And Thierry Mugler invented the fashion show - Elle

His universe populated by dream creatures and mutant women marked the aesthetics of the 80s. An exhibition returns to the Mugler epic, recalling the genius of this visionary creator.

Eva Herzigova, half-bird of paradise, half-reptilian mutant, a swarm of insect-women sheathed in latex, their hemoglobin mouths ready to devour everything, Emma Sjöberg as a diva with Harley-Davidson-style bodywork… The universe of Thierry Mugler has left many clichés in the collective imagination. Clichés in every sense of the word, even if some classify them in the “caricatures” department. But the culture of social networks, always eager for spectacular photogenics, has added a layer – virtual and viral – to the Mugler myth born before the all-digital era. The couturier and his work are now the subject of an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, under the direction of Thierry-Maxime Loriot, who orchestrated the first version of the event in Montreal in 2019. ci has been able to sweep away superlatives, put into perspective an iconoclastic, vibrant and complex vision. Between the lines, we also read an intimate and singular story where the work and the man are inseparable.

Creating your world

The interested party describes himself as "a creator of dreams, a fighter for beauty". For Mugler, the fight in question started early. It is that of a kid suffocated by the bourgeois microcosm of Strasbourg, between a doctor father in a spa and an eccentric mother, an improbable mixture of Norma Desmond and Jessica Rabbit. Like a Tim Burton, even in the grip of the dull languor of the Los Angeles suburbs, he chose escape and the construction of his own world: “It was stronger than me, an instinctive thing. It's my life, and I can't do anything else. Fortunately, I had a bit of talent, otherwise I would have ended up a tramp,” he laughs. Rebellious, the teenager skips high school, prefers the nuns who sing at the cathedral, tinkers with his clothes and is already building small cardboard theaters. "I didn't understand anything about this family and this world, I was suffocating, so I started to create my own world as I could, the world as I saw it through museums, cinema, nature, animals…” At war with the ordinary, he continues his fight by working on his own person. Thierry Mugler the dancer enters the scene. “Dancing saved me,” he says. The quest for balance, the desire to surpass oneself to go further, higher, it suited me well and it followed me in the creation of my clothes. It is in this almost ascetic discipline that happiness and success reside. “Once you've made the effort to master the technique, you fly, you're stoned. Like actors who know their text by heart, we can go beyond, interpret. »

Playing with extremes

Dancer at the Opéra national du Rhin, Thierry Mugler “went up” to Paris in 1968. It was the revolution in the street, he began his own backstage. He passed dance auditions and discovered the profession of “stylist”: at the time, the big fashion houses did not have appointed designers, they bought drawings from stylists. So he takes the pencils. Soon, the dancer becomes a “sculptor”: a(na)tomic architectures arise that glorify the body, sensual volumes that make you dizzy. The Mugler house was born in 1974, the first fashion show will take place in 1975. Over the shows, a gallery of extraordinary characters is born. If at Tim Burton we come across the unforgettable Edward Scissorhands and Oyster Child, at the young designer the “misfits” have a more joyful and triumphant eccentricity. Insects, big cats, warriors, futuristic femme fatales… their look contrasts with the sleepy archetypes of so-called Parisian good taste. Mugler is anything but a Parisian. Rather a globetrotter who feeds on travels and experiences. He lives for a time in London, spends five years on a barge in Amsterdam. The man who would have dreamed of being a Yuri Gagarin adventurer explores the countries of the East in the middle of the Cold War, crosses Afghanistan in a van, goes from Calcultta to Osaka. Everything captures it, especially when it's “extreme”. A word that defines it well? “When I asked him the question, confides Thierry-Maxime Loriot, he said to me: “Listen, I was a ballet dancer, yogi, hippie, Kathakali dancer in India [theater traditional of Kerala, ndlr], I 've worked in boutiques, I have been a designer, photographer, director and, in addition, I have undertaken an extreme physical transformation, I am extremely disciplined. Yes, I guess you could say I'm extreme. »

Adriana Karembeu on the catwalk at the Thierry Mugler Haute Couture Fall-Winter 1997-1998 show in Paris © Victor VIRGILE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

The end of an adventure

The man of the extreme, therefore, settles in an eleven-story fashion house, rue des Archives, in Paris. The seamstresses' workshops correspond to four basements reserved for laboratories, where chemical baths are next to a welding station. A true paradise of Frankenstein version glamour. The fight to give life to the couturier's ideas takes on its full meaning here. The Mugler world electrified the 1980s and 1990s. We stepped on it to attend the parades of those who even had the luxury of saying “no”. "No" to Bernard Arnault, at the head of the very young LVMH group, who offered him to take over from Marc Bohan at Dior in 1989. "No" to Madonna too, the absolute star of the time that he would have sent for a walk. But the extreme, sometimes, it annoys. Immortalized by Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, the carnal sophistication of Thierry Mugler is soon taxed as "pornographic", then as "exceeded" by those who have not understood that his fight is elsewhere: in the construction of a world at the extraordinary beauty, resistant to all moral, social and economic classification. But the real world convulses against the backdrop of the Gulf War and the financial crises. In couture, large groups emerge that will format an “industry” hungry for profits, but also a grunge, minimalist, even brutalist fashion. On this scene, the creator will therefore no longer have a place. He left fashion in 2003, “because it was no longer an emotional or artistic vehicle,” he asserts, uncompromising.

Reinventing itself, always

In any case, fashion keeps traces of its passage. By shaking up the codes of haute couture, Mugler has opened doors that will soon be smashed by “made in Britain” geniuses, from John Galliano to Alexander McQueen, the latter openly claiming the “Muglerian” heritage. And the 2020s continue to exploit the couturier's aesthetic vocabulary more or less half-heartedly, with shouldered jackets, latex leggings and other mermaid skirts that drive the red carpets crazy. Because, devoted body and soul to his personal approach, with no other goal than himself, Thierry Mugler is indeed a precursor. It was he who invented the fashion show, which he staged and controlled from A to Z, far from the bombastic atmosphere of small traditional couture salons. For the tenth anniversary of its brand, on March 22, 1984, 6,000 people (including 4,000 paid seats) flocked to the Zénith de Paris. On its catwalks, Cyd Charisse, Celia Cruz, drag icon Joey Arias, Diana Ross and Julie Newmar share the spotlight with the most spectacular top models. The natural union of fashion and show business that he fostered still lasts but has never really regained this intensity. Mugler culture invested pop culture at this time: the couturier dressed Bryan Ferry, the Pet Shop Boys, David Bowie (who opted for women's ready-to-wear, because no, the 2020s did not invent "gender fluid"), Niagara, the Rita Mitsouko, Mylène Farmer..., he directed George Michael's "Too Funky" clip (he is not credited on the final version) and became a legend in these MTV years, pre-networks social.

And if, today, it seems quite natural for fashion to play with rubber, thermoformed resins, latex, metal or other industrial material, it is Thierry Mugler who imposed them in sewing. With the complicity of the plastic sculptor Jean-Jacques Urcun, he turns to the technologies of the aeronautical industry; together, they invent both the shells of chrome women-robots and the bottle of the mythical Angel, itself a precursor to the surge of “candy flavors” to come. An ancestor of jack-of-all-trades artistic directors, Thierry Mugler was also the first to embark on the adventure of photography in the mid-seventies, in order to better control “his” world. Finally, in her bodies transformed by the magic of couture, we can see the first impulses of a transhumanism which only asks to be expressed today through augmented reality or the progress of plastic surgery. The modern world, fed on Marvel and DC Comics superhero movies, dreams only of this.

Humanism in excess

But fashion being only one of the aspects of Mugler's work, the exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts also explores the fight after. That of the director, who took him from Berlin (for “The Wyld”) to Las Vegas (for the show “Zumanity”, created with Cirque du Soleil). "Some artists came to me and said, 'You revealed things in me that I hadn't suspected'", he smiles. As if by building himself, he contributed to helping others to do so. And, in this form of humanism lurking beneath the excesses, one is tempted to see an unconscious reason for its continued success. Because there is indeed a new Mugler audience: anonymous young people who hunt for his creations on social networks, like the new show-business divas Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Cardi B or Kim Kardashian. The creator changed his name (he took back his first name, Manfred, in 2013), changed his physique (by dint of repairing his bruised dancer's body, he became similar to his comic book heroes). But he hasn't really changed; the soul of the disciplined dancer is still there and his eyes shine when he talks about his new project with the Bolshoi and the star Svetlana Zakharova, sacred monster of ballet, also extreme in her genre. He talks about her like a child, describing with admiration her incredible mastery of wrist gestures. No doubt, Thierry Mugler is still this dreamy and determined kid. And we think of Picasso's formula: “In every child, there is an artist. The problem is how to stay an artist as you grow up. »