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A review by batbones
The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris by Alicia Drake
5.0
Meticulously researched and matter-of-fact without being sterile, this is no flimsy fashion article, but it preserves the engagement of more excellent accounts of real-life events. The fashion world, which is anything but dull is perhaps susceptible to emotive rendering, but Drake is appreciative rather than bedazzled, nuanced rather than gasping, and the result reads like a marriage between the caution of a serious historian-biographer and the pen of a literary writer.
(Aside: This reader wishes to be enlightened on Victoria Beckham's curious endorsement of the book, printed at the back of this edition, as 'bedtime reading', when the experience of reading it has been so thrilling it would've been impossible to sleep afterwards.)
The writer repeatedly withholds personal judgment, and instead, the void created by impressive reserve is filled inch by inch with detailed accounts of wild lifestyles, jealousies, drug habits, car accidents. Her observations are incredibly unattached to praise or criticism, the sense of impersonality is commendable and hard to believe when what is mentioned is far from delicate. The facts, however, are sensational enough. The book succeeds in doing a precious thing: letting its subjects speak without impoverishing these interesting people of their mystique, and it does so by drawing heavily from published interviews but more interestingly, interviews personally conducted by the writer. These reflections (usually decades after the actual events) of Pierre Bergé, Betty Catroux, Helmut Newton, Pat Cleveland, and Corey Grant Tippin (to name a few on the long list), tinged with the haze of recollection (nostalgia/relief/insight), are a fascinating backward glance at a period of heady vibrancy and reckless transformation.
The impact of the aptly chosen quotation lingers along after the finished chapter:
'Fashion feeds you. You are there, it's your moment and fashion starts to feed you this extreme elation, adrenalin and this belief that is like divinity. Then suddenly just as quickly as you have gotten it, after you are used to believing it, you are chewed up and spat out and it's over. That is the hell of fashion. Then the hard reality of it is knowing it's all a lie. [...] I got out because I was forced out. I didn't want to go, but I just knew I couldn't show up any more. I couldn't do it, I was dying. ... This thing had such a hold on me. This glamour, this fashion thing, I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have another world. I was lost, I was twenty-four and I kept saying again and again: "My life is over."' - Corey Tippin
'People think decadence is debauched. Decadence is simply something very beautiful that is dying.' - Yves Saint Laurent
'I am the man who is the most important in his life; is that because he loves me or because he needs me? I don't know.' - Pierre Bergé
The author's personal encounters with her subjects, however briefly mentioned, are tantalising. There is no sense of the eager self-insert in these accounts, but one may feel a sense of awe at, metaphorically-speaking, being close to divinity. That emotion however is perhaps just the reader's own. (Documented at the epilogue, Drake's court case with Karl Lagerfeld, who wrongly accused her of inaccuracy and wanted this book banned in France, suggests for all the precision, knowledge and admiration for the artist, the author had no personal illusions about the stuff of life.)
The dual biography structure left this reader indecisive at the beginning whether to read this book, since my interest was in one and not the other, but as the book progresses it becomes clear that this demarcation was never meant to hold these two characters apart, but functions rather as a preliminary attempt to sketch out two different but frequently overlapping paths, and highlight their differences in personality, intimate circle, and artistic temperament. By placing two designers side by side, the book ends up with a fuller picture of their lives and the lives of the people around them. The bibliography is a sumptuous spread of texts, interviews, film and documentaries that will satisfy the appetites of the curious for a long time to come.
(Aside: This reader wishes to be enlightened on Victoria Beckham's curious endorsement of the book, printed at the back of this edition, as 'bedtime reading', when the experience of reading it has been so thrilling it would've been impossible to sleep afterwards.)
The writer repeatedly withholds personal judgment, and instead, the void created by impressive reserve is filled inch by inch with detailed accounts of wild lifestyles, jealousies, drug habits, car accidents. Her observations are incredibly unattached to praise or criticism, the sense of impersonality is commendable and hard to believe when what is mentioned is far from delicate. The facts, however, are sensational enough. The book succeeds in doing a precious thing: letting its subjects speak without impoverishing these interesting people of their mystique, and it does so by drawing heavily from published interviews but more interestingly, interviews personally conducted by the writer. These reflections (usually decades after the actual events) of Pierre Bergé, Betty Catroux, Helmut Newton, Pat Cleveland, and Corey Grant Tippin (to name a few on the long list), tinged with the haze of recollection (nostalgia/relief/insight), are a fascinating backward glance at a period of heady vibrancy and reckless transformation.
The impact of the aptly chosen quotation lingers along after the finished chapter:
'Fashion feeds you. You are there, it's your moment and fashion starts to feed you this extreme elation, adrenalin and this belief that is like divinity. Then suddenly just as quickly as you have gotten it, after you are used to believing it, you are chewed up and spat out and it's over. That is the hell of fashion. Then the hard reality of it is knowing it's all a lie. [...] I got out because I was forced out. I didn't want to go, but I just knew I couldn't show up any more. I couldn't do it, I was dying. ... This thing had such a hold on me. This glamour, this fashion thing, I didn't know what else to do. I didn't have another world. I was lost, I was twenty-four and I kept saying again and again: "My life is over."' - Corey Tippin
'People think decadence is debauched. Decadence is simply something very beautiful that is dying.' - Yves Saint Laurent
'I am the man who is the most important in his life; is that because he loves me or because he needs me? I don't know.' - Pierre Bergé
The author's personal encounters with her subjects, however briefly mentioned, are tantalising. There is no sense of the eager self-insert in these accounts, but one may feel a sense of awe at, metaphorically-speaking, being close to divinity. That emotion however is perhaps just the reader's own. (Documented at the epilogue, Drake's court case with Karl Lagerfeld, who wrongly accused her of inaccuracy and wanted this book banned in France, suggests for all the precision, knowledge and admiration for the artist, the author had no personal illusions about the stuff of life.)
The dual biography structure left this reader indecisive at the beginning whether to read this book, since my interest was in one and not the other, but as the book progresses it becomes clear that this demarcation was never meant to hold these two characters apart, but functions rather as a preliminary attempt to sketch out two different but frequently overlapping paths, and highlight their differences in personality, intimate circle, and artistic temperament. By placing two designers side by side, the book ends up with a fuller picture of their lives and the lives of the people around them. The bibliography is a sumptuous spread of texts, interviews, film and documentaries that will satisfy the appetites of the curious for a long time to come.