Gasping at the parade of imposing figures sporting broad shoulder pads, helmets and masks, the assembled fashionistas might have wondered whether they were at a catwalk show or the Super Bowl.
The dissonance was by design. Claude Montana, the “King of the Shoulder Pad”, became one of the leading fashion designers of the late Seventies and Eighties for his erotic, fetishistic and often androgynous spin on the decade’s power dressing trend, with strong curves, vivid and experimental colours and an emphasis on leather inspired by bikers and the military. This strident design sensibility for a more aggressive decade was showcased by especially tall, amazonian models.
Daring and radical, he allied French flair, sophistication and attention to detail with a brash, extravagant and testosterone-fueled aesthetic that owed more to Reaganism and Wall Street than Yves Saint Laurent and the Champs-Élysées. “Leather has a force, a rigidity, a power,” he once said. “That fits well with my vision of what a woman is.”
The likes of Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford modelled Montana fashions and celebrities such as Grace Jones, Cher, Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor underlined their diva reputations in his creations. At the height of his influence Montana had the sway to keep bleary-eyed supermodels waiting for fittings into the small hours and to force frustrated photographers to kick their heels for an hour or more before permitting them to shoot his collections. Tantrums were never far away.
When the French Fashion Federation organised a “Fashion Oscars” ceremony at the Palais Garnier in 1985, the newspaper Le Figaro named Montana, who arrived arm in arm with Cher, the star of the show.
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Critics on the other side of the Atlantic were initially less seduced, especially when one show featured models clad in black leather and chains marching down the catwalk to a soundtrack of howling dogs and cracking whips. Montana was lambasted in certain sections of the American press for celebrating Nazism, which he vehemently denied. It was true that he had something of an obsession for uniforms, but he was probably more inspired by a penchant for leather-clad young men in Paris’s gay nightclub scene.
Sceptics soon revised their opinions as the “glamazon” look trended. Montana’s clothes were the talk of the Manhattan fashion scene and carried by upmarket department stores. He flew to the United States on Concorde to launch a fragrance at Bloomingdale’s in 1989 at an event attended by the governor of the state of Montana, who made him an honorary citizen and handed him a cowboy hat. Acutely aware of the presence of the press and petrified of mockery and criticism, the self-conscious designer studiously avoided placing it on his head, though he was partial to lizard-green cowboy boots.
“His fashions seem to be everything he is not,” noted a Washington Post reporter in 1985 of the reedy and softly-spoken perfectionist. An enthusiastic sampler of nightclubs and a dedicated consumer of mind-altering substances despite his introverted personality, he was so anxious and shy that he would work nonstop for 72 hours before his Paris shows then hide in the bathroom. So rarely did he buy clothes for himself that he wore the same sweatshirt and jean jacket for 15 years.
In 1989 Givenchy was rumoured to be interested in his services and he was in talks to become the creative director at Dior. Yet he turned down one of the industry’s most prestigious positions for fear of the high stress and frequent travel. “I need room,” he told a journalist. “I don’t want to have all this money and go to an asylum.”
One of three children, he was born Claude Montamat in Paris in 1947 (some sources say 1949) to a German mother whose family fled the Nazis and a father from Catalonia who fought for the French army in the Second World War and became a fabric manufacturer.
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With his affinity for women’s fashion and dressing like a dandy and his refusal to seek a career as a lawyer or scientist causing some tension in his bourgeois household, in the late Sixties he escaped to London and sold his papier-mâché jewellery creations on the streets. There his Mexican-influenced creations from rhinestones, glue and toilet paper attracted the approval of a Vogue stylist named Olivier Echaudemaison, who in 2013 told Vanity Fair that Montana looked “like Little Lord Fauntleroy. He had curly blond hair and was wearing a velvet suit and a shirt with ruffles. He was nothing like the biker that he became.”
Without a work permit he also caught the eye of UK immigration officials. Swiftly returning to Paris, he shared a studio apartment with Thierry Mugler (obituary, January 25, 2022) and found a job at the opera as an extra. His interest in opera and ballet helped lend a flamboyant theatricality to his designs and a spirit of performance to his catwalk shows.
In 1973 he joined the French leather goods firm Mac Douglas, rising to become chief designer within a year before going solo, producing his debut collection in 1977 and setting up his own company in an insalubrious Parisian neighbourhood known for sex workers. He changed his surname for one easier to pronounce. In 1978 he told Women’s Wear Daily: “Next season everything will have the biggest shoulders I can make.” Initially his look was deplored by critics as “demeaning to women” but would soon align with the zeitgeist of the new decade. By the end of the Eighties his empire comprised men’s and women’s pret-a-porter as well as a range of accessories and a brand of perfume.
After rejecting Dior he joined the venerable but struggling Lanvin fashion house and won an unprecedented two Golden Thimble awards in succession. However, while some critics admired his futuristic takes on haute couture, reviews were mixed and customers were not entranced. Lanvin racked up heavy losses and he was sacked.
Though gay and a regular on the club scene, in 1993 he married his muse and friend, Wallis Franken, a vivacious American model with an androgynous look. A mother of two, Franken was obsessively in love with him and shared his penchant for partying and cocaine. The timing of the union — in Paris during a fashion week, so soon after his exit from Lanvin — led to suspicions that it was a calculated attempt to mobilise some positive publicity.
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In 1996 her body was discovered on the street below their apartment in Paris; Franken had plunged 25 feet from the kitchen window on to the cobblestones below. The 48-year-old’s death was ruled a suicide but her friends accused Montana of physically and emotionally abusive behaviour, including yanking her by the hair and calling her “old and ugly”, that harmed her mental health and contributed to her death.
The tragedy hit his reputation within the industry, while substance abuse blunted his judgment and compromised his relationship with reality. His precise tailoring and “power dressing” design oeuvre had also fallen out of touch with the messier chic and waifish models of the Nineties. Montana’s boutiques closed and his business filed for bankruptcy in 1997. His time as the avant-garde darling of French fashion was clearly over, though he continued to work intermittently. In 1999 he created a more affordable clothing line, Montana Blu. He also launched more fragrances and, after a long fallow period, designed three looks for a Paris couture show in 2013.
At one point Montana owned a chateau near Chartres and a villa on Capri. In later life, however, he became a recluse who rarely strayed far from his apartment near the Louvre. In 2013 a Vanity Fair reporter found him walking outside without shoes in the depths of winter and shoplifting lip balms from a pharmacy. A brother survives him.
“He had real talent. A talent that was modern, young, new, provocative,” Yves Saint Laurent told WWD in 2004. “But he burned his brain with narcotics and he is incapable of doing anything today.”
His was a life of extreme highs and lows, Montana admitted in a 2010 book. But at least it was dramatic: uncompromising, intense, and lived on a grand scale. “I feel Wagnerian,” he declared.
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Claude Montana, fashion designer, was born on June 29, 1947. He died of undisclosed causes after a period of ill health on February 23, 2024, aged 76
