2024 OCTOBER ISSUE
WORLD RENOWNED
FASHION DESIGNERS
PART 1
Written by Andrew Sia
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From the Desk of the Publisher
When we were doing the compilations for the 30 fashion designers we came across a chart telling us the ten top fashion designers and that brought us a lot of interest to single them out. Obviously they were selected by the fashion industry from their perspectives.
With this first report, we reported the top five of them. Also we found out that they were all victims of their own success. For instance Coco Chanel was forced to remain in close relationship with a Nazi officer during WWII and she fall from grace. Christian Dior died at the age of 52 only due to the heart attack. Yves Saint Laurent suffered when he was serving the French army from bullying from the others that led him mental disorder. He resulted in heavy drinking and drug addiction. He died of brain cancer. We all remember when Gianni Versace was gunned down outside his beach house in Miami Beach. Last and not the least, Alexander McQueen couldn’t take the sorrow from the suicide of his best friend, Isabelle Blow, followed by the death of his mother. He chose to end his life by suicide.
They all ended their life tragically, but their influences in fashion designs and the brands are still among us. You can find their names in the fashion catwalks where they continue to receive praises and admirations. Their status have also bene escalated which is something they wouldn’t have expected perhaps.
The Most Influential Designers of All Time – Part 1
We look at them at their historical impact, contemporary influences, and innovation. Based on the above criteria, we are featuring them in our journal. Today, we started with the No. 1 to 5 as the following:
Coco Chanel
Coco Chanel – Born in August 19, 1883, Gabrielle Bonheur “Coco” Chanel was a French fashion designer and businesswomen who founded the Chanel brand. She is known for her timeless designs, and her “little black dress” is her trademark piece. She liberalized women from the “corset” that had earlier dominating the women’s fashion. This revolutionized the scene as all of a sudden the styles were more simple, easier to put on and more comfortable without sacrificing elegance.
Chanel opened her first millinery shop on Paris’ Rue Cambon in 1910. Later she introduced clothing.
Chanel extended her influences beyond couture fashion into jewelry, handbags, and fragrances. Her “Chanel No. 5” which was her first perfume which was released on May 5, 1921, and has become an iconic product until today. A bottle of this perfume is sold is sold every 30 seconds. The Russian chemist Ernest Beaux was commissioned by Gabrielle Chanel for the perfume, and it was the No. 5 sample that Chanel selected. In 1970, another perfume known as “Chanel No. 19” was launched for remembering Gabrielle Chanel’s birth on August 19.
In 1925, she introduced the legendary Chanel suit with collarless jacket and well-fitted skirt. Another 1920s revolutionary design was Chanel’s little black dress and made it chic for evening wear rather than associating it with mourning moments. Chanel is famous for its quilted purses, and its “Double-C” logo became its trademark.
It was in 1920s Pierre Wertheimer began to fund Coco Chanel. His grandsons, brothers Alain and Gerald Wertheimer controlled the brand Chanel since then.
The international economic depression of the 1930s brought a downturn on Chanel’s company. Her couture house closed in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II as well. After the war Chanel left Paris and spent some years in Switzerland as self-exile. She returned to Paris in 1954 to revive her fashion house.
She died on January 10, 1971, at her apartment in the Hotel Ritz.
Ten years after her death, Karl Lagerfeld took the reins of her company to continue the Chanel legacy. Today, the company Chanel is still held privately by the Wertheimer family who is based in London and continues the legacy.
In the 1980s, Karl Lagerfeld was hired by Chanel, as the brand was considered as a “near-dead brand” since the time when the designer Coco Chanel died in 1971. Karl Lagerfeld took over the couture in 1983, he brought back life into the company, and received great success after he revamping its ready-to-wear fashion line.
One of the famous quote of Coco Chanel, “Fashion changes, but style endures” which we found very true.
Christian Dior
Christian Dior – Christian Ernest Dior, January 21, 1905 to October 24, 1958, was a French fashion designer, best known as the founder of one of the world’s top fashion house, Christian Dior SE.
Christian Dior was born in Granville, a seaside town on the coast of Normandy, France. He was the second of the five children born to the family of Maurice Dior and Madeleine Martin. The family was a very wealthy fertilizer manufacturer which in those days was very important for the agricultural society. Fertilizer was also used in explosives as well during the wartime. When he was five, the family moved to Paris and used the house on the Normandy seaside for summer holidays.
Dior’s family had hope for him to become a diplomat, but his wish was to involve in art. He was selling his sketches in his youth already.
At the age of 23 after he left school, his father gave him the money to finance a small art gallery where he and his friend were selling art similar to Pablo Picasso. The art gallery lasted only three years followed the death of his mother and financial downturn of his father’s business during the Great Depression.
Dior looked for means to support himself and started to sell fashion sketches. He was discovered by Robert Piguet, who later hired him in his fashion house to design fashion collections. Robert Piguet was remembered as someone who trained Christian Dior and Hubert de Givenchy. And during Dior’s time with him, he worked alongside with Pierre Balmain. Dior left the fashion house of Robert Piguet for military service.
In 1942, Dior left the army and joined the fashion house of Lucien Lelong. He and Pierre Balmain were the primary designers. And during the World War II, as an employee of Lucien Lelong, he designed dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators. During that time, to stay in business one would need to serve the Nazis. It also happened to other fashion designers like Jean Patou, Jeanne Lanvin and Nina Ricci. But Dior’s sister, Catherine Dior, was a member of the French Resistance, was captured by the Gestapo, and was imprisoned in the concentration camp until her liberation in 1945. In 1947, Dior named his debut fragrance Miss Dior to tribute to her.
In 1946, instead of accepting a successful entrepreneur, Marcel Boussac, try to revive a Paris fashion house—Philippe et Gaston—he accepted his investment to found his own fashion house. Maison Dior was founded in 1946 and his first collection—Corolle—was presented on February 12, 1947.
Christian Dior, the brand was established in 1947 in the midst of the post-war ruin in France. Dior changed the fashion industry with new designs. He crated voluminous calf-length skirts, cream jackets and fitted waists.
Christine Dior refined the “New Look” in the skirt shape and waistline that led the high fashion since the late 1930s. His designs were more voluptuous than the boxy, fabric-conserving shapes of the WWII styles. The house employed Pierre Cardin for the first three years of its existence.
The “New Look” not only revolutionized women’s fashion, but it also revived Paris as the center of the fashion world after World War II. Dior also became a virtual arbiter of fashion for much of the following decades. His fashion inspired many women during the post-war period, and regained their love for fashion.
Dior’s designs were known for its elegance, luxury, and a sense of fantasy. He was also known for the use of exquisite fabrics, the meticulous attention to the details and innovative silhouettes.
His fashion lines made statement every year since then. He was best known in the introduction of A-line, zig-zag-line, Y-line, H-line silhouette which is still important for today’s fashion and haute couture.
With Dior’s success in fashion, he also expanded into perfume, and most notably are the “Miss Dior” and “J’adore.”
His influence extended beyond fashion to art, film and culture. He is remembered as an icon and also a legend.
Christian Dior died of a heart attack in Montecatini, Italy at a card game at the age of 52. Yves Saint Laurent was the couturier’s successor during the time. He worked for Christian Dior when he was 19 years old.
In his life he received many awards and honors for films for the best costume designs.
I can’t help but to give more quotes by Christian Dior as the following:
“Black is the most slimming of all colors. It is the most flattering. You can wear black at any time. You can wear it at any age. You may wear it at any age. You may wear it for any occasion. I could write a book about black”.
I also want to remember Dior for his quote, “Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest”.
Today the Christian Dior brand remains one of the most prestigious and iconic luxury fashion houses in the world. It is now in the stable of LVMH. It continues to set trends with its runway shows and bring out couture collections and ready-to-wear lines.
Yves Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent – Yves Henri Donat Mathieus-Saint-Laurent was born on 1 August 1936 in Oran, French Algeria and was grew up in a villa by the Mediterranean with his two younger sisters. Already in his early teen days, he was designing dresses for his mother and sisters. At the age of 17, he moved to Paris and enrolled at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture, during which he won the first prize in an international design contest. He caught the attention of Christian Dior and was hired as his assistant. Christian Dior already the giant in the fashion world.
In 1953, Saint Laurent submitted his three sketches to a contest for young fashion designers as organized by the International Wool Secretariat. At the contest Saint Laurent won the first prize. At the award ceremony held in Paris he met Michel de Brunhoff. He took the advice and left Oran to Paris to further study at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture and graduated as a star pupil. He entered the International Wool Secretariat competition again and won and beat Fernando Sánchez and Karl Lagerfeld. Michel de Brunhoff sent him again to Dior and was hired immediately.
In August 1957 Dior told Saint Laurent’s mother that he had chosen Saint Laurent to succeed him as designer. And in October that year, Dior died at a health spa in Northern Italy because of the heart attack. Dior was only 52 years old at that time and as Dior’s protégé, he was named head of the House of Dior. At the time Saint Laurent was only 21 years old.
His spring 1958 was a success and saved the fashion house from financial ruin. Saint Laurent softened Dior’s New Look and became recognized by the fashion world as “trapeze dress”.
In 1960, Saint Laurent was drafted to serve the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence. In fact, he was spared in 1958 and 1959, but because of the disastrous 1960 season, Saint Laurent was replaced and he was in the military for 20 days before he was admitted to a military hospital. Not only he was harassed by the fellow soldiers but also received the bad news that he was fired from Dior. When he was in the military hospital, he was given the large dosage of sedatives and psychoactive and even took up the electroshock therapy. This was later traced to the origin of both his mental problem but also his drug addiction to his time in the hospital. During this time his role was replaced by Marc Bohan.
He was discharged from the hospital in November 1960 and he took Dior to court for breaching the contract and won. During his period of rehabilitation, he and his partner, Pierre Bergé, an industrialist, with the financial fund from the American millionaire, J. Mack Robinson, started their own fashion house, Yves Saint Laurent YSL.
The fashion trends that Saint Laurent made famous such as the beatnik look, safari jackets for men and women, tight trousers, thigh-high boots and the classic tuxedo suit for women, Le Smoking, in 1966.
Saint Laurent started the mainstreaming the idea of using the silhouettes from the 1920s to 1940s. He also began to shift the focus from haute couture to ready-to-wear and he liberalized the fashion and made it more affordable and cheaper for the market.
His full prêt-à-porter was released on September 29, 1966 and the first customer was Christine Deneuve.
In the 1960s and 70s, Saint Laurent was known as one of Paris’s “jet-set” and he shuttled between clubs in Paris and New York. He was known as a heavy drinker and the frequent use of cocaine. He also began to live in his villa in Marrakech, Morocco.
The workload of designing two haute couture and two prêt-à-porter turned him to alcohol and drugs, and he was found to be very frail when he was walking down the runway at the end of the show.
In 1983, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held a retrospective of Saint Laurent’s design.
The 1987 prêt-à-porter show in New York City was a disaster and although the line remained popular with his fans, and it was soon dismissed as “boring” by the press.
In 1999 he sold the ready-to-wear business to Gucci for $1 billion and shut down the couture house when he retired in 2002.
In 2017, a museum dedicated to his work opened in his former haute couture house in Paris and another in a terra-cotta building in Marrakech, Morocco.
Saint Laurent died on 1 June 2008 of brain cancer in his residence in Paris. A few days prior he and Bergé, joined the same-sex civil union, who has been his partner and business associate in 1960.
He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Marrakech, Morocco, where he found inspiration and refuge.
I would like to remember Yves Saint Laurent in one of his quotes, “To be beautiful, a woman needs nothing but a black pullover, a black skirt, and the man she loves by her side.”
Today, Yves Saint Laurent is owned by the Kering Group.
Gianni Versace
Gianni Versace, the iconic fashion design was known for his bold, glamorous designs, although he is not around anymore, but his fashion house is still powerful and influential in the fashion world.
Gianni Versace was born on December 2, 1946, in Reggio, Calabria, Italy. It is in the southern part of Italy, and it is a peninsula bordered by Basilicata to its north, the Ionian Sea to its east, the Strait of Messina to its southwest, and the Tyrrhenian Sea to its west. The Strait of Messina separated it from Sicily. In his youth, his mother, Francesca, gave him early exposure to fashion. He often helped his mom in her shop, learning the basics of design and garment construction.
In 1972, Gianni moved to Milan to work as a designer for several fashion houses, including Genny, Callaghan, Mario Valentino, and Complice. Already at his young age, Gianni shown his talent. In 1978, backed by the Girombellis, another Italian family fashion business, Gianni opened his company. The same year Gianni Versace presented his first collection for women in Milan, and also launched the Versace brand. He became the head of design, with his brother Santo in charge of the business, and later her sister Donatella became the designer and vice president of the company.
The Versace logo is the head of Medusa, a Greek mythological figure. The logo came from the floor of a ruins in the area of Reggio, Calabria, where Gianni and his siblings were playing there as children. Later, Gianni chose Medusa as the logo as perhaps of his childhood obsession.
Versace’s designs were known for their opulence, bold colors, and daring cuts. He was inspired by the Greek and Roman history, and incorporated luxurious materials and intricate patterns. He already engaged with supermodels and celebrities for his runway shows and ad campaigns in 1990s. His close associations with celebrities like Madonna, Elton John, and Princess Diane helped to popularized the brand.
Versace expanded into different product lines, including menswear, accessories, fragrances, and home furnishing. These seemed to be a natural extension for all brands. And all this time Versace has been domicile in Milan as his fashion capital. His fashion show during the Milan Fashion Week were known for its glamor and theatricality and often blended with performance art. He was also known for collaborating with different artists and designers, such as Richard Avedon, an influential American fashion and fine art photographer. His iconic portraits involved celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, the Beatles and Andy Warhol, and also Versace maintained a close relationship with Andy Warhol, who is known for colorful paintings and designs.
His designs were regarded as sensuality and sexuality. His most famous designs included sophisticated bondage gear, polyvinyl chloride baby-doll dresses, and silver-mesh togas. His designs were considered as vulgar sometimes.
He owned several luxurious properties. His New York mansion was listed for $70 million, and his mansion in Miami—Casa Casuarina, became a boutique hotel.
Gianni Versace was openly known for gay and had a long-time partner, Antonio D’Amico, who was also a model and a designer.
Gianni Versace was tragically murdered outside his Miami Beach home on July 15, 1997, by Andrew Cunanan, and his death shocked the fashion world. On that fateful morning, Gianni left his mansion on the South Beach, Florida for a morning coffee after 6:00 am. He bought a coffee from News Cafe, just three blocks from his home, and headed back to Casa Casuarina. He walked up five marble steps and slipped his key into the lock and there was a voice from behind called him, he turned and was shot two times in the head and died instantly. He was only fifty years old.
Gianni was gunned down by a 27-year-old killer, Andrew Cunanan, suspected as a serial killer and was wanted by the FBI in their “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list, who was found dead in a Miami Beach boathouse eight days later. It was believed as suicide.
Several memorial services were held for Versace. The one at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art where a lot of people turnout, including Anna Wintour, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Marc Jacobs. Performers like Whitney Houston, Jon Bon Jovi were among the performers at the memorial.
In twenty years, Gianni Versace build an empire worth $807 million at that time with 130 boutiques across the world.
His sister, Donatella Versace took over as the brand’s creative director, and she has then continued to honor Gianni’s legacy, and maintains the brand’s relevant in the fashion world. The Versace brand remains its creative, innovative and influential image and still enjoy the success under the helm of his sister, Donatella.
Today, Versace sale is at $5.8 billion and the state-owned equity fund of Italy is said to have interest to purchase a 20% stake in luxury fashion retailer Gianni Versace. The acquisition would also be backed by Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund would have valued the Versace brand at $5.76 billion.
It was in 2018, Michael Kors acquired the Italian brand for more than $2 billion following decades of ownership by the Versace family. Michael Kors shifted Versace, and Jimmy Choo into his parent company Capri Holdings. it is currently acquiring Tapestry, who owns Coach New York and Kate Spade, and waiting for approval from regulators.
The quote from Gianni Versace which I have picked as, “I want to be the joy to people through my work. To me, fashion is happiness.”
Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen was born March 17, 1969 in London, England and lived until February 11, 2010. He passed away by suicide at the age of forty at his home in Mayfair, London. McQueen was famous for tailoring and historicism, which was drawn from recreating historical styles and imitating the work of historic artists and artisans, and merged them into contrast often caused controversial.
McQueen dropped out of school at the age of 16 and began to work for Saville Row and later for Gieves & Hawkes. In 1992, he received Master’s degree in fashion design at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. The same year he launched his collection and drawn the interest from Isabella Blow, a stylist from Vogue, who purchased the whole line. She was also the person who encouraged McQueen to use the name Alexander and the two became very close friends. At the time when everyone in the industry was calling him “enfant terrible,” or another way of addressing him as “a hooligan of English fashion.” Isabelle Bow was always on his side and encouraged him.
In 1996, Givenchy, who owned the house of Louis Vuitton, approached Alexander McQueen. Instead of sketching the designs, he took the pair of scissors and some fabric and work directly on the model. Soon McQueen felt restricted at Louis Vuitton for his freedom to create, he chose to leave in 2000 and started to work for Gucci.
It was as early as 1992, McQueen began his interest in art, film, and music. He paid tributes to Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Bird and The Man Who Knew Too Much.” He also presented a show entitled “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” for its thorn-like overcoat and the three-point origami frockcoat.
His family root led him to his Scottish roots where he used elements of Scottish cultures various times in his collections. He also made political statements regarding Scotland and the concept behind his very controversial collection, Highland Rape, of Fall/Winter 1995-96.
Alexander McQueen, an iconic designer known for his avant-garde, and often controversial designs, and his theatrical fashion shows. People cannot forget Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, one of the most popular exhibitions in the United Kingdom at all time, with over half a million people who went to this paid exhibition. This influential fashion designer was responsible with some of the most iconic and fantastical creations that had ever been created. His talent in theatrical romanticism, setting of the rules of beauty, showing the fierce versions of femininity, McQueen made waves that were felt far beyond the barriers of the fashion industry.
You can read more about Alexander McQueen’s work from our other article under “Fashion Quote – Alexander McQueen” in our October 2024 issue.
Despite of all his success, McQueen was a deeply troubled person. The incident that shook him the most was the suicide of his beloved friend, Isabella Blow in 2007. Her addiction to alcohol and drugs was getting worse over the years and her death devastated him severely. McQueen dedicated his S/S 2008 collection to her for her trust of his talent.
The worst was the death of McQueen’s mother, who died of cancer in 2010. A day before her funeral, McQueen committed suicide in his apartment. All I can say is that it is a great pity that such talent who died so young and so unhappy.
I like to remember Alexander McQueen for his quote, “I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. I have to force people to look at things.”