On watching two ‘bio-streams’ about dead gay fashionistas
I could have been Lee Alexander McQueen’s husband.
Back in the last years of the 20th century, the now sadly deceased British designer, usually described as an ‘enfant terrible’ of the fashion world, offered to marry me. In writing.
In 1998, my fax machine (younger readers: a kind of steam-powered email) intercepted a call, began beeping and whirring, and out puttered a ‘GIVENCHY, Paris’ letterhead, where he was working as creative director at the time.
‘DEAR MARK, I SAID HELLO TO YOU AT DTPM ALONG TIME AGO AND WAS READING YOUR ARTICLE IN ATTITUDE MAG. GET UP OFF YOUR KNEES AND GET MARRIED. ANYWAY, JUST THOUGHT, YEAH JUST THOUGHT – LEE’
The hand-written text reproduced on the thermal paper printout was responding to a column of mine about a visit to a Parisian sex club in which I joked that worshipping sex is all very well and good, but I didn’t fancy spending the rest of my life on my knees in the ‘jism prison’. (Which I ended up doing anyway, of course.)
Tactfully overlooking the fact that I’ve never been to DTPM, a gay techno club in London, I faxed him back.
‘DEAR LEE, YOU OFFERING? – MARK’
Not long after, came the reply:
‘DEAR MARK, MIGHT BE. IS THERE A VACANCY? – LEE’
To which I responded:
‘OF COURSE THERE’S A VACANCY. WHO WOULD MARRY ME?’
Prompting, almost immediately:
‘MARK, WHAT YOU DOING NOW?’
Obviously nothing came of this. I either bottled it, and didn’t reply to his last, or poured ‘witty’ cold water on the whole flirtatious exchange, I forget which. Back then, I was young and naïve, and thought that you had to fancy someone to marry them.
Which is a shame as McQueen was seriously minted, as well as super talented and big-hearted. On his death, by his own hand, in 2010, aged 40, his estate was valued at a cool £16 million. In his will he left £55K to his three dogs.
The year after he faxed me, McQueen met the chap he did actually ‘marry’ – which he did in Ibiza in 2001, on a yacht belonging to the Prince of Gambia, with Kate Moss as a bridesmaid – though the relationship ended just a year later. Obviously, it should have been me.
I mention this now because I’ve been spending some time in the fashion world. Vicariously. By watching Becoming Karl Lagerfeld and Cristobal Balenciaga both on Disney+).
It’s been an education – the father of the metrosexual knows almost nothing about fashion. Save that it scares the shit out of me.
And after watching these dramatizations of the careers of these two legendary designers (and big homos – though I wonder if there are any straight ones) I have concluded that I was so right to be scared. I salute McQueen, the son of a London cab driver, for surviving and thriving in it as long as he did. And all the bloody hard work that is involved, especially if like McQueen (and Balenciaga) you are a highly skilled ‘seamstress’ yourself, heavily involved in the production process.
I can also see why McQueen wanted to make fashion more theatrical – and rock and roll. Because it really isn’t. It’s an industry. Of Satanic Mills. One built on an over-developed, ruthless work ethic.
Becoming Karl Lagerfeld is well done, well-written, suitably pretty, fun and often funny, with Daniel Bruhl as a very flattering Lagerfeld. But it has a problem: Lagerfeld. At least before he became a controversialist in later life, KL is quite boring as a protagonist for a six-part streaming show. A buttoned-down workaholic who lives with his domineering German mother whom he is faithful to, in a Freudian sense, by being celibate.
His main vice, apart from ponytails and brooches, is reading (Lagerfeld had a library of 300,000 books on his death). Because Mr Lagerfeld is not very expressive, and wears his face like a mask, Bruhl’s mouth must do a lot of barely perceptible twitching in close-up. Which he does very well.
So one can hardly blame Becoming Karl Lagerfeld for spending a lot of time with the much younger, prettier, pouty playboy, hypersexual – and Platonic – boyfriend, Jacques-de-Bascher, (played with swishy verve by Theodore Pellerin). Lagerfeld met him in 1971 – which is how the dramatization begins – when JDB was 21 and KL 37. JDB became and remained his lavishly kept companion, until his death in 1989 from Aids.
In the series, which ends in the early 1980s, JDB yearns for a non-Platonic love affair with KDL. Which KDL can’t provide, and instead showers him with gifts, houses, and apartments. KDL can’t even, apparently, manage to spare JDB much quality time, because of his workaholic schedule – and fear of intimacy.
JDB spirals into a world of anonymous sex, drink and drugs, and constant partying – his heart broken by KL’s coldness, and full of self-loathing at his lack of career as a kept boy (or “plaything of workaholics” as Yves Saint Laurent’s scary boyfriend/keeper Pierre Berge tells him). At one point, in lieu of spending more time with him, KL offers to adopt JDB. This doesn’t go down well.
This dysfunctional daddy-son relationship of unrequited, or rather, unconsummated love, provides the main sympathetic narrative arc of the six-part series, alongside KL’s attempts to get into haute couture, and the politics involved in that. JDB’s love for KL is the proof for the audience that the frosty German is loveable, despite appearances – and KL’s struggle to show his feelings, or even his wedding tackle, to JDB is the proof of pathos.
Adding extra Gallic drama – and some actual sex scenes, instead of KL sitting at home with his mother, reading – JDB becomes romantically involved with KL’s main competitor, Yves Saint Laurent. This is portrayed as an attempt to provoke KL – which he mostly fails to rise to. YSL though totally falls for JDB, and his nasty, selfish top routine.
For my part, despite Pellerin’s pretty pouty lips, big, brown, norty eyes, and general flouncy flair for the role, I got a bit tired with JDB’s poor-me gilded lifestyle, and the notion that this highly sexed young man (who had relationships with men and women), only wanted his German daddy, but had to settle for his extravagant generosity and the rest of fuckable France instead.
Perhaps I’m projecting my fantasy marriage with McQueen, but this is a difficult sell. I also began to feel like I was watching a kind of European, six-hour version of Behind the Candelabra.
Maybe JDB, who was beautiful, smart, cultured, young and from an elite French background, was chosen by KL to ‘reproduce’ him, in aspirational form, the way that wealthy homosexuals did before gay marriage and surrogate mothers became a thing. Or maybe JDB was a surrogate himself, in the sense that he was able to indulge in the kind of libertine life that repressed KL couldn’t.
Whatever the motivation, it does appear to have been devotion: reportedly, Mr Lagerfeld slept in a cot he had installed by JDB’s beside at the hospital he died in. Though if this series is to be believed, that would probably be the longest KL spent with him.
I suspect that KL, looking down from the rhinestoned hereafter himself – he died in 2019, aged 85, from prostate cancer – would approve of the JDB focus of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld. There isn’t though a great deal of KL’s work on display, and some of what you do see doesn’t appear to have aged terribly well (I mean, he was German, darling).
Perhaps because there is no JDB to be distracted by, in Cristobal Balenciaga, the Spaniard described by Dior as “the master of us all”, along with his obsessive-perfectionist craft is much more the focus of this bio-drama – and the frocks are still astonishing, all these decades later, and well-shot. Unlike Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, the work rather than the lifestyle, is the glamour.
Balenciaga (played compellingly enigmatically by Alberto San Juan) emigrates from Madrid to Paris during the Spanish Civil War and founds an haute couture Maison. He is a workaholic – and another control freak. So much so that he avoids the press, has a terror of having his photograph taken, or his voice being recorded. He even stays behind the curtain at the end of his shows. Contrary to pretty much everyone today – and of course Karl Lagerfeld – he worked extremely hard to make sure he didn’t become public property.
The series suggests that some of this stems from shame, and his fear that his homosexuality will become public knowledge. An understandable one, given the attitudes of the time, Franco in Spain (whose wife and daughter were dressed by Balenciaga), and the German occupation of Paris during the war. He nevertheless has live-in male partners, the first of which, the Franco-Polish millionaire and milliner Wladzio Jaworowski D’Attainville, is the love of Balenciaga’s life.
After his death in 1948 at the age of 49 (though in BKL, played by the fresh-faced Thomas Coumans, he seems to be about 30), CB was so bereft he considered closing his Maison, but was persuaded by Dior to carry on – deciding instead to make his next collection entirely in black. Which seems a little… indiscreet.
The writing and direction however allow you to make your own mind up whether his paranoia about being outed was the cause of his control freakery, or another manifestation of it. For what it’s worth, I think I would much rather have been Lagerfeld’s spoilt, arm’s-length companion. Or his cat. (His beloved Choupette was left a cool £1.5 million in KL’s will).
While Becoming Karl Lagerfeld is about KL’s attempts to break into haute couture from pret-a-porter, Cristobal Balenciaga eventually becomes about haute couture CB’s attempts to escape being sucked into pret-a-porter in the 1960s. He has a traumatic (if hilarious) loss-of-control experience with Air France, after being seduced against his better judgement into designing their new stewardess uniform. It ends up with him and his staff personally tailoring every stewardess’ mass-produced outfit, as they form a long line outside.
After witnessing the student riots in Paris in 1968 and realising that he doesn’t understand the world anymore, he reneges on his promise to allow long-suffering Ramon Esparza (Adam Quintero), his younger, very sympathetic – or just very subby – boyfriend and milliner (CB seems to have had a thing for them), to take over from him, and shuts his Maison down.
“How can someone sign with my name?” he asks. Rhetorically.
I think I would have got quite stroppy with Mr B at this point, but Ramon says nothing.
McQueen doesn’t have a Disney+ series yet, but there is a documentary.
The faxes from McQueen are long lost, but I mentioned them in a letter at the time to my US pen-pal Steve Zeeland, who was able to very kindly unearth the relevant missive with the transcription of the exchange.
Update
I decided to go for the full dead gay fashionista set, and watched the 2014 Yves Saint Laurent French bio pic. It has a slightly ploddy structure, narrated in reminisce by his lifelong partner Pierre Berge (Guillame Gallienne), who survived YSL by nine years, dying in 2017. It also features the drink-drugs cruising along the banks of the Seine that we saw in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld.
Obviously, Berge is portrayed as much more likeable and lovely than in BKL, where he is the nearest thing to a proper baddie. What’s curious though, is that Pierre Niney (right), the actor playing Yves, with his full mouth and big norty eyes, looks eerily similar to Theodore Pellerin (top) who plays JDB in BKL. I suppose part of the reason for this is that Yves, unlike Karl, can be the sex object of his own biopic.
Lagerfeld doesn’t appear in this movie, but JDB does (played by Xavier Lafitte), and YSL falls madly in love with him. But in this movie, JDB is a passionate and sensual lover, not a nasty, cruel top, and is in fact really in love with YSL, not KL, and definitely not trying to provoke jealousy KL: “I want to grow old with you” he tells YSL. YSL replies “Is that what you tell Karl as well?”
“No, with Karl I am a clown.”
However, as in BKL, JDB does take Yves down a druggy, sex club, gang-bang spiral – and is also rescued by Berge, who visits JDB at his home and violently warns him off.
All in all, JDB who achieved precisely nothing career-wise because he was too busy having fun, hasn’t done too badly by posterity: he is the celebrated decadent gorgeous toyboy whose affection two dead gay fashionistas still argue over.
