Detailed history chronicling these two masters of fashion. It makes you realize that while Galliano has brilliance, he is mostly show, but McQueen was a true craftsman and creative genius. He could back up his vision with technique and imagination. While one is now dead (detailed in a gruesome way), the other has fallen hard from his lofty position in the world of fashion. It will be interesting to see if he can pick up the threads.

I would have liked a bit more analysis and opinion from Ms. Thomas, whose "Deluxe" book definitely tells it like it is… This felt very journalistic and factual to me, like a running timeline of shows and events, which made it very dry. I would have loved for it to be tied together better at the end, and with a bit more of a future-cast on Galliano.

stuffed with detail, and absolutely worth it on that level alone, but anytime thomas starts speaking on either galliano or mcqueen as people — mental health, addiction, professional pressure, faggotry, etc — she really makes tabloid gossip look nuanced!

So much potential, such an interesting concept, such a boring book. I guess I really don't care enough about fashion to read about all the intricacies of creating a show and the whole creative process. I was bored stiff so no I didn't finish it.

It became like a little night routine - tucked in bed, me showing him a fashion show, one of the many I have encountered in the book throughout the day, either by McQueen or Galliano, but mostly McQueen as his collections were more poignant and concrete in their messages.

Aside from the childhood narratives in the beginning, the book is structured around the collections. The author, Dana Thomas, leads with the inspirations for the clothes, follows the creative process and describes the more notable pieces and the logistics before and at the day of the production. The small extracts from the reviews after the shows give us perspective how they were perceived at the time and where in their careers John and Lee were. We also get introduced to the inner circles of the designers and from there a plethora of characters opens up, as famous as Anna Wintour, Kate Moss, Lady D, as peculiar as Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness, deep fashion people like Amanda Harlech and Andre Leon Talle, and obscure ones like Steven Robinson or Harumi Klossowska de Rola. A google search on any of these launches us down a rabbit hole of fascinating lives interconnected and branching out to endless cultural, business and political figures and events, and if you go back - to aristocratic family trees closer to fairy-tales than reality. If this is how you read the book, it is going to take ages.

http://slpssm.blogspot.com/

It is a brilliant book but I wish it came with photos. Vogue runway doesn’t have all the shows mentioned and I spent too much time looking up photos that matched the description which took away from the reading experience. When she describes all the brilliant decor and clothes and techniques, the descriptions are accurate once you open up the images. However, it is impossible to conjure up in your head the brilliance of Galliano and McQueen with mere words.
No shade on Dana Thomas, she is a brilliant writer. I hope a version of this book comes out with pictures, I’d buy that again.

Although I enjoyed this book, I felt it was essentially a tawdry tell-all masquerading as a more serious work. She does a fairly good job though of highlighting the massive changes that were taking place in high end fashion design during the "reigns" of Galliano and McQueen. I do wish that her preference for McQueen wasn't so obvious. I really feel it was an opinion (which I actually do share incidentally) presented as fact. I also found myself baffled by the inclusion of loving details of some collections and complete exclusion of others. FOr instance, if one wanted to make a point about the excesses of McQueen's shows, why would you leave out ones where, for instance, the model comes out walking a wolf? There were strange oversights like that which made the book seem less comprehensive than it purported to be.