Claude Montana, the bold and forceful French designer whose exquisite tailoring defined the broad-shouldered power look of the 1980s – an erotic and androgenic tough chic that brought him fame and accolades until he became addicted to drugs and one in the ’90s Tragedy struck – died on Friday in France. He was 76.
The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode confirmed the death but did not name the cause or where he died.
Mr. Montana was among a cohort of avant-garde Parisian designers, including Thierry Mugler and later Jean Paul Gaultier, who idealized the female form in flamboyant, stylized ways reminiscent of the screen sirens of old Hollywood but recreated in external space. Mr. Mugler, who died in 2022, offered a campier femme fatale as Mr. Montana’s icy vision, although the two were often lumped together as the architects of the 1980s “glamazon.”
“Claude Montana,” declared The New York Times in 1985, “is to big shoulders what Alexander Graham Bell is to the telephone.”
His clothes, said Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, “were wild and had a power that was both militaristic and highly eroticized.” She added, “It was not the American power look of the shoulder-padded manager . “He was a different kind of working woman.”
Mr. Montana often drew inspiration from the after-hours world of the Parisian demimonde – the sex workers and dominatrixes, the denizens of the leather bars he frequented. But he didn’t just eliminate the fetish gear.
“His tailoring was razor-sharp,” fashion journalist and author Kate Betts said by phone. “The level of perfectionism was enormous.”
Josh Patner, a former fashion coordinator at Bergdorf Goodman, said in a telephone interview: “His clothes were carefully crafted and beautiful. He defined the design language of his time. The powerful 1980s proportions, the inappropriately smooth surfaces, the hard, sensual edges.”
Although shy and recessive by nature, Mr. Montana was still a born showman. From his first show in 1977, when he sent out models in full leather regalia with chains wrapped around their epaulets (provoking comparisons to Nazi uniforms and angering the designer, whose inspiration lay closer to home), his Parisian presentations belonged plus the liveliest ones, always supervised by gatekeepers in white paper overalls and shrouded in secrets. “You waited and you waited,” Ms. Betts said, “but it was always worth it.”
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Ellin Saltzman, a former fashion director at Saks Fifth Avenue, said: “There were people crying after Claude’s shows. Almost Germanic in tempo, they could be very militant, but at the same time absolutely sexy.”
Claude Montamat was born on June 29, 1947 in Paris as one of three siblings. He changed his last name in the 1970s because he said people kept mispronouncing it. His mother was German; his father, a cloth manufacturer, was Spanish; The family was wealthy.
“Very bourgeois,” he told The Washington Post in 1985. “They wanted me to be something I didn’t want to be.”
At 17, he left home and moved to London, where he began making papier-mâché jewelry that was featured on the cover of British Vogue. But back home in Paris, where he returned in 1973, he couldn’t find a market for his pieces and, through a friend, got a job as a cutter for Mac Douglas, a luxury leather goods company. A year later he was the company’s chief designer. In 1977 he was on his own.
By the end of the decade he was a star and his styles would dominate the ’80s. Critics called him the future of Parisian fashion. He had licensing deals, a boutique, a best-selling perfume, and ready-to-wear lines for men and women; He designed for the Italian line Complice. Eighties connoisseurs like Cher, Diana Ross and Grace Jones all wore Montana. So did Don Johnson and Bruce Willis.
“He was a great designer,” Ms. Steele said, “but he had demons.”
Involved in drugs, he often disappeared for days or weeks. When Dior called in 1989, he turned down the job. “I need space,” he told the Washington Post this year. “I don’t want to have so much money and go to an institution.”
But a year later he accepted Lanvin’s offer to design the haute couture line for five seasons. “His new space girls are a gentler lot, wearing soft silk clothes with nipped waists and full skirts,” Bernadine Morris wrote in a review in The Times. “His collection was a perfect cameo that expressed the latest new era of couture.”
But many critics criticized the new work — Mr. Montana’s asymmetrical shift dresses and beaded tops were perhaps too minimalist for the ladies of couture — and he was fired.
Wallis Franken was an American model with two children who was Mr. Montana’s muse and catwalk star from the start. They shared a love of nightlife and cocaine, and, according to her, Ms. Franken was always deeply in love with him. However, their marriage in 1993 was seen by some as a manipulation on his part to revive his business, a cynical “Marage Blanc”.
In any case, as Maureen Orth reported in Vanity Fair in 1996, their relationship was stormy. She resented his affairs with men and he resented her work; He once hit her, Ms. Orth wrote, when photographer Steven Meisel asked her to pose for a Donna Karan campaign.
Three years after her wedding, Ms. Franken’s body was found on the street outside her Paris apartment. Tormented by her own drug use and despondent over her marriage, Ms. Franken had told friends that she had considered suicide. But people whispered: had she been pushed?
“Whatever I suffer, I suffer because I suffer,” he told the Washington Post. “I often wonder why I have to go through this pain.”
Mr. Montana continued to publish collections until the turn of the millennium, always described in lackluster terms by critics. He lived in seclusion in the 2000s, although younger designers were inspired by his bold styles.
“There was a feeling that Claude would go on and last forever,” Dawn Mello, a former fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman, told Vanity Fair in 2013. “Then he disappeared and fell off the map.”
Designer Lawrence Steele recalled from Milan that one of the first fashion pieces he bought was a floor-length navy cashmere coat from Claude Montana, with shoulder pads “up to here,” as he called it.
“It was 1983 and I had a short haircut so I looked like Grace Jones and felt incredibly gorgeous,” Mr. Steele said. “His clothes gave you a larger-than-life personality. They were like pure ego and strength. And that’s what the 80s in general were about: this pure, powerful pride in being.”
Vanessa Friedman contributed reporting.
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2024-02-24 01:22:28
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