The armor will write off everything – Newspaper Kommersant No. 12 (7213) dated 01/25/2022

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Thierry Mugler died in Paris at the age of 74. Designer, couturier, photographer, costume designer and art director, he will go down in fashion history as one of the main creators of the image of power woman and singers of theatrical sexuality.

Thierry Mugler, who in the last period of his life called himself Manfred Mugler, was all of the above, but for popular culture, of course, he is first and foremost a fashion designer and creator of one of the most striking fashion brands of the 80s and 90s.

Born in Strasbourg, Manfred Thierry Mugler studied classical dance and joined the ballet company of the Opera national du Rhin (Opera national du Rhin) while studying interior design at the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts. His dancing career did not work out, and after spending some time in the corps de ballet, he quit dancing and went to Paris, where he created his own brand Thierry Mugler in 1975.

After many years, he will return to ballet, but already as a costume designer – and will make the ballet “McGgregor + Mugler” with Wayne McGregor in 2019. The costumes, as always with Mugler, will be wildly spectacular, but dancers are said to complain that they are uncomfortable to dance in. Still would! It is unlikely that Mugler ever even said the word “comfortable” to himself – there was simply no such thing as comfort in his world of snake women, jellyfish women, butterfly women, birds of prey women, Egyptian figurines women, women -cars – and robots, and just cars and motorcycles (Müller had a whole collection of corsets based on auto and motorcycle motifs), and, of course, sex machines. The further, the more eccentric, exalted and theatrical became his collections and his fashion shows, which turned into real shows – all this reached its apogee in his famous haute couture show AH95, which lasted an hour and consisted of 300 looks – the current Michele and Gvasalia , trying to screw up theirs to a hundred, never dreamed of such a thing.

But Mugler began in the 70s and early 80s with much less theatrical, but quite spectacular collections, made with an eye on the stars of that era, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Cardin. These collections were full of very progressive for the 70s and early 80s sport touch and military touch – variations of overalls, service jackets, wide flaps and detachable yokes. He uses metallic fabrics and leathers at the time, bright open colors, and his things look bright and witty. In the minds of the public, this early Mugler was almost completely obscured by the later Mugler, who had already given free rein with his fantastic beasts, chimeras and fanaticisms, the Mugler of the time of the video “Too Fanky” by George Michael, which Mugler also directed. But in his exhibition “Thierry Mugler, Couturissime”, made at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2019 and now shown (until the end of April 2021) at the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, it was the room with the early Mugler that was the biggest surprise. We more or less imagined everything else, but we almost didn’t remember this Thierry Mugler, who was still practically devoid of any camp. But it was the camp that, of course, became his soil and destiny, and the camp made him a real star, including our time.

If you recall the classic definition of Susan Sontag – “Camp is a woman in a dress of three million feathers”, then this will be an almost literal description of what Mugler did, for example, the dress in which Cradi B appeared at the opening of his retrospective in Paris. But all the other signs of Camp according to Sontag were quite clearly expressed in him – extravagance, theatricality, grotesque, affectation, artificiality, play, anti-seriousness. As well as a mixture of high and low, pastiche, irony, parody and indispensable nostalgia – even the famous Muglerian futurism becomes the reverse side of the latter. Mugler said that back in 1995 he felt that the world was changing and there was no longer a place in it for the way he used to express himself. And recently he said the following: “Beauty is not particularly in trend in our time.” And yes – beauty in his understanding, with corsets, heels and feathers, was really rapidly going out of fashion. But the story with Mugler did not end so easily – at the end of his life and career, he became literally one of the cultural heroes of our time.

On the one hand, there is nothing more old-fashioned than Mugler’s corsets, and on the other hand, there is nothing more hit in pop culture than the grotesquely feminine image of beauty that Mugler has always developed.

And this paradox tells us something important not only about modern fashion, but also about the modern world.

Mugler began his return to popular culture in 2010 when he designed costumes for Beyoncé’s I Am… World Tour. And over the next 10 years, stars of the caliber of Kim Kardashian and Cardi B began to appear in his vintage outfits, Mugler even made Kardashian a special outfit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute ball in 2019, the famous “wet dress”. It turned out to be a happy union of camp stars, newer and slightly more historical, in which the image of these women, with their hypertrophied feminine curves and excessive forms, turned out to be the ideal content for Mugler’s dresses – or his dresses became the ideal shape for their bodies. He himself cultivated such beauty all his life – and, of course, they saw in him a kindred spirit.

In one of his last interviews, answering the question why Kim Kardashian and Cardi B wear his vintage outfits, why hundreds of thousands of people come to his exhibition and why in general he finds such a response now, Mugler says: “Because my work pays tribute to woman and her personality – I give her armor. That’s why my shows have always been so challenging: I worked with each model individually to style their clothes, create different hair and make-up, give them their own role, and guide them to the stage. My work is timeless because it is based on the beauty of the human body and the fascination of the world we live in.”

These words explain little directly, but at the same time they say a lot about that very Mugler paradox. “Armor” in its sense and in the sense in which the current fashion understands it, with its new femininity and a new idea of ​​corporality and sexuality, are two different armors. Armor that maximally exposes and sexualizes the female body, and armor that hides and shelters, builds a space between this body and the world, deobjectifying. Mugler’s armor went out of fashion before he went out of fashion in 2002, but today, people in jeans, hoodies and sneakers at an exhibition in Paris are enthusiastically looking at models in 20 cm heels, corsets and feathers in photos of his advertising campaigns , which he shot himself – and this is a socio-cultural illustration of our time. It is unlikely that any of these people are ready to tighten themselves into corsets and walk in such heels – but it is they who put millions of likes on Kim Kardashian in Mugler’s outfits. And in this sense, Mugler’s futurism really turned out to be an image of the future that surrounds us now.

Elena Stafieva

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