[REVIEW] Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall
Feb. 18th, 2009 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI might not be familiar at all with the materials of the fashion industry that Paris-based journalist Alicia Drake uses in her 2005 The Beautiful Fall, but The Beautiful Fall tells the sort of well-crafted traditional moralist's tale that I could easily recognize.
It begins with a gang of awkward but talented outsiders, led by the intensely anxious pied noir Yves Saint-Laurent and the insecure north German social climber Karl Lagerfeld, has them take over the field of fashion and Paris high society, grow rich and famous and powerful over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, only to see their paradise dissolve as heroin and AIDS decimates their co-workers and friends while the Socialists of François Mitterand ironically commodify their art and make fashion just another cultural industry. Drake distinguishes between people, like the model Pat Cleveland, who were able to get out before it was too late (she got out with the help of love), and people like Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld's long-time lover, who was never able to forge an identity for himself separate from the fashion scene and died (of AIDS) in 1989.
There were survivors, like Saint-Laurent and Lagerfeld, but in Drake's narrative they do (in Saint-Laurent's case, did, now) at the expense of being forced to live etiolated lives, their worlds strictly screened for material that might upset their fragile constitutions. The energetic young people who insisted on having everything, it turns out, ended by having everything, yes, but lacking the ability tolerate any of it. but could bear none of it. Like I said, The Beautiful Fall tells an eminently recognizable type of tale.
It begins with a gang of awkward but talented outsiders, led by the intensely anxious pied noir Yves Saint-Laurent and the insecure north German social climber Karl Lagerfeld, has them take over the field of fashion and Paris high society, grow rich and famous and powerful over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, only to see their paradise dissolve as heroin and AIDS decimates their co-workers and friends while the Socialists of François Mitterand ironically commodify their art and make fashion just another cultural industry. Drake distinguishes between people, like the model Pat Cleveland, who were able to get out before it was too late (she got out with the help of love), and people like Jacques de Bascher, Lagerfeld's long-time lover, who was never able to forge an identity for himself separate from the fashion scene and died (of AIDS) in 1989.
There were survivors, like Saint-Laurent and Lagerfeld, but in Drake's narrative they do (in Saint-Laurent's case, did, now) at the expense of being forced to live etiolated lives, their worlds strictly screened for material that might upset their fragile constitutions. The energetic young people who insisted on having everything, it turns out, ended by having everything, yes, but lacking the ability tolerate any of it. but could bear none of it. Like I said, The Beautiful Fall tells an eminently recognizable type of tale.
