French designer Thierry Mugler (Strasbourg, 1948) died on Sunday of natural causes at the age of 73, as reported by his representative through the creator's Instagram account.
His death comes while his retrospective exhibition,
Couturissime
, covering almost thirty years of iconic designs that defined not only fashion but also the visual culture of the 1980s, can still be seen at the Musée d'Arts Décoratifs in Paris.
This Monday, the museum opened the exhibition for free to the public to honor his legacy.
Trained as a dancer, at the age of 14 he was already part of the Opéra du Rhin ballet. A decade later, he moved to Paris and began to sketch as a
freelance
designer for various firms.
It was this training that made him stand out above his contemporaries, conceiving clothing not as mere adornment, but as a way of playing with anatomy and, above all, as a show in which theatricality and movement mattered almost as much. like the design itself.
An overview of the exhibition 'Couturissime', about the work of French designer Thierry Mugler, exhibited in Montreal (Canada) in February 2019. MARTIN OUELLET-DIOTTE (AFP)
In 1974, after having presented a couple of collections, he met Didier Grumbach, who would later hold the position of president of the Haute Couture Federation. Both, together with the businessman Michel Douard, would create the Triumvirat Company, the company that would develop the production, sales and, above all, the communication of the Maison Thierry Mugler for more than two decades. "Without the staging, Thierry would not have been so successful," Grumbach recalled in a recent interview with this newspaper. “In 1984, we decided to show the collection in front of 6,000 paying people, and that changed the idea of what a catwalk was. All those who came later continued with this idea of a show”, the businessman recalled about the parade they orchestrated at the Zénith stadium in Paris. Of those 6,000 people,more than half had paid admission, as if it were a rock concert.
More information
Latex, one-hour fashion shows and amphibian-women: the great legacy that Thierry Mugler leaves to fashion
And the truth is that there was something of that.
Mugler's shows sometimes lasted over an hour and included almost a hundred creations worn by his cohort of muses, from Jerry Hall to Verushka, from Naomi Campbell to Tippi Hedren, from Amanda Lear to Patty Hearst.
They became, through her gaze and her needle, amphibians, insects, flowers or mermaids, but also science fiction heroines or spies from the forties.
Mugler championed the aesthetic exuberance that defined the fashion of the eighties and early nineties along with two of his contemporaries, Claude Montana and Jean Paul Gaultier, but, as he would tell in an interview with
S Moda
in 2019, it wasn't them he looked up to.
"Those who really changed fashion were couturiers older than us, like Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin," he said.
His love of retro-futuristic 1960s aesthetics and the understated imprint of his native Strasbourg were the foundations on which Mugler imagined his
glamazons
, as they would be called in the media, twisting and sharpening their silhouettes until the dress itself was the that transcended the natural form of the body.
French designer Thierry Mugler, at the presentation of his 'Couturissime' exhibition in Montreal, Canada, in February 2019. MARTIN OUELLET-DIOTTE (AFP)
Like the rock star he truly was, Mugler continued to tour throughout the early 1990s. His shows reached Moscow, Berlin or Vienna. In 1992, and after years collaborating with David Bowie or Diana Ross, among others, this union between fashion and entertainment reached its zenith when he was in charge of dressing supermodels (such as Linda Evangelista, Eva Herzigova or Nadja Auermann) for the video clip
Too Funky ,
by GeorgeMichael. It was in that same year that he entered the very elite circle of members of Parisian Haute Couture. If the tenth anniversary of his signature was celebrated with that macro-show with tickets on sale, for the second he chose one of the most memorable fashion shows that are remembered;
Cirque d'hiver
, almost an hour of
show
in which all his muses took part, clad in latex, silks, corsets and vertiginous heels, and which ended with a performance by none other than James Brown.
One of the creations of that collection, inspired by
The
Birth of Venus
, was the one chosen by Cardi B to attend the Grammys in 2019, and the one that rescued, to a large extent, the name of Mugler for the new generations.
Rapper Cardi B appeared at the Grammy Awards last February in this dress that looked like a Venus.
Because 1992 was also, in a way, the beginning of the end.
Together with the Clarins cosmetic brand, the designer launched the Angel perfume, a daring fragrance based on sweet notes such as cocoa or sugar, which, however, became an unprecedented success.
It still is.
In 1997, Clarins bought a majority stake in his fashion firm (now owned by L'Oréal) and Mugler stepped down in 2002.
Kim Kardashian dressed in Mugler at the 2019 New York Metropolitan Museum Gala.Hahn Lionel/ABACA (Hahn Lionel/ABACA / Cordon Press)
In 2008, he came out of retirement to dress Beyoncé on her
I am…
tour with a total of 58 models.
Since then, the couturier had only redesigned once, for Kim Kardashian, one of his great supporters, the very viral wet-effect dress that he wore at the Metropolitan Museum gala in 2019. However, in the last decade, Cardi B or Lady Gaga, among others, have rescued their archive designs on multiple occasions, keeping their legacy active.
He himself, from his Instagram account, @manfredthierrymugler remembered some of his deeds almost daily and publicly denounced the firms that were too inspired by his work.
“If they gave me a penny for each dress inspired by my designs, I would be a billionaire…” he told S Moda two years ago.
And he was right.
Today