Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the '90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion by Maureen Callahan

Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the '90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion Reviews

• 
  A

  I adored the endless (and endlessly entertaining) stream of bitchy gossip that spewed forth from the interviewees in this book, but I seriously wanted to give this 1 star because my GOD is Maureen Callahan insufferable. This woman has more agendas to push than a Moleskine showroom. I could barely hear what was being said over the sound of all the axes she was so busy grinding! In Callahan's world, apparently Isabella Blow's suicide is her own fault because she was depressed and needy, but McQueen's suicide is all Anna Wintour's fault because he was depressed and talented. And don't even get me started on her claim that it was Marc Jacobs who made the West Village cool for the first time -- in 1999, no less. The mind reels like Kim Gordon in a Milk Fed by Sofia Coppola baby doll dress....
  
  Long story short: a must read for even a casual fan of the 90s, grunge, or recent fashion in general -- just choke down every single word with a massive grain of salt.
• 
  Roberto

  Ah the Nineties, how dark did they get! You could read this as a kind of morality tale, how these three damaged figures (and other key players like Isabella Blow and Corinne Day) captured, defined, and created an era and then were utterly consumed by that same era. This was an enlightening and fun read though, about some ultimately tragic shit. Kate Moss is just so fascinating, and just knowing that she can apparently drink anyone under the table (usually a whole bottle of vodka and several grams of cocaine in one sitting back in the day) and STILL out-chic everybody else in the world, makes me so happy. I love that McQueen, after his No. 13 show, was so moved by his own genius, he wept. Haha. Though, it's a shame that him and Marc Jacobs were such cunts on drugs.
  
  So interconnected were these figures to the story of the Nineties itself, that addiction, excess, and darkness seemed to inevitably smother them all. Some came through it, others didn't. So, dark times, sad, bloated times, and the fashion industry is a cold-hearted bastard...really you just get the feeling these guys needed a few nights in, and snuggles. Really entertaining stuff, especially if you love reading about the Nineties like i do, and i discovered loads of stuff i now love like the Anglo-Saxon Attitudes shoot in Vogue.
• 
  Individualfrog

  In 1990, I think, I would have been the very last person in my middle school you would have predicted to go into a career in fashion. My mom having just died a year before, my dad beginning the slow process of drinking himself to death as a result, I was that kid who wore the same ratty sweatpants to school every day, never showered, felt almost nothing but an outraged sense of confusion and disgust at the sudden severing of myself from childhood, for which I blamed (strangely it seems to me now) the new adolescent world of trendiness and so-called 'popularity' my peers were entering without me. I want to emphasize that this was no proto-grunge rebellion, but the deep categorical blindness of nerdery: I wasn't dressing differently on purpose to say "NO", I was fundamentally failing to realize that clothes had any meaning at all. Furthermore, even in my relatively exuberant youth I was more afraid than desirous of people noticing me: I recently found, in one my mother's weekly letters to my grandmother, her talking about how I was too self-conscious to wear red pants. I was four. But throughout middle school I was at my most intensely ignorant and angry about fashion. It wasn't until I was in high school that I first encountered the CK One ads featuring Kate Moss, an encounter which improbably enough was perhaps the most significant of my entire life, and certainly changed it forever.
  
  I tell this story frequently, because at some point I realized it was better than whatever self-conscious lies I was telling about how I got interested in fashion. It's entirely because I fell in love with a skinny girl in an ad. I was just beginning to feel that my peers and pop culture could be the source of something other than pain; watching VH1 and finding people at school responded better to smiles than scowls. My teenage crush led me to scour the barely-existent Internet, where you spent fifteen minutes to download one bad low-res scan of a photo, but I soon exhausted the early web, and I knew the only place to get more pictures, new pictures, was in fashion magazines. I distinctly remember picking up my first issue of Vogue at the library and furtively tearing out the CK Jeans ad in the front, walking home with that incriminating contraband in my backpack, terrified and ecstatic. (I didn't jerk off to Kate, though the kids assumed I did I'm sure; I was never really sexually attracted to her, but deeply in that strange pure chivalrous love of virgin boys.) Rather than feel such guilt again, I started buying issues at the convenience store, and eventually got a subscription.
  
  At first I just went through, cover to cover, with an X-Acto knife, finding every picture of Kate (and there were plenty in those mid-90s days, all through the magazine, from ads to editorials to paparazzi shots) and carefully cutting it from the magazine to add to my growing pile. But soon I started to have opinions, about photographers, about makeup and hair, and at length about clothes. It was an incredibly rich time in fashion, from the avant minimalism of Helmut Lang and Prada to the conceptual weirdness of Martin Margiela and Hussein Chalayan to the fecund genius of Galliano and Comme Des Garcons. And oh yeah, the two dudes profiled in this book.
  
  Their contributions were never bad, but not really to my taste either. Marc Jacobs is American, with all that implies; while his taste and artistic aspirations reach as high as Americans get, it's still basic, pretty, commercial clothes to sell. McQueen is destined to forever be overrated as martyrs often are, and spent his life rooting around in Vivienne Westwood's castoffs drawer. While he was a great stylist and showman, despite all his bluster about being the Only Competent Man in Fashion who could cut and sew etc, he was in the end a guy who bedazzled things, took a basic pattern and put a bunch of stuff on it. Beautifully so, but never a true pattern cutter in the Vionnet tradition. (In my opinion there have only been two true revolutionaries of fashion: Vionnet, whose approach, like that of Braque and Picasso, did not resemble in any particular whatsoever the method of anyone before her, and precious few since; and Westwood, a medium through which a generation spoke an entirely new fashion language. The only person possibly in their league is Kawakubo Rei of Comme Des Garcons, who synthesizes the two.) Since McQueen is now the tragic martyr, and Galliano the disgraced piece of shit, the comparison will always be in McQueen's favor, but Galliano was the only non-Japanese pattern cutter of his generation, and therefore in my mind will always be the greater master of the two, because cutting has always been the only thing I really respect in fashion. I wish I could find on the internet the ad where I thought the dress was almost as beautiful as Kate: a canary-yellow, minimalist Calvin Klein full-length with an asymmetrical hem. It was the first time that the interaction between fabric, seams, the body, and gravity took hold of me.
  
  The stories in this book were mostly familiar to me. In many ways it is less about Kate and McQueen than it is about the other tragic figures in their lives, who helped create, and were later discarded by them: Corinne Day, the grunge photographer par excellence who invented the 90s with her photos of Kate in The Face in 1990 (before Nevermind, before anything); and Isabella Blow, the avant-garde hat-wearing stylist and professional discoverer who bought McQueen's degree collection, two people who deeply influenced me in the 90s and beyond (I called out of work the day Blow killed herself, unwilling to try to explain to people why I was so miserable about it.) Callahan feels a strange need to puncture familiar legends (McQueen sewing naughty words into jackets for Prince Charles, anyone having a sense that the newly-discovered Kate was something special, etc) and replace them with the most ludicrous gossip of decadent Primrose Hill sex parties and massive hills of cocaine strong enough to kill an elephant. It's comfortable, fun, effortless reading, even if the rise-and-fall narrative is overly familiar. I really did thoroughly enjoy it, though the writing is nothing to write home about.
  
  These days, though I still like sewing and work as a tailor, my love for fashion is at a low ebb. Somewhere around the end of the first decade of the 2000s, after decades of unbelievable genius, the real sense of an emerging tradition of greatness, something went wrong and everything began to suck. I never really fit in -- I'm still the least fashionable person I know, just more boringly presentable, and this book reminds me of some of the bullshit pretensions of the fashion world that alienated me from everyone at Parsons. (The claim that nobody works harder than a fashion designer is constantly hammered on in the fashion world, and it is absolutely ridiculous and offensive. The Indonesian seamstresses handcuffed to their sewing machines that actually make the fucking clothes don't have any energy left for sex parties and mountains of cocaine, you know what I mean?) But more than that it just reminds me of a lost world, a time when fashion was the most exciting art form on earth.
• 
  Bess

  Ok. I get it.
  Character 1: Poor, not very educated from the wrong side of the tracks, never quite fits in but is always trying to prove everyone "wrong" and at the same time get comfortable in his own homosexual skin.
  Character 2: Poor, not very educated with parents that don't care about you, underage partier, party going, love being in the nightlife. A few lucky breaks at the right time land you modeling gig of all time.
  Character 3: Well to do, well educated, well connected, absentee parents, lives with grandma who is hands off & allows him to party, be an underage partier and hang out with an older influential homosexual crowd so that he can pretend he is not part of the well to do crowd & try to be like Characters 1 & 2.
  
  So similar and not as different as you would first imagine.
  
  If I hear the term "Amazonian" one more time about the models of the 1980's and how Kate Moss was so anti the "Amazonian" stereotype. I will throw up. The author really needs better descriptions.
  
  What is fascinating to me is as these 3 tried so hard to not be the establishment they have become. Especially Marc Jacobs (like his handbags haven't saturated the market) and even Kate now has her own fashion line. The only one who didn't fully succumb to the commercialism was Alexander McQueen and that is only because he committed suicide and never realized his full monetizing potential like Kate & Marc.
  
  I did like the back stories of the various designers and the nightlife but there are better books out there worth your time.
  
  
• 
  ?0?0?0

  Aside from the shoddy writing and presentation and narrative flow, the fact that this book barely skims the surface of the two most fascinating people on the title, and instead, mainly focusing on their image making and their images along with their orgies and drug use, this book does little but overlook what these people did because all we get here is a blend consisting of quotes from others, a slight summary of the shows and their receptions. There is little detailed information within these pages that paints a clear picture of an exciting time for the industry, one filled with much more than drugs and sex, so it is unfortunate that this topic is written with as much personality as a wikipidia entry and with as much passion and journalist intrigue as a lazy first year college paper thrown together hours before completion with a belly full of stimulants and a mind so spaced it refuses to focus on the thrilling world meant to be studied, right there, begging to be brought to life. People who already know basic details and gossip on the people mentioned in the title will have little to no use for this book, the other reading populace will just be frustrated with Miss Callahan's methods and, even worse, bored, and bored in the time of the rise of McQueen, a real shame.
• 
  Samantha

  celebrity gossip! so, the thesis was that these three people, in particular, had an enormous effect on the fashion world, bringing it closer to youth culture, incorporating grunge, etc. I would say, even just given the information presented here, that that is a bit overstated. it's not just that these young designers and photographers discussed here rose up - there was a financial piece where multinational conglomerates bought up old european fashion houses, there was an epidemiological piece where because many many designers died of AIDS in the 80s, there were spaces for people to move into that wouldn't typically have been there. she touches on these things in the book but she wants it just to be about these personalities, and it was more a confluence of events at the time. I feel like it would have been a more interesting discussion to say, ok, here's the financial thing that happened, and here's how it intersected with the AIDS epidemic, and here's how it intersected with these people with a sort of shared new vision. as it was, she wants to talk about these three but their stories are about massive drug use, horrible pressures, suicides, soulless promiscuity, etc. well, kate moss seems to have come through better than most from her era - she seems somewhat indestructible and pretty interesting.
  
  the style, going from one person to the next, made things scattered and in particular made timelines very difficult to follow. it wasn't easy to know when things happened in relation to each other, there was some repetition. there were some color pictures in the middle, which was nice, but it could have used so much more illustration. the picture budget was too low. too many descriptions of outfits or shows that I would want to see pictures of - many of the pictures that were there were unsatisfying.
  
  in short: not all that well written, could have been more interesting to me if it just had a different thesis. instead of omg these three changed fashion in a way we didn't even realize until I wrote this book, I would have rather seen, wow, in the late 80s these things collided and this is what happened. I feel like she tried too hard with the look at their great accomplishments when most of the book was more concerned with their prodigious drug use and decline. she also wrote a lot about people like connie someone or other who photographed kate a lot and originated a lot of the heroin chic style, but then never really made it, and isabella blow, who really championed alexander mcqueen and hooked him up, really helped his career, but then he sort of left her in the dust (and then they both ended up killing themselves in different but equally determined fashions). so it's not just, oh, these three! hooray for them! they changed the world! it's also about the unsung folks whose shoulders they stood on. I liked the book for the gossip, though. like, I know jude law left sadie frost and took up with the nannie or something, but I didn't know that they had been pretty totally non monogamous before that. also: great title.
• 
  Katie

  This book would have more of a solid throughline if the author had chosen three designers from the '90s or picked three people from the UK. Or it would have made sense to talk about the mashing up of fashion and music. The profiling of each person just didn't seem in-depth enough. I didn't not like this book, but I felt like I just wanted more. But sometimes a little fluff is good too.
• 
  Jeremy

  Super good! Bravo to Callahan for making explicit the connections between music, fashion, and the newly emergent 'alternative' aesthetics of the 1990s with the high (often very high) fashions of the time. I would have liked to see more about the impact of these brands and designers on people's shopping habits--for all its examination of street fashion, there's little talk here of the business of fashion and only a glancing look at how it became a simultaneously more mainstream and dollar-obsessed industry.
  
  I'm not exactly sure when I became aware of what a Marc Jacobs tshirt was, or why I might want it, but it happened somewhere about the time I started getting into Oasis b-sides and noticing Kate Moss had retained her grip on the imaginations of stylists and fashionistas around the world for over a decade. These and other musings are at the heart of Callahan's project, and she ties together her diverse and vibrant subject matter with intelligence and verve. Lots of fun, even if the people aren't very nice.
• 
  Niya

  Like any well popped bottle, Champagne Supernovas begins with an effervescent fizzle, a teasing palate tickle that invites your to consume more - just as the lives of the three principle characters begin. The paths are different, the themes are the same. Intensity and timing vary. One comes to a messy end, perhaps because the beginning was the most messy. The others live on, idols & icons - and yet the ending feels like a champagne hangover. Sudden, sharp, surprising. It needs a little bit more finessing in terms of narrative, but is otherwise an engaging, compelling read about the turning point of a generation, and the cost of it.
• 
  Emily

  You don't have to know anything about 90s fashion in order to enjoy the hell out of Champagne Supernovas (I speak from experience). It is so dishy, filled with so much drama, and so well written it just pulls you right along. For fans of fashion, cultural history, the intersection of art and commerce and anyone looking for a good, dramatic narrative, this is for you. You'll be surprised by how much you actually DO care about fashion in the 90s.
• 
  George Ilsley

  Saw an excerpt of this book on the Vanity Fair website, and what seemed interesting at a glance online failed to engage on the page. The writing here is somehow disjointed; it indulges in hyperbole whenever possible yet never manages to cohere. The topics here are not my specialties but even I could tell that some of the claims were ridiculous (This collection changed the world! Forever!!)
  
  Most of these stories are just sad. Just plain sad. Not glamorous. Sad.
• 
  Olya Zakharyan

  that’s a great choice if you want to learn a bit about 1990-2000 years in fashion when ‘beauty’ was revolutionized and reinvented. the author doesn’t show the full picture, though. but I still had a good time reading it.
• 
  Cassidy

  Pulled me in every page, but the end was rushed. McQueen was the most interesting portion, while Jacobs could have been addressed more. I felt kate moss dominated too much.
• 
  Katie

  I read this book over the summer and I keep going back to it.
• 
  Milva

  It would be a 5 star read if only there were more photos.
• 
  Kaelin Brown

  Oh the drama
• 
  Stephwereley

  Poorly written.
• 
  Edel Henry

  Fashion fun.
• 
  Laurie

  The 1980s were all about excess- huge hair styles, giant shoulder pads in rigid skirted suits, fancy everything, lots of cocaine. At some point in the 90’s, though, things changed. Grunge took over from hair metal. Fashion got stripped down and dirtied up and became shocking instead of pretty- but the cocaine stayed. The author has picked out three people who she feels were the primary forces behind this movement: two fashion designers and one model.
  
  Kate Moss has a very different look from the super models of the 80s; skinny, wan, and messy. She became the first model to have the look that came to be named “heroin chic”- strung out and apathetic. Marc Jacobs’s first collection- which failed miserably- was grunge. Alexander McQueen was an outsider, showing in empty warehouses and stealing fabric for his impossible to wear early collections.
  
  Of course these three did not work in a vacuum. Kate was discovered by a photographer digging through a drawer full of ‘maybes’ at a modeling agency; McQueen was given contacts by his ‘muse’, Isabella Blow; Jacobs took the traditional route of design school. And the zeitgeist of the world of haute couture was changing.
  
  The picture Callahan paints of these three and their world in the 90s is not pretty. All three indulged in huge amounts drugs- I’m talking super human amounts that it’s hard to believe they survived it. Their personal lives were wrecks for most of that era. It’s rather hard reading, really- but I couldn’t put it down because it was another of those books that’s like watching a train accident. But it was also very interesting to see how art and fashion made such a sea change so fast.
  
• 
  Emily

  I am studying fashion public relations and chose to read this book for a class. The author does an incredible job of starting in London, 1990 with Kate Moss, the youngest character in the story, and then takes readers on a journey throughout western fashion history up until about 2007. The sources the author interviewed were all extremely insightful and beneficial to the story, helping to share stories and further the narrative. To be honest, I did not know much about Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen or Marc Jacobs before reading, but after reading this book I can tell you each of their career stories in full from about 1990- 2007, as well as their peers and coworkers.
  
  The author additionally talks about everything interesting, including drugs and suicide and the drama within the personal lives of these major fashion industry people. The book is very insider.
  
  My one complaint is that I can tell that the author is a reporter for the NY Post - she writes extremely direct and upfront, which I found to be a little insensitive when talking about issues of HIV, disability, and drug use. She does not show empathy which I understand because she is a journalist, but at times it read insensitively because the author was discussing weighted issues extremely casually.
  
  Overall, this book is really good and I highly recommend it to anyone trying to aquatint themselves with the contemporary fashion industry, like fashion or writing about fashion, or just want more info on Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen and Marc Jacobs.
• 
  Ashley Hasty

  Although I was a child of the 90s, I hadn't yet started to pay attention to "high fashion" at that age and I was blissfully unaware of the drugs that fueled the fashion world that was inspiring current trends. What I knew about 90s fashion, I learned from my history of fashion courses and they were VERY brief when covering decades as recent as the 90s. So truth be told, I probably knew a fraction more than the average person who grew up in the 90s. So I was really fascinated by this book as I learned about the lives of Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, and Alexander McQueen. I can distinctly remember hearing of McQueen's death in 2010, which was in the middle of my graduate school days studying fashion history at the University of Missouri. I was familiar with his work but knew little of where he came from and how he got to be one of the most successful fashion designers of the day.
  For more about this book, visit:
  https://www.hastybooklist.com/home/ch...
• 
  Aja

  I'm reading a lot of books about the 90s right now and this one, I can say without doubt is the best one I've read so far. The worst thing about fashion writing and the business in general is that publications have a tendency to try and write everything neatly with a bow. To make every story clean and glossy when in actuality, many of which are anything but. This story talks about the complications of all these famous fashion friendships that I always admired and sheds a harsh light on the drug use and the rumors. The fame game will both make and break you in equal measures. Meanwhile I did enjoy the references to photos I have loved and the stories behind the art. Amazing! I got this from the library but I'll probably buy it for myself. It's that good.
• 
  Rebecca R

  I enjoyed the premise and subject matter of this book as I am a huge fan of fashion and pop culture. I was excited and interested to learn more about the 90s, a pivotal decade for fashion and culture. The interviews really made this book 5 star worthy, in my opinion. The book is filled with insider "gossip" and opinions and it was interesting to read about the grittier or unglamorous side of the fashion industry from insiders and experts. The book is definitely not for everyone but if you have an interest in the topic I would highly recommend. It's a fast, easy and addictive read. Overall I loved the book!!
• 
  Dramatika

  I had trouble reading this book. I've struggled through the three year period of depression and know too much how is it to survive just on the thin line of medication. The most creative, exceptionally talented people in this book are the most troubled ones. I didn't care that much about Kate Moss, whose influence I think overrated, who is she without the designers? The story of Alexander and Isabella, budfing designer and socialite, is the most interrsting one. I would love to read the beiography of either one to get more understanding of their lives and deaths. This book is more like a broad sketch of the era, one of the most innovative ones in the story of fashion.