Fashion Beast: Arena Homme + pays tribute to Malcolm McLaren’s collaboration with Alan Moore
//Introductory spread from the Fashion Beast feature in Arena Homme + 53, Summer/Autumn 2020//
//Above: Fashion Beast story, AH+ 53. Photography Drew Vickers; fashion Tom Guinness//
The new issue of Arena Homme + – which is available to read through Exact Editions here for those who can’t obtain physical copies – includes a 28-page extravaganza on Malcolm McLaren’s activities across cinema, fashion and music during the mid-80s.
With an extract from my new biography of McLaren, the feature homes in on Fashion Beast, the unrealised film collaboration with Britain’s dark magus of comic book writing Alan Moore. It also includes my interview with Moore as well as an ingenious fashion story photographed by Drew Vickers and styled by Tom Guinness.
//From the Fashion Beast story, AH+ 53//
Fashion Beast – which merged the story of Beauty & The Beast with the obsessional relationship between a reclusive fictional fashion designer Jean Claude Celestine and his muse Doll Seguin – had its beginnings in a fashion collection McLaren developed in 1984 on the dissolution of his partnership with Vivienne Westwood.
//From the Fashion Beast story, AH+ 53//
By this time McLaren was working on opera/r&b hybrid LP Fans, which – led by hit single Madam Butterfly – was released to acclaim in the autumn of 1984. Simultaneously the collection with the working titles of “Fans” or “FAN MM” was created over several months at a design studio McLaren set up in London’s King’s Cross with his then-partner Andrea Linz and designer Simon Withers.
//Detail: Stainless steel toe-cap. This image © Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//
And a range of extraordinary and transgressive designs reached sampling stage. “The concept centred on a beautiful woman attending a ball in clothes which had been ‘militarised’,” says Withers, nowadays a major force in architecture academia.”
The designs included hand-crafted lace-up boots in calf with exposed stainless steel toecaps, armature-structured, bodiced leather jackets, gowns in pin-stripe material threaded with tiny gold chain, custom name belt buckles and gold conical bras.
//Detail: From ‘San’ custom name buckle (as in the Puccini opera character Cho Cho San). This image © Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//
Elements of the collection appeared on the sleeves of the Fans album and its spin-off singles. These were art-directed by McLaren and graphic designer Nick Egan with contributions from John Galliano, who constructed a giant fan, and stylists Paul Frecker and Amanda Harlech (then Grieve).
//”Malcolm gave us total freedom,” says Amanda Harlech, one of the styling team who worked on the sleeve of McLaren’s 1984 album Fans (above)//
In Arena Homme + Harlech says McLaren gave the team “total freedom – our aesthetic at that point was about heartbreak and fragile beauty. Malcolm had that special sense of who would be fired up by his vision and gave us the loose idea and let us colour it in without any interference. I remember him standing on set and taking it all in, almost basking in the elements he had put together”.
//From the Fashion Beast story, AH+ 53//
When he failed to gain sufficient backing, McLaren moved to LA to take up a job as a top production executive at CBS Theatrical Films, where his slate included Fashion Beast. He struck upon the idea of commissioning Moore to write the screenplay during a visit with his girlfriend, the actor and model Lauren Hutton, to St Mark’s Comics in New York’s East Village in search of inspiration.
“Me and Lauren got talking to all these kids there,’ said McLaren. ‘I asked one who he thought was the best comic book writer and he said ‘Alan Moore’. Lauren asked him why, and he said: ‘Are you kidding? He sits by the left hand of God!’ I thought, if a black 13-year-old from New York thinks Alan Moore is the best, then he’s got to be good.”
//A copy of the 1985 screenplay with issues of the comic book series produced in 2012 by Moore, the Malcolm McLaren Estate and Antony Johnston//
When he tracked Moore down, McLaren related the St Mark’s Place exchange.”I thought the left hand of God comment was wonderful,” Moore told me. “If I ever write an autobiography, that will definitely be the title. That or My Struggle.
“Malcolm told me about three of the films he was developing: Heavy Metal Surf Nazis, Oscar Wilde’s 1882 visit to the US and Fashion Beast. Surf Nazis didn’t appeal and Malcolm’s explanation of the Oscar Wilde movie was that it was going to be Madonna touring nineteenth-century America. While I’m big on Oscar Wilde I’m not so big on Madonna. I thought Fashion Beast as he explained it was really good. Looking back, I think that was the one he wanted me to work on all along.”
Read the full interview in the new issue of AH+ here.
The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren is now widely available from a variety of outlets such as here and here. The book is to be published in Australia on May 12 and will be available to buy in the US from August 4.