McQueen often had to answer for misogynist readings of his designs, and the kind of unquestioned dominion of male designers left a number of fashion historians wondering about the period before World War II, when fashion’s two greatest minds were Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, and the leading French houses (Lanvin, Vionnet, Alix, and Madame Gres) were mostly run by women. This has not always been a comfortable reality. (Even as her wardrobe commanded Camp status, Reagan turned a blind eye to the ongoing AIDS crisis, even refusing to help her friend Rock Hudson when he was dying.) But it was in the ’90s that the Camp fashion we know fully blossomed, when it shifted from the unintentional-the “dead serious” true Camp, in which, say, Nancy Reagan could believe, earnestly, that giant red taffeta sleeves were just the right thing for the First Wife of an administration that claimed to be all about tax reform-to something more conscious. Those three designers had first established themselves as masters of glitz and studied artifice during the go-go ’80s-with Nancy Reagan, a truly underappreciated Camp icon, asserting that the world stage should be as flamboyantly styled, fictionalized, and directed as a Hollywood biopic. The provocateur attitude swept the industry, with Jean-Paul Gaultier, Gianni Versace, and Franco Moschino hitting their stride. Alexander McQueen was installed at Givenchy, and John Galliano at Dior the latter, in particular, has a number of pieces in the exhibition.
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As the small and discrete luxury houses were absorbed by larger luxury conglomerates, executives looked for designers who could bring the spectacle and drama necessary to cultivate a brand with worldwide recognition. That attitude was quickly adopted by Europe’s surreptitious gay communities, most notably the dandy Oscar Wilde.īut it wasn’t until the ’90s that what we think of as contemporary Camp in fashion really began, and most of the exhibition’s clothing is pulled from this era to the present. As Camp: Notes on Fashion suggests, Camp always had a strong relationship to fashion, with the first several rooms of the exhibition guiding visitors through the way that Camp was invented as a language of discretion, a flirtation with the feminine epitomized by Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV, in which the king shows off his legs with the lusty wink of a can-can dancer. The open-but-closed nature of this reality in the fashion industry is a somewhat recent phenomenon, though. Many of the industry’s major editorial stylists, who determine what clothing consumers see in magazines, advertisements, and even on streetstyle stars, are gay men. Of course that doesn’t mean the other 59.8% are gay men-but most of the luxury brands listed in McKinsey’s 2018 Global Fashion Index, including Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Gucci, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent, and Burberry, are led by gay men.
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The tradition continues to this day: in a 2016 poll, the Business of Fashion found that across the four major fashion weeks in Europe and the United States, only 40.2% of designers were female.
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Even Coco Chanel is basically a myth propagated by Karl Lagerfeld. The first designers to define fashion as we know it, whose names still pack a powerful branding punch and mean millions of dollars in sales, were gay men: Cristobal Balenciaga, Christian Dior, and Yves Saint Laurent. Some of them are closely kept, while others are everything but spelled out on a billboard-like the fact that gay men are the fashion industry’s real power players.Įven if fashion’s primary consumers are women (and many of its newest, hungriest consumers are straight guys), many of its most influential creative forces are gay men.
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The fashion industry, like a popular girl’s hair, is full of secrets.