French designer Thierry Mugler, who had reigned over 1980s fashion and continued to delight international stars with his spectacular outfits with marked silhouettes, died Sunday at the age of 73 from “natural death”, announced his press secretary to the AFP.
“We have the immense sadness to inform you of the death of Mr. Manfred Thierry Mugler which occurred on Sunday January 23, 2022”, is it also written in a press release published on the official Facebook account of the creator. “That his soul rests in peace.”
According to his press officer Jean-Baptiste Rougeot, the death of the great couturier, who now called himself Manfred Thierry Mugler, occurred unexpectedly on Sunday followingnoon. He still had plans and was due to announce new collaborations earlier this week, he said.
Born in Strasbourg in December 1948, Thierry Mugler arrived in Paris at the age of 20 and then created his own label “Café de Paris” in 1973, before founding the company “Thierry Mugler” a year later.
Its structured and sophisticated silhouettes quickly imposed themselves. The Mugler woman, with accentuated shoulders, plunging necklines and corseted waists, has toured the world, from Jerry Hall to Kim Kardashian.
A director at heart, he had made an impression by becoming a pioneer, from the 1970s, of grand spectacle parades.
He later embarked on the creation of perfumes, his first feminine model “Angel” launched in 1992 experiencing great success, until competing for first place in sales with the mythical N°5 of Chanel.
His fashion collections had also marked the political world, as when in 1985, the French Minister of Culture Jack Lang was whistled at the National Assembly because of his Mao collar suit signed Mugler, worn without a tie.
Thierry Mugler retired from fashion in 2002, but today’s pop culture icons like Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Cardi B and Kim Kardashian still wear his archive outfits for special occasions.
Thus in September 2021, for the inauguration of the exhibition “Thierry Mugler, Couturissime” at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, the American rapper Cardi B had posed by his side dressed in a spectacular dress with red sequins, topped with feathers. .
“Mugler wanted to break away from the haute couture that corresponded to an elite, and show that young people might also wear haute couture and that it might be something other than a dress to go to a chic evening”, had to the time declared to AFP Thierry-Maxime Loriot, curator of the exhibition, originally produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Among the latest photos on her Facebook account, we might see Kim Kardashian, in a metallic outfit and cowbow hat, designed for her for Halloween by the designer.
In 2013 and 2014, the couturier wanted to “shake up” the art of the magazine by launching the “Mugler Follies” in a Parisian theater, transformed into a cabaret.
Singular dancers from the filiform to the Botero model, ventriloquists, singer, fado singer, acrobats, unpublished strength numbers: he had wanted to set up a magazine for “a long time”, “a free art, joy of living and exchange , without a message, where everything is possible”, he told AFP at the time.
“I don’t really miss fashion,” he explained then.
“I do a lot more now: architecture, design, setting up a magazine, staging… When I was a designer, it was a daily staging offered to clients. Now it’s a narration, a story, shows, films…”
