. Although their individual aesthetics and personal recriminations are unique, they are united in the opulent glory of their narcissistic myopia. Ultimately, Drake makes a good case for the extraordinary nature of their individual achievements and the revolutionary effect of their competitive energy on the fashion industry. And yet we're left with a portrait defined more by the careful craft of its brushstrokes than by the substance of the sitters. Thomas Barthelmess
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 074757037X
• ISBN 13: 9780747570370
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 448