CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVAS

Examination of three iconic tastemakers who changed the face of American high-fashion merchandising.

Editor and writer Callahan profiles three fashion figures throughout their cultural reigns during the 1990s, an era marked by a “collective hunger for change”: ultrathin, image-shattering supermodel Kate Moss and fledgling creative designing wunderkinds Marc Jacobs and Alexander McQueen. Each emerged from meager backgrounds, Callahan writes, as she insightfully analyzes how the trio burst onto the artistic scene and transformed the decade. Moss, an unassuming British teenager with “no glamour, no figure, bowed legs and jagged teeth,” went against her mother’s wishes, determined to be successful while rejecting the contemptuousness of the era’s Amazonian supermodels. Jacobs, initially a struggling designer at Perry Ellis (fired for his “grunge” collection), grew up a focused, sensitive and parentally neglected artist who frequented Manhattan nightclubs in the ’70s for inspiration. McQueen’s melodramatic saga is in a league of its own; Callahan dutifully paints him as a flamboyant, “self-mythologizing” and eccentric designer hailing from the sketchy East End of London who was physically self-conscious and prone to self-sabotage. Rising above homosexual mockery and channeling his dark obsessions with sex and violence (his graduating thesis collection was inspired by Jack the Ripper), McQueen, ever the maximalist provocateur, went on to exhibit a series of boundary-pushing collections until his suicide in 2010 at age 40. Callahan walks us through each animated career with a keen eye for detail and a narrative buoyed by histrionics but never weighed down by them. The author makes great use of personal interviews and reference materials, and through cross comparisons, she discovers like-minded commonalities they all shared with each other, such as ambition, determination, a distinctive stylistic vision and rampant drug abuse. Their relevancy and creative visions endure today, Callahan writes.

A lucid, smoothly executed look at a pivotal decade in the legacy of American fashion.