Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano #
Author Dana ThomasDate August 22, 2025Rating 5/5
This is a good book, and it taught me a lot about a period in fashion history that I know almost nothing about. Due to that, I don’t really have any overarching ideas I want to share about my experience here, but rather a few collected things of interest:
I’m sure everybody knows this by this point, but fashion is actively killing itself with the amounts of runway shows designers are meant to take on each year. I’m not sure if much has changed nowadays (my understanding is that it hasn’t), but actively reading Galliano and McQueen continuisly picking up yet more and more collections to present every year feels sickening to me. Sickening, not because it is necessarily bad, but because of the insane amounts of work they each require. The quality (in whatever capacity you define quality to be) is going to drop somewhere and we can’t all have nice collections all the time.
We complain about the repetitiveness of fashion nowadays in the world of online dressing, but I had never known that McQueen also criticized how designers kept pulling from the past for their current designs. I’ve seen more discussion online about the sameness in fashion nowadays, some of these discussions are good, some not so much, but McQueen showcasing the sameness in design shows how difficult it is to do something new. It makes me admire certain modern designers even more, that there are still people who are able to break away and do things not considered before.
It is odd seeing the Internet and things like Twitter appear at the end of this book. Although I recognize that McQueen and Galliano’s lifetimes have intersected with mine (one is still alive, after all), it’s still weird reading about this, when everything here feels decidedly not within my lifetime experiencing fashion. Some of these things feel like relics now, too, which feels weird given I uses to interact with them frequently