Claude Montana was the designer who defined the 80s with his exaggerated big shoulders that gave women tough semi-masculine silhouettes, has died aged 76. This was a major success and started the whole ‘power dressing‘ for women and and was at the peak of his career, but it didn’t bring his company any financial success, and by 1997 he had to file for bankruptcy.
Now he is dead at 76 and there is a plethora of obituaries across the media, we are reminded that aside from his fashion genius, Montana’s life story reads somewhat like a salacious made-for-TV movie.
After a stint in London as a teenager, he moved back to Paris eventually working as a designer for luxury leather maker MacDougles, but by 1979 he was running his own company. He was just 40 years old. His first creations didn’t meet universal acclaim, especially with American buyers who accused him of being misogynistic and even promoting a “neo-Nazi” aesthetic, through his leather-and-studs looks.
However undeterred by this, Montana persevered and by the mid-’80s, his catwalk shows had become the hottest ticket in town. He was at the top of his game, and his collections were up there being compared with Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier. In 1990 Montana was also the designer haute couture collections for the House of Lanvin, for which he received two consecutive Golden Thimble awards. The media loved him and couldn’t praise him enough, however, his designs were financially disastrous for the house and created a total estimated loss of $50 million.
He was ‘let go’ from Lanvin in 1992, and a year later, openly gay Montana, married one of his best friends model Wallis Franken. This marriage of convenience was said because they wanted Montan’s clothes to appear more marketable to polysexual buyers, and she was his best choice for this purpose. On paper at least it made good sense as she had been both his muse and his best friend for 18 years. However, they shared a taste for nightlife and cocaine and this actually accentuated Montana spiraling out of control. The marriage ended after Wallis fell three stories from their Paris apartment. The death was ruled a suicide and provoked a whole lot of unsubstantiated rumors that were hard to ignore claiming there had been spousal abuse
Montana continued to put out collections until the turn of the millennium, but by then with his star greatly diminished, critics joined the buyers invariably describing and rejecting them in lackluster terms.
Montana had always been habitually shy and by now he had become a total recluse, although in 2011 he co-authored a memoir of sorts; Claude Montana: Fashion Radical. Very sadly, it sheds little more of his own life, but it does give us a fabulous compendium of his stunning work which really is his legacy.
Claude Montana (29 June 1947 – 23 February 2024 R.I.P.ROGER WALKER-DACK is a Member of G.A.L.E.C.A. (Gay & Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association) and NLGJA The Association of LGBT Journalists. and. The Online Film Critics Society. Ex Contributung Editor The Gay Uk & Contributor Edge Media.He is also the former desgner ROGER DACK
