4 Wednesday January 26 2022 | the timesfashion
L
ady Gaga. Beyoncé.
Cardi B. Demi Moore in
Indecent Proposal. Kim
Cattrall in Sex and the
City. You can tell a lot
about a fashion designer
from the women who
wear his or her clothes.
Thierry Mugler, who died on Sunday
of natural causes at the age of 73, was
not for the wallflowers.
Manfred Thierry Mugler, to give
him his full — and suitably theatrical
— name, made clothes that were
costumes. They were spotlight-
garnering body-burnishers for women,
and occasionally men, who wanted to
be seen. David Bowie wore a Mugler
dress (yes) with shoulders like the
tailfins of an American classic car
when he appeared on Saturday Night
Live in 1979. (Iman garbed herself in a
rather more restrained Mugler
number when they married in 1992.)
The Strasbourg-born designer, a
dancer turned bodybuilder in his spare
time, built bodies by way of his clothes.
His thing was a big-shouldered 1940s
silhouette rendered almost cartoonish
in scale. He also liked boobs, his
moulded acrylic corsets turning the
female torso into a cross between a
vintage Bugatti and, speaking of
cartoonish, Jessica Rabbit.
Mugler, who was gay, once described
fashion as “3D art on a human being”.
Sometimes it seemed as if he had
somehow conjured a fourth
dimension, such as when Kim
Kardashian wore a remarkable
flesh-coloured latex concoction to the
Met Gala in 2019, an almost-dress that
dripped crystals, oozed sex and earned
its own category: “wet couture”.
(Should you be game for surfacing
your own fourth dimension, there’s a
purple moulded Mugler corset-belt
online for $1,900.)
Kardashian’s get-up might have
broken the internet if dresses had still
been able to do that kind of thing
three years ago. Not that it would have
meant much to the designer if it had.
A Mugler frock had done a version of
that nearly three decades before.
There may not have been much of an
internet when Indecent Proposal came
out in 1993, but Moore’s similarly
indecent-for-the-time black cutout
body-con dress — the ultimate now
you see me, now you see me creation
— still went viral. It was later named
one of the dresses of the decade.
Mugler had hit the big time in the
1980s, alongside the two other
shape-focused Francophone designers
with whom he was often bracketed,
Azzedine Alaia and Claude Montana.
This was an epoch when women were
shoulder to shoulder with men in the
workplace — and out in the world
generally — like never before. To
co-opt some actual shoulders —broad, masculine-looking ones — was
akin to putting on a kind of armour.
To combine that with the hyper-
femininity of body-con was something
else again. What more canny way was
there to take on the boys than to play
the woman and the man card hard?
Think Elizabeth I at Tilbury; Boudica
spliced with Don Draper.
“I never say I’m a fashion designer,”
Mugler once tellingly declared. “I’ve
always felt like a director, and the
clothes I did were a direction of the
everyday. There are women with small
waists and big shoulders, so it’s not
much of an exaggeration to me. The
shoulders were always important.”
He was the storyteller. He set the
scene, cast the female lead, rigged the
follow-spot, then left her to get on with
stealing the show. While his catwalks
may have been boldface when it came
to the clothes and the presentation, in
the shops there were always togs that
were amped up just enough to ensure
they worked in the real world.
The designer pretty much gave up
on fashion in 2002, aside from the odd
favour to Beyoncé. (Only Mugler
would have the audacity to booty-up
Sasha Fierce even more than nature
intended by padding the hips of the
gold bodysuit she wore on her 2009tour.) He could afford to. Sales of his
perfumes Angel (ha!) and Alien (I get
it) still tick over to the tune of
$280 million annually.
Mugler had sought out an
exhausting, and peculiarly
21st-century, type of fame.
“The advantages are that
there’s always a table for you
in a restaurant,” he once
said, “and you can turn up
bare-chested at the hotel at 3am
when it’s minus 15 degrees. The
disadvantages are that when you’rechilling in a nightclub there’ll always
be someone to throw themselves on
the floor and lick your boots.”
In the end he became something
of a recluse, applying his love of
sculpting to his ever more remarkable
body and similarly attention-grabbing
face. He claimed his plastic surgery
was necessitated by a series of
accidents: in a Jeep; in a gym; and
so it went on. “So I said, ‘Let’s find a
way to make this fun!’ I wanted my
face to represent progress.”
Fashion lovers — at least of theThink Elizabeth I
at Tilbury;
Boudica spliced
with Don Draper
COVER: RON GALELLA/GETTY IMAGES; REX SHUTTERSTOCK. BELOW: GETTY IMAGES; REX FEATURESCardi B wearing Mugler at the
Grammy awards in 2019. Top:
Cindy Crawford on the Mugler
catwalk in Paris in 1990No one did sex
appeal like Thierry
Mugler, who died
this weekend. By
Anna Murphy
The king of high-drama va va