【作者簡介】

Alicia Drake was educated at Cambridge University. She has lived and worked in Paris for the last 10 years. Drake has been a fashion journalist, writing regularly for a variety of publications, including the International Herald Tribune, Travel and Leisure, W Magazine and British Vogue, for which she was a contributing editor.

【內(nèi)容簡介】

Drake presents a sublime and dramatic narrative about the high-chic fashion wars of 1970s Paris where two titanic geniuses and rivals, Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagefeld, collided and sparked a tumultuous decade.

【評論】

The relationship between hedonism and decay and the understanding of excess as creative consumption are themes central to this glittering exegesis. Drake conducted more than 100 interviews in her scrupulous chronicle of fashion's most illustrious rivalry. Yves Saint Laurent, the charmed genius of effortless success, and Karl Lagerfeld, the patrician workhorse, engaged in a decades-long competition for hyperbolic headlines and jet-set celebrity, pitting their cliques against each other in bitch-slap feuds of sartorial splendor. Theirs is a world of glorious, hideous self-involvement, where heroin is an accessory, violent political unrest is an evening's amusement, and a close friend's suicide is, foremost, a contemptible blemish on an orchestrated image. Drake's subjects made their livings and their names dedicating themselves to the pursuit of surface perfection, and her comprehensive examination of their barbed, parallel arcs is appropriately superficial. These titanic designers crafted their personas as carefully as they put together their luxurious collections, and we come to know them as reflections in the mirror houses they built. Although their individual aesthetics and personal recriminations are unique, they are united in the opulent glory of their narcissistic myopia. Ultimately, Drake makes a good case for the extraordinary nature of their individual achievements and the revolutionary effect of their competitive energy on the fashion industry. And yet we're left with a portrait defined more by the careful craft of its brushstrokes than by the substance of the sitters.