Cronica footer.logo.title.hidden.text.placeholder goodbye to Thierry Mugler, the designer who turned the parades into shows
Thierry Mugler gave women the chance to dress as heroines and since the 1980s she transformed fashion through the window that gave her icons such as Madonna, Lady Gaga or Kim Kardashian. The most scenic creator, who turned the walkways into rock concerts, died unexpectedly this Sunday at the age of 73.
Born in Strasbourg in 1948, Manfred Thierry Mugler was before dancing designer. He began working at the Rhine Opera at age 14, before travelling to Paris to try to make a hole in the dance.
But what caught attention was not his steps but his garments, for which he began to be hired as an independent stylist in Paris, London and Milan.
At the age of 25 he decided to go further and opened his first shop, Café de Paris, a springboard towards what a year later would be the Thierry Mugler society, with which he began to dress women with a futuristic theatricality.
He said it was the dance that had taught him "the organization of the dress, the importance of the shoulders, the play and the rhythm of the legs".
Starting from the tailor suit of the 1940s with which Christian Dior had triumphed, he exaggerated the female shapes by marking the shoulders, narrowing the waist, elongating the cleavage and drawing artificial and voluminous hips.
A drama that explains Mugler's close relationship throughout his career with singers such as Madonna, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and more recently celebrity and "influence" Kim Kardashian.
"I imagined myself as a Californian girl coming out of the ocean, wet, dripping," Kardashian said at the Met Awards gala in 2019, to whom she wore "the wet dress", whose realization took eight months of work.
This sculpted dress was the first Mugler designed in twenty years, having released the reins of his firm in 2003 to devote himself to the rest of his passions: photography, theatrical and musical costumes and even theatrical direction.
Theatre and future
Mugler's fashion fit like a glove in the excesses of the '80s, where the woman he proposed seemed to turn into a robot or a siren.
His enormous sense of the show went to a higher level on the tenth anniversary of the creation of his brand, in 1984, when he gathered 6,000 people at the Zénith concert hall in Paris to show his latest collection.
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It was the first public fashion performance in Europe that could be accessed like any concert, paying an entrance cost 178 francs (27 euros), reminiscent of the evening Le Monde, which recalls that walkway as "a rock concert".
In the 1990s "Angel" arrived, a perfume in a star-shaped jar that became one of the best-selling in history and came to play first place at Chanel's No. 5.
So many eccentricities did not end his enormous sense of independence: Mugler rejected the proposal of businessman Bernard Arnault to direct Dior, as he had refused a few years earlier to work in the dressing room of a Francis Ford Coppola film.
Dior was eventually left in the hands of a young Gibraltarian who was revolutionizing London fashion with his decadent style, marked by a sense of drama similar to that of Mugler, John Galliano.
Love for the theater
In the last years of his life Mugler lived between Paris and New York, where he was seduced by the enormity of the city and its skyscrapers.
He turned to shows such as Mugler Follies, a transformist musical who triumphed in Paris and Berlin in 2013. Already at that time he refused to be considered a museum object, and only in 2019 he consented that the city of Montreal dedicated a retrospective to him that has traveled the world and arrived in Paris recently, where the designer was celebrated as a myth.
Yoga and bodybuilding also marked his entry into old age, and he himself appeared unrecognizable in recent years between his muscles and his repeated entrances to cosmetic surgery theatres.
His unexpected death, for natural reasons, this Sunday at the age of 73, surprised colleagues and admirers in the fashion world, concentrated in Paris these days for the celebration of the Week of Man fashion and High stitch.
"A visionary whose imagination as a seamstress, perfumer and image maker empowered people all over the world to be more daring and dream more every day," wrote on social media his brand, which announced his death early on Monday.
According to his agent in the local press, he planned to announce a new collaboration this week, within the framework of the many projects he was carrying out, always looking to the future.
