The Beautiful Fall: Fashion, Genius, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris

by Alicia Drake

Book Overview

A comprehensive biography of the late designer, Karl Lagerfeld, and his infamous rivalry with Yves Saint Laurent.

In the 1970s, Paris fashion exploded like a champagne bottle left out in the sun. Amid sequins and longing, celebrities and aspirants flocked to the heart of chic, and Paris became a hothouse of revelry, intrigue, and searing ambition. At the center of it all were fashion's most beloved luminaries - Yves Saint Laurent, the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316001856
• ISBN13: 9780316001854
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.5" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

20th Century Masters

This book is beautifully written and impeccably researched. I was on a cloud for days after finishing it.

What a Fall It Was!

To those fashionistas who remember the early 70s and to those who don't, this book is wonderfully interesting and perfectly detailed in its comparisons and reflections on the works of St. Laurent and Lagerfeld. Although in the early 70s the US was just starting to swing, it seems that Paris was sizzling. This book made me envious of everyone there. I would recommend this book to everyone interested in fashion, pop culture and Paris.

La mode rend fou !

I love this book. It's my Christmas discovery. If you like fashion, you will have so much fun discovering that everything we have now started in the seventies. Lot of details, you feel like an insider. Beetween Karl and Yves, which one will you choose ?

The Beautiful Fall

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.

Decadence indeed

"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.

a BEAUTIFUL book

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.