Customer Reviews

The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris

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The Beautiful Fall is a fascinating view into the Paris fashion scene during the intensely creative and revolutionary period of the 60's and 70's (and beyond). The book concentrates on fashion as lived by the rival camps of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, but its scope is much broader. Throughout a narrative that reads as compellingly as fiction, the author analyzes the socio-cultural events that shaped the Paris fashion world. Drake astutely pays homage to the symbiotic realtionship fashion has always had with society. She also taps into the fashion world's neuroses in all their terrifying glory: Saint Laurent's and Lagerfeld's ongoing fear of being outdone by the other; YSL's battles with his own creative demons; the manic way in which Lagerfeld surrounds himself with an everchanging fashion coterie that fuels his own creativity.

Drake's writing style is fluid, with her prose as rich and elegant as the world she depicts. Turning the pages of the book, one can see, taste and feel the luxe accoutrements that are the lot of fashion royalty: the sumptuous residences, the sit-down dinners for a hundred, the plush privelige of a chauffered limousine. Yet Drake also opens a door to the down side of fashion--the wounded egos as entourage members are cut loose, the heinous drug hangovers after all night parties at Le Palace, or the letdown of a fashion season fallen flat, when an anticipated collection is panned or ignored.

Class, too, is an overriding theme. The weight of the aristocracy is evoked, with its crushing confines of hierarchy and tradition. Overwhelming, too, are the shackles of design superstardom as Saint Laurent cracks under the weight of his own legend, his genius solicited season after season by a voracious Ready-to-Wear industry churning out clothes for the masses. YSL's torturous decades of self doubt are unflinchingly rendered as he struggles not only against drug and alcohol demons, but also to compete against the fashion standard he himself has set in his prolific early years. For as the author points out, it is every designer's damning quest to not only further their own body of work, but to create something new.

The Lagerfeld saga is given equal billing. Karl's veritable style assault on the industry over decades--the creation of tens of thousands of designs for dozens of labels--culminating in his triumph at Chanel--is an unparalleled tour de force in the design world. As Drake describes it, one can't help but feel that no man has poured more of himself into fashion than Lagerfeld, bringing not only a manic drive but a Renaissance Man's arsenal of knowledge, culture, and plain old street savvy. With the advent of youth-driven social forces like Rock music, MTV, and the rise of the supermodels, fashion became in fashion, and no-one has milked it more or used it to better advantage than Lagerfeld. The fact that Lagerfeld is actually taking the book to court in France (citing invasion of privacy) is unfortunate. Drake's portrait of both men is unflinching but not unflattering; it is fascinating, and above all, human.

Given the multiple tales of excess chronicled within, some might try to pass off the book as exploitative journalism or a cheap kiss-and-tell narrative. The book is neither. The Beautiful Fall is an astutely written, brilliant portrait of a history-making period in fashion that will forever stand as testimony to those tumultuous times. It is a must-read for anyone professing a serious interest in fashion.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Like Alicia Drake, I write on fashion, but the comparisons end there, as Drake, who is superlatively gifted author, truly exists in a league all her own. Her treatment of this gripping topic--fashion-world excesses and catfights in 1970s Paris--is nothing short of excellent: astonishingly well researched, fascinatingly detailed, and wonderfully readable. THE BEAUTIFUL FALL is a must-have for anyone who cares about clothing, or Paris, or just plain terrific writing.

I have been a fashion writer for about 10 years and this is absolutely one of the best fashion biographies I've read since perhaps DV by Mrs. Vreeland. The Beautiful Fall is beautifully written--a richly detailed account of Paris in the 50's through 80's packed with fashion and Parisian history, insight, and delicious gossip and scandal. You'll feel like you're there at the party and front row at shows that took place long before the televised mania over fashion began in America in the early '90s. Fabulous photos, as well.

"The Beautiful Fall" (which is a somewhat literal translation of the word `decadence' in French, and nothing to do with its English meaning of the word) is a superbly researched account of the influential generation of young men and women who, in the aftermath of the gilded age of post-IIWW fashion and the revolution of 1968, refused to lead their lives in a less than young, beautiful and shocking modern lifestyle.

Instead, they cultivated, all their lives, alternative ways of being perceived as nothing less than innovative and influential, which then became for a time still resonating today, the dominant cultural style of much of the fashion world.

Alicia Drake traces the fate of the gifted and glamorous generations of the Paris in the 1970's through the lives of two of its central figures, Yves Saint-Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, and their members and accomplices, most of whom attained considerable importance in the shape and character of Paris life, such as Pierre Bergé, Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise, Jacques de Bascher, Kenzo, Pat Cleveland, Antonio, Paloma Picasso, Anna Piaggi, among others.

Their story takes us from Germany, Morocco and Paris from the thirties to today, through the revolutions of the sixties, the arrival of new money, the dinner parties and balls, the impossible intake of drugs and alcohol, the disco area and the AIDS epidemic, into allusive womanhood, the opulence and decay of beauty, the importance of living the day, in glamour, as if it were the last.

The volume includes an enormous amount of first personal accounts and quotations and a good selection of photographs, many from private sources, of the fascinating personalities whose lives and careers Alicia Drake has woven into a provocative, richly textured social and intellectual history of fashion.

Alicia Drake's "The Beautiful Fall" was the most fascinating and informative book about the last fifty years of the world of haute couture I have read to date. In essence it was the joint biography of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld, but it also created a vivid picture of the Parisian fashion scene during the period.
The book was meticulously researched and filled with marvellous anecdotes and characters, including Antonio Lopez, Paloma Picasso, and Loulou de la Falaise, to name just a few.
Especially interesting was the inimitable Pierre Berge, the business brain behind Yves Saint Laurent.
I originally found out about this book in a newspaper article about the court case in France over its contents. Karl Lagerfeld sued the author, but in my opinion, it was Yves Saint Laurent whose image was tarnished. Saint Laurent was portrayed as a self-centred, immature man who became increasingly reclusive with time. Lagerfeld, on the other hand, was portrayed as a survivor thanks to his own creativity, hard work and business acumen.

It seems Karl was not very happy with this book...indeed. A friend of mine from Paris who has been on the fashion scene for more than forty years (he traveled with the Kennedy's when they did thier European tour) and knows most of this cast of characters intimately, called to tell me this is a must read. If you are interested in fashion history or just a fashion/gossip junky, this book is for you. A combination of sharp, clear analysis re; recent fashion history, and breathless, delicious stories that recall the excitement that was Paris and fashion at that moment, she informs as well as entertains. This book was fun for me because I've met many of these people. But if you don't already know who these people are, I cannot imagine why you would waste your time turning the pages.

Fashion is not a particular interest of mine; but after I heard Alicia Drake talk at the LA Times Festival of Books, I bought her bio and dove in. The Beautiful Fall is the most exciting book I've read in the last six months at least. It's a page turner, a rhapsody of sensory indulgence. Her evocations of the clothes demonstrate why she's a sought-after fashion journalist--I could see these collections, feel the fabrics, hear the pulsating music at the runway show, smell the truckloads of flowers YSL had sent from Paris to his country manor in Normandie.

You don't have to know much about fashion to be captivated by her ying-yang portrayal of YSL and Lagerfeld. The book bristles with details, the entourages sauntering off the page and into an array of dazzling parties that are so characteristic of the 70s zeitgeist.

The rivalries, the sumptuous locales, the music and drugs and personalities--it's all here. If you want an escape from the quotidian--read this book.

I used to write about fashion (I was the first person -- god help me! -- to put fashion in US magazine so many years ago), so I picked up Ms. Drake's book with a great deal of anticipation.

I loved it, sat down and read it in practically one day. It is all here -- the talent, the heartbreak, the excess, the bitchy jealous (oh -- the bitchy jealousy), and the beauty of fashion that only the French can evoke.

Say what you will, YSL was/is the master. And Ms. Drake has written a tremendous book. I would give it ten stars if I could, she knows from whence she writes, and I look forward to more of her work.

This book is a great read, and is an intensely intriguing tale of social history and personality in the context of the fashion world. The reportage is very credible and well documented. The approach and the narrative in just the right tone so that one reads for twenty pages and is totally engrossed before lifting one's head for a cup of tea. Too bad that the French have exercised censorship in a most undemocratic maneuver and banned it from being sold there. There is a lot of ugliness in the fashion world as emodied in several characters and events in this true story. Yet the narrative of a time with different cross currents interacting in fashion, style, industry & culture is intriguing and educational.

Alicia Drakes' book "The Beautful Fall" shows the rise of the designer as celebrity star rather than the clothes which he designs. It shows that there could only be one designer on top, for either one of them to succeed in their own mind. It shows a human side - both positive and negative in their personalities and actions throughout the 1970's. Both were ego-maniacs but brilliant in their opposite directions. I knew all about Lagerfeld's dismissal of people but not the scale of it and the book tries to explain it. Yves was not any better with his need for people. But, Lagerfeld is curently sueing the author for what she wrote in her book, which i think will make the book sell better.