The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris by Alicia Drake

Review by Colin McDowell:

Have you ever wondered why fashion designers are so insecure? Well, here’s the reason. “Mirror mirror on the wall” is the game that the fairytale fashion world constantly plays. It’s not the fairest, of course, but the greatest that everyone is looking for. And as there are no verifiable criteria for judging fashion quality (should it be sales figures, recognition or critical acclaim?), so opinion — slippery, spineless, unreliable and endlessly changeable — matters greatly.

Depending how you view people who spend their days dreaming up ways of making us look extraordinary, bizarre or wonderful, this state of affairs gives designers’ lives their appeal. That neurosis — as exemplified in the careers of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld — is at the core of this intermittently interesting, frequently irritating book.

Both are old men now, their parallel careers having covered a period during which fashion has changed completely, just as Paris has been forced to adapt to new ideas that have attacked its hegemony as the home of high fashion. All three have proved to be survivors. The two men first met in 1954, when they came to Paris as prizewinners in the International Wool Secretariat competition. Saint Laurent, from Algeria, won first and third places in the prestigious dress category. Lagerfeld, who was brought up in a small town near Hamburg, was in Paris to receive the slightly less eminent first prize in the coat category. He was 21, Saint Laurent was 18.

Their lives and rivalries would remain intertwined for the next 50 years, and keep Paris — most gossipy of cities — entranced, appalled and delighted for all that time. Saint Laurent was taken up by Dior; within a year of the competition his career was off and away. Lagerfeld barely came into his own until 10 years later when he was appointed design director of Chloé, the ready-to-wear house. By then, like Icarus, Saint Laurent had flown high — having been made chief designer at Dior after Christian Dior’s death in 1957 — then had his wings singed (the house sacked him two years later) and, rising phoenix-like, flapped them again with his own-name label, protected and cossetted by his business partner and lover Pierre Bergé.

Despite their achievement gap, the designers had been intermittent if guarded acquaintances, occasionally sharing and swapping friends while carrying on a deadly but largely hidden rivalry for the crown of Paris. And that’s it. The Beautiful Fall is a basic tale of tortoise and hare, with Lagerfeld spending much of his fine career working as named or unnamed designer for a motley mix of ready-to-wear labels while Saint Laurent, ruthlessly propelled forward by Bergé, became a world-class designer before he was 25 and remained that way until his retirement from ready-to-wear in 1999, when his name was sold to the Gucci Group, although he continued to control and design Yves Saint Laurent couture until it closed in 2002. He is now retired.

Lagerfeld’s trajectory took time, and even after Chloé he had to wait until he took over as design director at Chanel in 1982 to be sure that his world status was inching closer to that of Saint Laurent. He was 49, and it was 28 years since he and Saint Laurent had stood together at the International Wool Secretariat. Nevertheless, in terms of creativity Saint Laurent was always the prince, and Lagerfeld the peasant. Even now, when the German designer is considered by many to be the creative leader of Paris, Saint Laurent’s reputation keeps him ahead. Like Chanel, Dior and Balenciaga, his place in the pantheon of fashion greats is secure. Lagerfeld, for all the endless originality and skill that he shows at Chanel, will probably always have a place, along with Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, in the Elysian fields, but on the other side of the fence from true fashion greatness.

This is not a lot to make a thick book out of, you are probably thinking. And you would be right. The Beautiful Fall is full of side dishes in the form of interviews with bit players (most of them saying nothing, frequently rather pretentiously) but it has little real meat. There are the usual fashion suspects: models such as Pat Cleveland, muses such as Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux, illustrators and photographers, and Paloma Picasso. But the most intriguing figure for Alicia Drake appears to be the Parisian dandy Jacques de Bascher, who united his heroes by being boyfriend to both. She devotes pages to this vain and empty-sounding man. And this is the problem with The Beautiful Fall. Drake didn’t interview either of her subjects. Saint Laurent, who, as Bergé memorably said, “was born with a nervous breakdown”, is now almost certainly incapable of a coherent interview. Lagerfeld agreed to talk, but never did. So we have a cold collation of a book, warmed over at the edges but only palatable to readers who are interested in the spectacle of two ageing fashion designers living preposterously luxurious and artificial lives and wondering who is the greater, or to those lost fashion souls who like gossip so much that they will still lap it up. The best bet is to ignore this volume and spend the money on a lipstick or two — bearing one or other of the illustrious names, of course.

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