VERNISSAGE

“HE TOOK THE ART OF FASHION CREATION TO THE NTH DEGREE.

IT WAS THEATRE—IT WAS AN UNVEILING.”

MATTHEW YOKOBOSKY

Fashion’s Greatest

Showman “When I first started working in museums 35 years ago, fashion exhibits weren’t big,” says Matthew Yokobosky, senior curator of fashion and material culture at the Brooklyn Museum. “[Curators] were trying to make that art/fashion connection…that somehow it was going to increase its allure.” A few decades later, everything has changed. Fashion exhibits have become major attractions, and none more so than the traveling retrospective Thierry Mugler: Couturissime, a multimedia celebration of the genre-defying French fashion designer which arrives at the Brooklyn Museum this month. It’s the fifth institution to stage the show since its debut in Montreal in 2019, and the first to display it since the designer’s death, at the age of 73, in January. “Blockbuster” could not be a more apt phrase to describe it. No one is better suited to a solo exhibition than Thierry Mugler, the wildly theatrical designer, photographer, and artist known for his over-the-top couture creations and fashion extravaganzas of the ’80s and ’90s. “It was just

so much more about fantasy and extreme forms of beauty,” explains Yokobosky of Mugler’s creations. “He was working with people that did amazing beading, feather, and leather work. He even worked with industrial designers to work on the Chimère gown, in which there are 3,000 differently sized scales that were individually cast. He took the art of fashion creation to the nth degree.” His runway shows were equally dazzling, blurring the lines between fashion and entertainment. A trained ballet dancer, Mugler directed his runway models to embody characters—a sharp contrast to what Yokobosky describes as the “military walk” popular today. “Everyone's walking and stomping down the runway so quickly, you're not looking at the fashion anymore,” he says. “[Mugler’s models] came out and presented the dress to the audience. It was theater—it was an unveiling.” Couturissime is a reminder of how audacious the French couturier’s vision was. The show includes more than 130 outfits designed by Mugler from 1973 to 2014, which drew on a multiplicity of sources and influences, from science fiction and surrealism to comic books and cinema, and comprised every kind of material including rubber, resin, and plexiglass. As in past iterations, it features stage costumes and couture, as well as photography (both Mugler’s own and from collaborators like Helmut Newton) and sketches. One gallery is entirely dedicated to George Michael’s 1992 music video for “Too Funky,” which Mugler outfitted and directed, while another is devoted to his first fragrance, Angel, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. And true to his panache for sci-fi, the show opens with a life-size 3D hologram of Mugler’s work for a 1985 stage production of La Tragédie de Macbeth. Though Mugler sold his namesake fashion house in 1997 and walked away from the fashion industry in 2002, he continued to design for productions like Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity and Beyoncé’s I Am... world tour. (The Mugler label has since been revived and is currently helmed by Casey Cadwallader.) But in 2019, Couturissime brought his career rushing back into the public consciousness. The custom dress he created for Kim Kardashian at the 2019 Met Gala, as well as the multiple archival Mugler gowns Cardi B wore to the Grammys that year, went viral, generating days’ worth of headlines. In an era driven by the internet’s insatiable appetite for content, his work provided fodder. There was nobody like Mugler, says his friend and muse, Stella Ellis; the perfectionism and showmanship embodied by the couturier is fading away. “Fashion [has] kind of lost its magic,” she says. Ultimately, Ellis hopes museum patrons will walk away from Couturissime with a better sense of Mugler’s unmatched creativity. “He put so much into GRAND SCALES Left: Yasmin Le Bon his creation…he's not just a dressmaker. He's on the runway of the Thierry Mugler a couturier, he's a director, he's an artist, he's a couture fall/winter show “La Chimère,” in London, 1997. Top: a Jean-Paul photographer. He's a visionary. All of this goes Goude portrait of Thierry Mugler for into the clothing. It's everything.” Vogue Paris, 1998. —AriA DArcellA

“I THINK IT’S SAFE TO SAY THAT 2023

WILL BE THE YEAR OF LOW

ALCOHOL.”

KEN AUSTIN

Spirited Away

In a sign that the mindful drinking trend might have the staying power of a brutal hangover, Boisson, the New York company that launched in 2021 offering slick, de-alcoholized drinks for the fashionably abstinent and sober-curious, is opening yet another store in December at Rockefeller Center.

The new location, the company’s fifth in New York, follows three recent openings in Los Angeles and another in San Francisco, as well as a thriving e-commerce platform, serving up its sophisticated craft cocktails, wines, beers, and elixirs from around the world.

The company’s expansion, as well as the launch of After, a magazine debuting in December for nondrinkers and those looking to rethink the drink, suggests that many of us are drastically dialing back our alcohol overconsumption since the pandemic, when binge drinking spiked by a staggering 21 percent and sales swelled to the size of an engorged liver.

“The majority of us were forced to slow down and be more aware of the state of our bodies and our minds,” says Boisson cofounder Nicholas Bodkins. “There was a spike in drinking alcohol to cope at first, but then for many, it stopped serving them. When we opened in Cobble Hill, which is such a close-knit neighborhood, we connected with our fellow Brooklynites on a personal level, realizing this shared need for well-being.”

Bodkins and his partners are hoping that the embrace of wellness and temperance will continue to gain traction in the rest of the country. The signs are good. Not only are top restaurants and hotels calling on Boisson (Eleven Madison Park, The Carlyle hotel, and the new José Andres restaurant at Ritz-Carlton New York, Nomad, are among the venues utilizing its menu-consulting services), but the big liquor conglomerates such as Diageo are pulling up a barstool in the nonalcoholic (“NA”) market, having acquired Seedlip in 2019 and invested in 15 other emerging brands, including Chicago-based nonalcoholic distillers Ritual Zero Proof.

Ken Austin, a veteran of the booze biz who now works with the big multinationals to fill key holes in the market with new releases such as Avion

tequila, expects the trend to continue. “It's still social and around food,” he says, after pointing out that, so far, he doesn’t have a horse in the NA race, “so I think it’s a no-brainer for restaurants where trained staff can create drinks that most of us couldn’t dream of making ourselves. At-home consumption at mass is going to be more of a stretch. The public education just isn’t there.”

Like the big companies, Austin is gambling instead on the lower alcohol market and is launching an as-yet unnamed drink. “I think it’s safe to say that 2023 will be the year of low alcohol. That’s the sweet spot, but you can be sure that if there is any real money to be made from zero alcohol, the big companies will be there.”

Being able to make something resembling Boisson’s Phony Negroni at home at a fraction of the price? We’ll drink to that.—hORACIO sILVA

The Other Magic Kingdom

The world of high fashion is an endless retro cycle, with designers leading a merry decade-dance of inspiration. One season the world’s leading luxury houses are all seemingly in lockstep, saluting the soignée elegance of the French couture in the postwar optimism of the early ’50s, the next we’re all strutting around in disco-ready Lurex threads of the ’70s.

FASHION MOMENT A model on the runway at the Alexander McQueen fall/ winter show during Paris Fashion Week in 2008.

As designers are forced to trot out more and more collections to increasingly informed customers, even the near past is being revisited. Not surprisingly, there has been a slew of recent books on John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and other creators from the ’90s and early 2000s. But meaty film investigations of this period of great upheaval, and the rise of the luxury conglomerates, have been as skimpy as a ’90s supermodel.

Kingdom of Dreams, a new four-part highend fashion series premiering on HBO Max in the new year, is set to change that. Produced by Misfits Entertainment, the team behind the BAFTA-nominated McQueen and the recent Netflix documentary Rising Phoenix, the series uses rare library material, unseen personal and designer archives, dazzling visuals, and probing interviews to tell the story of the watershed moment in fashion in a contemporary, cinematic way that does justice to the dazzling creations on the runway.

As seen in these themed episodes, the period was a last hurrah for the cult of the designer, supermodel, magazine editor, power PR, and department store—a beautiful collision of big budgets and even bigger egos. The rapid rise of designers at the beginning of the era, such as Galliano and McQueen, was bookended by the precipitous falls of these flawed geniuses. It’s an often-ugly story about a world of beauty that sadly cannot be told in today’s fashion magazines, which live and die at the hands of their powerful luxury advertisers. For that alone, Kingdom of Dreams is an important addition to the fashion dialogue.—hs