Champagne Supernovas INTRODUCTION THIS NEW KIND OF BEAUTY EVERY LONG-HELD NOTION OF beauty and fashion--and the way these things were created and consumed--had begun to change, forever, in 1992. That was the year a scrawny, short, flat-chested unknown named Kate Moss was signed as the face of Calvin Klein, demolishing the reign of Amazonian supermodels and saving the house in the process. That was the year Alexander McQueen, a pudgy vulgarian from the East London projects, showed his thesis collection at Central Saint Martins, London''s famed design school. He called it "Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims," and it was twisted and warped and witty and sent the London press into paroxysms of outrage. And that was the year an emerging young design star named Marc Jacobs, three years into his job as VP of design at Perry Ellis, got an unusual phone call. The man on the other end of the line was Nick Egan, a graphic artist from London with an impressive rock ''n'' roll pedigree. Egan had worked with the Clash, the Ramones, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and staged some of Marc''s early shows. Now Egan was directing music videos, and he needed a favor.
Would Marc let him use his space at Perry Ellis? Egan was working with a band called Sonic Youth--Marc wasn''t overly familiar--and they needed a place to shoot. Also, could they use this collection that Marc was about to show, maybe even film some models walking in the pieces? Marc was dubious. He was under enormous stress, and this collection that Egan wanted to use--it was unprecedented, Marc knew it. But at twenty-nine, he was a good generation removed from the girls he was designing for. Marc had come of age at clubs like Studio 54 and Hurrah, places that didn''t even exist anymore, and this collection mainlined a new kind of cool, one that a major designer had yet to interpret. Marc knew it could be the defining collection of his young, sun-kissed career: Like nobody else in American fashion, he understood this moment in youth culture. There was a smash-and-grab sensibility, a rummaging through thrift shops and discards, and an embrace of dispossessed beauty. It was a pulverizing, almost moralistic rejection of every excess wrought in the 1980s.
Marc had been struggling to establish an identity at Perry Ellis, to move the house, sclerotic in its preppy tastefulness, forward--if not ahead of the times, at least on track with them. With this work, which would come to be known as "the grunge collection," he''d cracked it. But Marc was also self-conscious: Would the buyers and critics get what he was doing? Would the girls he was designing for get it? Was it sublime or sacrilege to buy a flannel shirt on St. Mark''s Place for two dollars, then ship it off to Italy to have it remade in silk? To turn a utilitarian thermal undershirt into a luxury good made of cashmere? Marc was equally aware that this collection might make him just another great pretender in the pantheon of fashion design, cannibalizing a subculture he knew little about. And what was this band Sonic Youth about, anyway? Why had they zeroed in on him, at this critical time in his professional life? Did they actually like Marc''s clothes, or were they trying to mock his studied blend of high and low fashion? As it turned out, Sonic Youth was intimidated by him, and he was intimidated by them, and this was a small example of the larger feeling among kids on the fringe: Nobody felt cool enough. "Was I going to be used," Marc said later, "as sort of a Seventh Avenue designer who has exploited grunge?" Marc didn''t know it, but in 1992 he had a kindred soul in Lee McQueen, then a student at Central Saint Martins. McQueen, too, was an upstart, bored senseless with what was considered fashion. He was a fan of avant-gardists Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Helmut Lang and that was about it, really.
McQueen was a happy warrior of dark arts, and he longed to infuse fashion with the things he was most interested in: sex and death, mutilation and contamination, perversion and harm. "He always had these horrible Victorian pornography books that he carried around," says his old friend Alice Smith. "I don''t know where he got them--they were these little fat books that he got in a junk shop or something and they were horrible pictures--he thought they were amazing--of women wearing ball gags and cages over their heads, over-the-top S&M, and he''d be going, ''Isn''t that lovely? Look at this woman in these leg irons!'' He had quite a distinct idea." McQueen was gifted, and, as the best designers often are, a hustler and a showman. The press always covered the yearly thesis collections shown at Central Saint Martins, and he was determined to stand apart. "That show was their launchpad," says Bobby Hillson, who established the MA fashion course at Central Saint Martins and was McQueen''s mentor. "The students were written up all over the world." It wasn''t enough for McQueen to be written up: His collection had to be the one to electrify.
He went to Hillson with his concept: Jack the Ripper. His models were to be the victims, their clothes badges of bloody struggle; Hillson thought it was a shaky idea at best, but she wanted to help. "He was doing terrible things to the fabric, and I said, ''You can''t do this with the cheap fabric you''ve got.'' And he said, ''I can''t afford anything else!''" And so Hillson went to her cupboard and removed "terribly expensive, rich fabrics that had been donated to us. And I said, ''Take some of these.'' You know, somebody would''ve died if they saw what he did with them." McQueen was slashing and ripping, printing and staining. He was chopping off locks of his hair and sewing them into the clothes, a riff on a Victorian tradition among lovers, who would buy and exchange the locks of prostitutes.
He was obsessed by the latter notion, and for as long as he could sewed his own hair into his label. "Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims" was shown in 1992, and it changed McQueen''s life forever: In that crowd was a peculiar, fashion-mad English aristocrat named Isabella Blow. She went by "Issie," and was so overcome that she told McQueen she wanted to buy the whole collection. She''d pay in installments, £100 per, until she owned all six pieces. She told McQueen she''d do whatever she could to help; Issie was averse to the nine-to-five, but she had deep connections in the industry and a strong affinity for mongrels and misfits. First, she said, McQueen must change his name. Issie told him that Lee, his first name, was too common for high fashion. She suggested his middle name, Alexander: It was majestic, had some weight and dignity to it.
He agreed. It wasn''t hard for him to make that change: McQueen would do whatever it took. Marc and McQueen weren''t the only designers on the bubble in the summer of 1992. Calvin Klein, who''d built the ultimate 1980s status brand, was on the verge of bankruptcy by the beginning of the ''90s, his name diluted through careless and diffuse licensing deals. To save his house, Klein had to become relevant again, and this meant going younger, less crisp and arch--almost dirtier. Klein, approaching fifty, trusted his team, who were in their early to mid-twenties and dialed into what was happening on the streets of London and downtown New York: art director Fabien Baron, creative head Neil Kraft, senior art director Madonna Badger, and consultant Carolyn Bessette. "Everything was up for grabs," says Badger. The central conundrum facing the brand, she says, was how to reframe its overtly sexual DNA in the age of AIDS.
The team considered the women they''d pinned to their inspiration board as potential new faces of Calvin Klein: women as disparate as Rosie Perez, the short, curvy, Nuyorican actress hot off Spike Lee''s Do the Right Thing, and the lithe, elegant supermodel Linda Evangelista, whose arrogance ultimately worked against her. "We don''t wake up for less than $10,000 a day," she''d said in 1990, and even for a supermodel, such a comment seemed deliberately contemptuous to the rest of the Western world, living, as it was, through a recession and the aftermath of the Gulf war. Evangelista didn''t make it past the first round. For a moment, Perez was the front-runner. "I remember Carolyn Bessette shooting that down," Badger says. "She wanted it to be modern and fresh." Klein trusted Bessette''s taste; she was a muse, and he would eventually charge her with casting all his CK shows. In mid-1992, this moment of grunge and grit and ''70s regression, Bessette was nothing like the minimalist glamazon she became after marrying John F.
Kennedy, Jr.: These days, she wore Egyptian musk and no makeup and had competitions with female Calvin staffers to see who could go the longest without washing her hair. Bessette coolly knocked back her own patrician beauty, spurning perfectionism for a warmer, no less artful dishevelment; at heart, she was a downtown girl who loved vodka, Parliaments, and partying at Save the Robots till six in the morning. "We were half-hippie, half-natural," Badger says. "It was a total sea change, the opposite of the ''80s." The question was: Could Calvin Klein make squalor sophisticated? There were two other contenders on the inspiration board: Both were European, small and slight, and h.