Olivia: Most people think of high fashion as glamour and beauty. But for a brief, explosive moment in the 90s, it was a blood sport. And its two greatest gladiators were a plumber's son and a cab driver's boy from London. Jackson: Wow. That's a heavy way to start. You're talking about Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, right? This is all from the book Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano by Dana Thomas. Olivia: Exactly. And Thomas is the perfect person to tell this story. She's a Paris-based fashion journalist who conducted over a hundred interviews for this. She was there, on the ground, watching it all unfold. The book is widely seen as this definitive, riveting history of that era. Jackson: Though I've heard the reception can be a bit polarizing, especially in how it treats Galliano. It's not a simple hero-and-villain story. Olivia: Not at all. It's a tragedy, in the classical sense. Two titans who flew too close to the sun. And to understand their impact, you have to remember what fashion was like when they arrived. It was the mid-90s, and the industry was… well, it was beige. Jackson: Beige? You mean literally? Olivia: Almost. It was the era of minimalism. Clean lines, neutral colors, very corporate, very safe. It was respectable, but it was creatively stagnant. And then, out of working-class London, these two forces of nature emerge.

Jackson: So what made them so different? What was jejich shock value? Olivia: They were complete opposites, yet they served the same purpose: to inject raw emotion and theatricality back into fashion. Let's start with Galliano. By 1994, his career was on life support. He was broke, sleeping on a friend's floor, and had been dropped by his backers for the third time. He had one last shot to put on a show in Paris. Jackson: That sounds incredibly stressful. How do you even create a collection with no money? Olivia: You basically conjure it from sheer will and belief. The book describes this legendary moment. He gets some last-minute funding from an American banker, but it’s barely anything. He and his team, including his muse Amanda Harlech, take over the empty mansion of a Portuguese socialite, São Schlumberger. They have two weeks. Jackson: Two weeks? That's insane. Olivia: It is. They're working with the cheapest black satin they can find. But Galliano transforms it. He creates these eighteen Japonism-inspired gowns that are just pure poetry. And the most incredible part? Everyone—the supermodels like Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, the top hairdressers, the makeup artists—they all worked for free. Jackson: For free? Why? Olivia: Because they believed he was a genius. They knew they were witnessing something special. The show itself was legendary. They scattered dead leaves on the floor, lit it with candles. Joan Juliet Buck, the editor of French Vogue, said it launched "a new way of looking, an affirmation of femininity." It was pure, unadulterated romance and fantasy. He saved his career in one night. Jackson: That's an amazing story. It's like a Hollywood movie. So that was Galliano's brand of rebellion—this epic, romantic storytelling. What about McQueen? Olivia: If Galliano was the romantic, McQueen was the surgeon. He was brutal, precise, and deeply intellectual. His rebellion wasn't about fantasy; it was about anatomy and power. His breakout moment was in 1993 with a single garment: the "Bumster" trousers. Jackson: The Bumster. I feel like I know the name, but what exactly was it? Olivia: It was a pair of trousers with a waistline cut so low it sat on the hip bones, revealing the very top of the buttocks and the small of the back. And people, especially the British press, freaked out. They thought it was just crude shock value. Jackson: Okay, but was it? Or was there more to it? Olivia: There was so much more. McQueen himself explained it perfectly. He said, and I'm quoting here, "I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum. To me, that part of the body – not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine – that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman." Jackson: Huh. So it wasn't about being vulgar. It was a completely new idea about the human form and what's considered sensual. He was redefining the erogenous zone. Olivia: Precisely. He had trained on Savile Row, the heart of traditional British tailoring. He knew how to construct a garment perfectly before he started to deconstruct it. The Bumster wasn't just a low-cut pant; it was a feat of engineering that changed the silhouette of the 1990s and 2000s. Every low-rise jean that followed owes something to McQueen's initial, radical idea. Jackson: It's fascinating. You have Galliano creating these dream worlds, and McQueen dissecting reality. Two completely different approaches, but both are fundamentally challenging the status quo. Olivia: Exactly. They were the twin flames. One burned with romantic fire, the other with a cold, intellectual flame. And the established fashion world, which had grown so comfortable and corporate, had no choice but to take notice. And one man, in particular, was watching very, very closely.

Jackson: Okay, so they're these raw, brilliant outsiders. How on earth do they end up at the absolute pinnacle of French couture, at places like Givenchy and Dior? That feels like a world away from sleeping on floors and making trousers that scandalize the press. Olivia: It is. And the bridge between those two worlds has a name: Bernard Arnault. He's the chairman of LVMH, the luxury conglomerate that owns everything from Louis Vuitton to Moët & Chandon. In the 90s, Arnault was on a mission. He was buying up these dusty, old, family-owned couture houses and transforming them into global, profit-driven empires. Jackson: The corporate takeover of fashion. Olivia: The book calls it the corporatization of the industry. It grew into a $200-billion-a-year global machine in less than two decades. And Arnault’s strategy was to install young, rebellious, headline-grabbing designers at the helm of these old houses to make them relevant again. He was, essentially, a collector of geniuses. Jackson: And Galliano and McQueen were his next big acquisitions. Olivia: They were. In 1996, in a move that shocked the industry, Arnault appointed John Galliano, this romantic English pirate, as the head of Christian Dior, the most sacred of French fashion houses. And shortly after, he installed Alexander McQueen, the brutal London punk, at Givenchy. Jackson: That must have been a culture clash of epic proportions. Olivia: It was. And this is where the Faustian bargain really comes into play. They were given unimaginable resources. Galliano, who once made dresses from cheap satin, now had the legendary Dior ateliers at his disposal, with unlimited budgets to create his fantasies. His first Dior couture show was a spectacle of pure opulence, held at the Grand Hôtel, with models styled like Masai warriors and Belle Époque heroines. It was a sensation. Jackson: So for Galliano, the deal worked. He got the resources to match his imagination. What about McQueen at Givenchy? Olivia: It was the complete opposite. McQueen felt like he was in a gilded cage. He called his time there "worse than being a gladiator." He respected the craftspeople in the atelier, but he hated the corporate bureaucracy. He felt creatively stifled. His first couture show for them was a disaster in the eyes of the critics. They called it vulgar, a "poor man's way of making clothes." He was trying to force his raw, London-edge aesthetic onto a house known for Audrey Hepburn's elegance, and it just didn't work. Jackson: Did they know what they were signing up for? Was it a conscious trade-off, this exchange of freedom for resources? Olivia: That's the billion-dollar question. The book suggests they were seduced by the platform, the money, the chance to realize their visions on a grand scale. But the corporate world had a very different view of their role. There's this chillingly honest quote in the book from Bernard Arnault's son, Antoine. He said, "If designers wanted to be artists, they would paint or sculpt. But they design clothes or leather goods or products that are made to be sold in large quantity." Jackson: Wow. That's cold. There's no romance in that at all. It's just... product. Olivia: It's just product. And that fundamental conflict—between their identities as artists and their roles as corporate employees—is what sets the stage for the final, tragic act of their stories. Because once you're a 'product,' the machine demands you produce. Endlessly.

Olivia: And that quote really sets the stage for the final act. Because once you're a 'product,' the machine demands you produce. Endlessly. We're not talking about one or two collections a year. At their peak, both Galliano and McQueen were responsible for over ten collections annually. Jackson: Ten? How is that even humanly possible? That's almost a new collection every month. Olivia: It's not. It's an unsustainable, frenetic pace. Vogue's André Leon Talley said it best after Galliano's downfall: "Fashion is fast forward, frenetic. There are too many collections, too many seasons. How can designers keep up?" The answer is, they can't. Not without a cost. Jackson: And that cost was their well-being. Olivia: It was their sanity, their health, their lives. The pressure was immense, not just to create, but to constantly top themselves, to generate media hype, to be the public face of a multi-billion dollar brand. They became incredibly isolated, surrounded by handlers but profoundly lonely. And they both turned to drugs to cope. Jackson: It's a classic story, but it sounds like it was amplified to an extreme degree in their cases. Olivia: It was. For McQueen, his art became a direct conduit for his pain. His shows in the 2000s are some of the most profound and disturbing pieces of performance art ever created. There was the 'VOSS' show, where the audience was forced to stare at their own reflections in a giant mirrored box for an hour, only for the box to open at the end, revealing a scene based on a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, with a naked, masked woman surrounded by fluttering moths. It was about voyeurism, beauty, and decay. Jackson: That's incredibly intense. It's so much more than just clothes on a runway. Olivia: It was his soul on the runway. His final completed show, 'Plato's Atlantis,' was this haunting vision of humanity evolving to live underwater after an ecological apocalypse. The models looked like these beautiful, alien sea creatures. It was broadcast live online, one of the first designers to do so, and Lady Gaga premiered a song. The site crashed. It was a global event. But just a few months later, in February 2010, devastated by the death of his mother, he took his own life. Jackson: It's heartbreaking. He's at the absolute peak of his creative powers, and yet he's in this deep, dark place. What about Galliano? His implosion was much more public. Olivia: It was. A year after McQueen's death, in February 2011, the story breaks. John Galliano was filmed at a Paris café, La Perle, drunkenly spewing vile, anti-Semitic abuse at a couple. The book details the incident, and the quotes are just horrific. He tells a woman, "'Dirty Jew face, you should be dead.'" Jackson: Oh, man. There's no coming back from that. Olivia: None. The video goes viral. Dior fires him immediately. His career, which had been this fairytale of success, is just... over. In an instant. But the book makes it clear this wasn't a random outburst. It was the culmination of years of unchecked alcoholism, prescription drug abuse, and the immense pressure of being the 'King' of Dior. He was a man completely disconnected from reality. Jackson: It sounds like they were both in these pressure cookers, and they just exploded in different ways. One imploded inward, the other outward. Olivia: That's a perfect way to put it. McQueen's pain turned inward, resulting in his suicide. Galliano's pain exploded outward in a torrent of hate, resulting in his public disgrace. Two different ends, but born from the same unsustainable system.

Jackson: So what's the ultimate takeaway here? Is this just a story about two tragic figures, or is it bigger than that? Olivia: I think it's so much bigger. Dana Thomas's book isn't just a biography; it's a cautionary tale for our entire creative economy. We worship genius, we crave the spectacle, but we build systems that are fundamentally hostile to the fragile, often damaged, humans who possess that genius. Jackson: It's a paradox. The very things that made them brilliant—their sensitivity, their raw emotion, their outsider perspectives—were the same things that made them so vulnerable. Olivia: Exactly. The industry wanted their magic, but it didn't want to deal with their madness. It crowned them 'Gods and Kings,' put them on pedestals, and then was shocked when they fell. They were sacrificed, as the book says, in the name of capitalism. Their stories are a brutal reminder of the human cost behind the beautiful things we consume. Jackson: It makes you wonder where else we see this pattern today—in tech, in music, in any field that demands relentless innovation. Who are the 'Gods and Kings' of our time, and are we setting them up for the same fall? Olivia: A question to reflect on. This is Aibrary, signing off.