Claude Montana, the bold, tormented French designer whose exquisite tailoring defined the broad-shouldered power look of the 1980s – a tough, erotic, androgenic chic that brought him fame and acclaim until he was felled by drugs and tragedy in the 1990s – died on Friday in France. He was 76 years old.
The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode confirmed the death but did not specify the cause or say where he died.
Montana was part of a cohort of avant-garde Parisian designers, including Thierry Mugler and later Jean Paul Gaultier, who idealized the female form in extravagant, stylized ways that harked back to the screen sirens of old Hollywood, but recast on location. . space. Mugler, who died in 2022, offered a campier femme fatale than Montana’s icy vision, although the two were often lumped together as the architects of ’80s “glamazonism.”
“Claude Montana,” declared the New York Times in 1985, “is to the shoulder what Alexander Graham Bell is to the telephone.”
Her clothes, said Valerie Steele, director of the Fashion Institute of Technology Museum, “were fierce, with a power that was both militaristic and highly eroticized.” And she added: “It was not the appearance of American power of the executive with shoulder pads. “Hers was a different kind of working woman.”
Montana was often inspired by the nocturnal world of the Parisian elite: the sex workers and dominatrixes, the inhabitants of the leather bars he frequented. But he didn’t just stop at fetish equipment.
“His tailoring was scalpel-sharp,” fashion journalist and author Kate Betts said by phone. “The level of perfectionism was intense.”
Claude Montamat was born on June 29, 1947 in Paris, one of three brothers. He changed his last name in the 1970s, he said, because people kept pronouncing it wrong. His mother was German, his father was Spanish and the family was wealthy. “Very bourgeois,” he told the Washington Post in 1985. “They wanted me to be something I didn’t want to be.”
She left home when she was 17 and moved to London, where she began making paper mache jewelry that appeared on the cover of British Vogue. But back in Paris, where he returned in 1973, he could not find a market for his pieces and, through a friend, he got a job as a cutter for Mac Douglas, a luxury leather clothing company. . A year later, he was chief designer. In 1976 he was already alone.
A full obituary will be published soon.
