Disappearance
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The couturier whose work is synonymous with a grandiose and triumphant femininity, a pioneer of the parade-show, died this Sunday at the age of 73.
He seemed in great shape, wished everyone at the beginning of January, via his Instagram account, “Love and Serenity” for 2022 – in the caption of a photo with a blonde in a sheath and black gloves lying on the ice floe and showing the azure horizon. He was in his seventies but gave the impression of flourishing in the era, solid as the rock he had resolutely carved, this body built and modified by cosmetic surgery which he assumed completely, explaining (during the show Day-to-day, in October 2021): “I like to transform and arrange people. It makes sense in my research into architecture.”
The handsome young man from the beginnings had become statuesque, trucker-like, all with prominent abs and visible veins, as if straight out of a drawing by Tom of Finland, a shaved colossus with a boxer’s nose and mustache immortalized by Dominique Issermann or Steven Klein – for who he had posed naked. As if the repair of his body damaged by classical dance (practiced in his youth), he said, had been the opportunity for a new experimentation to become in his turn a creation, he who had seized fashion as a demiurge: his clothes were viaticums of fantasies, of desires, which called for beings bigger than life, spectacular, mutants.
Sculptor who models the body through clothing
In October, on the occasion of “Thierry Mugler, couturissime”, the very first retrospective dedicated to his work as a designer presented …