Ivana be a model
Bring back the 90s Fashion Show! The casting, the clothes, and the drama of it all finally gives the much overused word iconic meaning again. It was a time when the show was just that: a show. And nobody did it better than the fascinating Thierry Mugler, the favourite designer of every baby gay, club kid, and drag queen who adores tight-fitting, sharply-cut leather suiting, and more, more, more.
While all of Mugler’s shows were masterpieces to behold, his SS92 show proved even more of a sensation than usual. As Cathy Horyn, the savagest show critic of all time, wrote of it in The Washington Post: “Mugler's shows have pretty much ceased to be about fashion per se. They are about the people who are in his shows – socialites, peroxided Lido stars, pop singers, bouffant transvestites – and in that sense they are for the people who live for fashion.”
They were, and watching them again they still are. Like a leather clad genius, Mugler took the dark underbelly of his experimental gay world, added in the kitsch, camp countenance of early 90s pop-culture, squeezed the pumped-up glamour of socialitism over the whole thing, and then poured it all into an hour long(!) fashion show.
From Jeff Stryker, the all-American gay, bi and straight porn star, who drew an audible gasp from the frow as he bent down to pick up the leather chaps he’d just zipped off, to Ivana Trump, who whipped off her cowboy bandana as people hollered her name from the audience. Lip Synka, a muse of Mugler’s, delivered a glorious ode to actress Cyd Charisse, while Lady Miss Kier and Dmitry from the band Deee-Lite (you know – “Groove is in the Heart”!) wiggled down the runway. An unlikely army of faces with one thing in common: they all look incredible in his clothes.
With SS92 just one of many of Mugler’s legendary revue-performances-cum-shows, these spectacles somehow never lost the air of glamour, of power, and of exclusivity that a fashion show needed to be a fashion show back in the 90s. While porn stars and pop stars have often been the sweethearts of fashion, Mugler was an early adopter of the wonderment we all remember being at the heart of the decade’s OTT, boundary-pushing fashion.
Watch the video above.
