Thierry Mugler, fashion designer, 1948-2022

Thierry Mugler, the outré French designer who dressed David Bowie in a nude sequinned mermaid gown for his 1979 music video “Boys Keep Swinging”, was known for a love of fetish and fantasy. The bladelike shoulders and wasp waists of his trademark silhouettes helped define 1980s power dressing and influenced designers including Alexander McQueen and Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia.

Mugler, who has died aged 73, sent Hollywood stars and porn stars down his runways. His designs were transformative and transporting, using materials previously outside the luxury canon — latex, rubber, vinyl and metal. He moulded women into robots, insects, dominatrixes and Botticelli’s Venus.

His shows were the stuff of legend. A 20th-anniversary haute couture extravaganza at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris in 1995 was an hour-long spectacle that opened with the actress Tippi Hedren, star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, festooned in black feathers. It featured a striptease by socialite Patty Hearst and concluded with a performance by singer James Brown. Such displays helped promote — and were funded by — Mugler’s bestselling Angel fragrance, an over-the-top, cotton-candy scent that was a rebuke to the light, gender-neutral fragrances dominating the market when it was introduced in 1992.

Sandrine Groslier, who worked with Mugler for 27 years, described him as “funny, passionate, crazy at times” and “a genius jack-of-all-trades, an artist for whom measurement was not part of his vocabulary”.

Manfred Thierry Mugler was born in 1948 in Strasbourg, France. His father was a doctor and his mother was the most elegant woman in town. As a teenager he danced ballet at the Opéra national du Rhin and spent his free hours at the cinema.

He launched his own ready-to-wear label, Café de Paris, in 1973. Its sharp, architectural lines stood in contrast to the folkloric fashions then celebrated in Paris and Milan. “I wanted to do this very pure, Parisian silhouette: the little black suit, the trenchcoat, the black dress, the siren dress,” he told WWD in an interview last year. “It was all about a very precise, streamlined silhouette, very strongly influenced by dance.”

Mugler was not a favourite of fashion critics, and was often censured for fetishising the female body, though he insisted his designs empowered women. “Ultimately, society has proved me right,” Mugler said in the same interview. “Everything I showed, that some papers described as pornographic, sexist or racist, is now mainstream.”

“He was so misunderstood during his time, his work was too innovative and too avant garde,” says Thierry-Maxime Loriot, curator of a retrospective now on show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. “He really invented a fashion that is timeless, that is not historically referenced, which is quite unusual.”

Mugler was ahead of his time in other ways. He did not use fur or exotic skins. He designed magnificent faux fur coats spliced with silk chiffon to make them softer and stitched small rectangles of black leather in imitation of crocodile. “There was no way I would torture animals for a piece of clothing,” he said. He photographed his brand’s campaigns himself for decades.

At the height of his fame, in the late 1980s, he was sounded out for the top job at Christian Dior — a role given to Gianfranco Ferré. “Perhaps I had too much personality for the job,” he told an interviewer.

Mugler retired from the runway in 2002, around the time that Clarins, the French beauty conglomerate that had acquired his company in 1997, closed down its fashion division. He became disenchanted with luxury fashion and its growing obsession with money and power but continued to work on fragrances. He designed costumes for Cirque du Soleil and dressed Beyoncé for her 2010 “I Am . . . World Tour”.

Having sold his name to Clarins, he began to go by Manfred again, and cultivated a superhero physique via bodybuilding and plastic surgery, which he modelled in Interview magazine. His goal, he said, was to look like a sculpture by Arno Breker.

Interest in Mugler’s oeuvre has revived in recent years: he created Kim Kardashian’s latex beaded gown, made to look dripping wet, at the 2019 Met Gala. David Koma, the creative director of the Mugler label from 2014 to 2017, describes his work as “an ultimate balance of provocation and art form”. “His groundbreaking sculptural designs, unparalleled garment construction and use of innovative materials will be inspiring generations of designers to come.”

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