Audacious star of France’s ready-to-wear renaissance, Claude Montana earned himself the couture throne at Lanvin in 1989. Eight years later, he vanished, in a haze of drugs and bankruptcy, following the suicide of his American wife and muse. Deeply scarred, he is now daring to dream again.
To become a fashion genius, it is essential to possess the three T’s: talent, temerity, and timing. Claude Montana, the French designer, was abundant in all three. His power women with padded shoulders and sculpted silhouettes marked the 1980s as well as influencing Alexander McQueen, Riccardo Tisci, Olivier Theyskens, and other talents of the next generation. For nearly 20 years, his theatrical shows were mythic events that caused crowd frenzy and feverish excitement.
“People used to bang down Montana’s doors to be allowed in,” says Inès de la Fressange, the French style icon who was one of his early catwalk models. Since it was viewed as the collection that drove the season, Montana had the power to make his audience wait. “A perfectionist, he often ran 45 minutes late,” continues de la Fressange. Yet no one was disappointed by his flawlessly achieved spectacles.
“There were people who cried after Claude’s shows,” recalls longtime fashion director Ellin Saltzman, then at Saks Fifth Avenue. “Almost Germanic in tempo, they could be very militant but totally sexy at the same time.” Montana’s suits and separates were viewed as “money in the bank” by American retailers, another considerable plus.
Enchanted by his “exceptional clothes that were modern and unique,” Dawn Mello, then Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion director, organized a Montana extravaganza in 1979. “It was to introduce Claude to New York,” she says. The Bergdorf clientele could not get enough of his embroidered evening jackets and broad-shouldered coats. In light of Montana’s sensational and growing success, Mello presumed that he would have the career of Giorgio Armani, another European designer whom she had championed.
“There was a sense that Claude would go on and last forever,” she says. “Then he disappeared and fell off the map. In the 1990s, we couldn’t even get him on the phone.”
Having cut a serious swathe in the French fashion world and been the instigator of much heat and hoopla, Montana did a Greta Garbo and became a recluse, retreating from the public eye for the past 15 years.
In fact, Montana has not disappeared into the French provinces. Occasionally referred to as the Phantom of the Palais-Royal, he just rarely steps out of Paris’s First Arrondissement, where he lives. Last September, Montana attended a retrospective of his work, organized by Didier Ludot, the vintage-clothing specialist, and he has recently become a regular at the events of the nearby Galerie du Passage.
This past summer, surprising the couture crowd, Montana designed three looks for the French designer Eric Tibusch. However, depending on his mood, Montana can be many different versions of Clau-Clau, his fashion nickname in the 1980s. Caught early on a Saturday morning, in a pharmacy opposite his home, he was wild-eyed and disheveled. “I’ve cut my foot,” he yelled. It was the depth of midwinter, and Montana was shoeless.
Sensing the emergency, the pharmacist interrupted his previous activity and rushed to the back of the shop for a first-aid kit. And while he did, Montana shoplifted two lip balms. Aware of being watched, he boldly made eye contact, as if to convey, “I am Claude Montana and I’ll do what I please.”
When informed of Montana’s bite-the-hand-that-bandages-him behavior, the good-natured pharmacist shrugged. “I’ll put them on his bill,” he said. The entire episode was so alarming that one customer burst out with “That man used to be a fashion god!” And with a mixed look of puzzlement and empathy, the pharmacist replied, “I know, but the recent years have been difficult.”
Montana was riding high throughout the 1980s and early 1990s—appearing with Cher at the French fashion Oscars, dressing Jeanne Moreau and Charlotte Rampling, owning boutiques in Paris (including one on the tony Rue de Grenelle), launching three fragrances, designing couture for Lanvin, and marrying his muse, Wallis Franken, in 1993.
But by the mid-90s Montana had lost his footing in fashion. Some put it down to drugs and alcohol, while Cameron Silver, fashion historian and author of Decades: A Century of Fashion, questions whether Montana was too revered. “Being idolized is dangerous,” he says. “You can’t be objective.”
Fashion in the 1990s led to the birth of deconstruction, minimalism, grunge, and hip-hop, yet Montana—steeped in what was viewed as creative integrity—refused to adapt to the times. “It was almost as if he retired,” offers Mello. This led to American retailers like Bloomingdale’s Kal Ruttenstein, Montana’s former defender, dropping the line, boutiques closing, and Montana’s company going into receivership in 1997. Then there was the tragedy of Franken’s suicide the previous year. He has been AWOL ever since.
Widely viewed as a design visionary, albeit deeply tortured and insecure, it is easy to understand why so many people in the French fashion world still care. “You will be kind about Claude, won’t you?” was a constant refrain throughout my series of conducted interviews. Indeed, even the most hard-nosed business types acknowledge that, yes, Montana flew too near the sun and his career exploded in flames, but his authentic talent deserves respect. “Montana was very much like Yves Saint Laurent,” says Didier Ludot. “He had such a sense of luxury, the way he handled fur and cut leather. Then there was his relationship with color, Yves Klein blue, absinthe green, and mustard yellow.”
Theory’s Olivier Theyskens was struck by “Montana’s perfect line” and “his belief in magic with a big dose of allure and attitude.” Valerie Steele, the director and chief curator of the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology, who did some shows including some of Montana’s designs in late fall of 2013,exhibition “A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk,” was impressed by his “tough chic” and how this “pioneer of modern couture” played “an important role in high fashion.”
When we meet in a café by the Comédie-Française, Montana will discuss everything except Franken. “I’m not going there,” he says firmly. Under the watchful eye of his sister, Jacqueline Montana, he sips apple juice and, in contrast to the pharmacy incident, is courteous and articulate. Physically, he looks shriveled: his slight frame lacks the pads—including the ones that famously filled his leather pants—that made his signature silhouette so dramatically triangular. Montana’s sulky pretty-boy face—blond hair, dark-blue eyes, thin mustache, and pouting mouth, which the designer turned writer Josh Patner describes “as an emblem of pre-AIDS sexuality”—is also different.
The hair is darker and thinner, while plumped-up cheeks add an odd Father Christmas air to his formerly furtive features.
Still, Montana is more accessible than in his heyday. “I was shy,” he says. Actually, he was probably high. Initially, it is hard not to warm to his vulnerability. “I miss fashion,” he says softly. “Because when you have something all of your life, it becomes part of you. I miss it all, like holding the fabric in my hands.”
He also demonstrates humor. When informed that he was once considered “the Marilyn Monroe of the gay world,” he giggles with glee and then camps it up. “It’s true that I used to be Marilyn, but I’m not anymore,” he says in a perfect English accent. That said, Montana’s refusal to fess up and take responsibility for his actions mildly exasperates. He blames two business associates and “a lack of funds” for the loss of his empire, which is currently owned by French businessman Jean-Jacques Layani.
No mention is made of his daily decadence and extravagant lifestyle, which included a villa in Capri and an 18th-century French château. As for his decision to be his fashion house’s president with no previous financial experience, Montana is equally unrepentant. “I like to control everything,” he says. “It’s almost by necessity.”
Montana was born Claude Montamat in Paris in 1947. In spite of rumors to the contrary, Montana cites practical reasons for the name change, which occurred in the late 70s. “Our friends had problems pronouncing it and ‘Montana’ was easier,” he says. One of three children, he was brought up by a Spanish father and a German mother. Indicative of the xenophobic period and the need to adapt, only French was spoken in the household. “It was after the war and our mother really suffered,” his sister, Jacqueline Montana, says. “So she refused to speak German and our father was the same.”
After a stint at the Paris Opera—and completing his baccalauréat exams—Claude left home at 17 for Swinging London, where he made papier-mâché jewelry. Created out of baked toilet paper and rhinestones, they caught the attention of Olivier Echaudemaison, a fellow Frenchman who was then styling the covers of British Vogue. “Claude arrives looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy. He had curly blond hair and was wearing a velvet suit and a shirt with ruffles,” says Echaudemaison, who is now Guerlain’s creative director. “He was nothing like the biker that he became.” Echaudemaison put Montana’s pieces on the cover and found him a distributor. But within a few years Montana was back in Paris, where he began working for John Voigt, the Danish designer of Mac Douglas, the leather house. “I met him at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was the place where everyone met,” Montana says. “It was the moment of the Drugstore, Brasserie Lipp, Les Deux Magots, and the [Café de] Flore.”
And it was the moment of Claude the heartthrob. “When he arrived in a gay bar, there would be silence,” says Jean-Jacques Picart, the prominent fashion consultant, who was then Thierry Mugler's assistant.
While Montana was perfecting his signature silhouette at Mac Douglas and sharing a studio apartment with Mugler, a ballet dancer turned fashion hopeful—“I lived with Thierry at his parents’ apartment on Avenue Wagram . . . a little studio at the top,” Montana says—the bastion of French haute couture was crumbling. This was emphasized by the Versailles event organized by legendary fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert in the fall of 1973, which Women’s Wear Daily later coined the “Battle of Versailles.”
With the aim of giving publicity to the 17th-century French palace, five American designers—Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Halston, Anne Klein, and Oscar de la Renta—were invited to take part in a fashion spectacle alongside their French counterparts Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro, and Yves Saint Laurent. Up to that point, the American designers had felt seriously inferior. They were firmly ready-to-wear and lacked the French technique and savoir faire. However, as described by W magazine, “the Americans’ brisk, breezy and very modern 30-minute show far surpassed France’s operatic, two-hour spectacle.”
Suddenly, the American designers were launched as international, and the French fashion establishment seemed old-hat and out of step with disco madness, divine decadence, and the “Me” Decade. New blood was needed, which was where Montana, Mugler, Anne-Marie Beretta, and, eventually, Jean Paul Gaultier and Kenzo Takada fit in. However, far from being respectful to haute couture, they broke the rules and launched the Golden Age of French Ready-to-Wear, which began in the mid-70s. “It was a sort of mutiny within the ranks,” recalls Robert O’Byrne, former fashion correspondent for The Irish Times.
Prior to Montana and Mugler, designers nursed close ties with society. Stilted shows viewed from little gilt chairs were put on for members of the mondain, or clients from the jet set. Montana and Mugler showed no such interest. “Their shows were for the press,” says de la Fressange. And with an aim of making French fashion sexy, relevant, and fun, they produced incredible events each season. “The future Chanel and Dior shows evolved from that,” notes Didier Grumbach, the head of the French Chambre Syndicale, who ran Thierry Mugler’s company from 1978 to 1998.
At first, Montana and Mugler were criticized for being raw, disorganized, and extreme.
One season, Montana’s matching motorcycle helmets and metal chains were condemned for being “Nazi-like.” But, being ambitious showmen, they soon hit their stride.
Despite having been friends, Montana and Mugler parted company and formed opposing gangs. “You were either with Thierry or with Claude but not both,” says Vincent Darré, the furniture and interior designer, who was briefly Montana’s assistant.
“Claude was the first to have an entourage [in the fashion world],” says de la Fressange. “You recognized them because they were all in black.” According to Echaudemaison, responsible for organizing the makeup of Montana’s shows, “[Claude] could not breathe without his gang” and “needed to be reassured, reassured, and reassured.”
Their styles also played in direct contrast. “Mugler was very Hollywood pinup, but had no notion of comfort,” says Ludot. “Montana was all about comfort. He was more androgynous and mysterious.” Their shows were also different. “Mugler would show the girls how to walk—it was lively and spontaneous,” says Picart. “But Montana produced this army of Amazonians who walked out in groups and were not supposed to put their hands in their pockets because it would deform them.”
De la Fressange describes Montana’s house as being cathedral-like. “I remember going to the fittings and being amazed by the calm,” she says. “Nothing was frivolous. [Designers like] Lagerfeld, Gaultier, and Lacroix were amused by 50,000 things, and Claude was not like that.” She found him to be dogmatic about creating his signature goddesses. “Every model was viewed through Montana,” she says. “You were uniformed by him, or so he planned.” One time, she decided to take off her gloves and make a Marlene Dietrich gesture.
“Well, I was severely reprimanded for doing so,” she says. Montana still gets heated up about the incident. “Inès had a very particular style,” he says. “It’s true that I was very firm about my vision. . . . I wanted women to look beautiful and impeccable.”
Josh Patner, then a fashion coordinator at Bergdorf Goodman, remembers “the amazing fabrics which were sturdy enough to hold the severe lines but also wonderful to touch—military twills in sun yellow or sea aqua.” Afterwards there would be a crazed stampede to Montana’s showroom.
“We were feverish to buy, but it was so disorganized that it was a nightmare,” says fashion consultant Robert Forrest, then at Browns in London. “There was only one collection and you had to put your selection together, pulling separates away from others.”
Meanwhile, a certain excessiveness was creeping into the Paris fashion world, enhanced by the arrival of cocaine and fabulous nights at Le Palace, then Les Bains Douches, both nightclubs being the French equivalent of Studio 54. Along with Karl Lagerfeld and de la Fressange, Mugler was one of the few to avoid alcohol and illicit substances.
“[Thierry] was macrobiotic and didn’t drink. To be honest, he wasn’t much fun,” says Darré. “I mean, not to do drugs, drink, or smoke during the 1980s!” Montana, on the other hand, stunned Darré by “the proportion of drugs he consumed.” “I went out with him one night and have never seen so much cocaine in my life,” he says. “The lines were beyond long.”
Gradually, Montana developed imbalanced behavioral patterns. Just as he epitomized generosity—“when my grandmother was unwell, he paid for all my return flights to Stockholm and never mentioned it,” says Christine Bergström, his Swedish fittings model, and he picked up the bill for the two-hour lunches shared with his studio and gifted mini gardenia trees as a thank-you for each season—he was also thoughtless. Mid-collection, Montana could disappear for days, then suddenly turn up at six p.m. for fittings that lasted until four a.m. “A lot of coke was being sniffed in Claude’s office,” says Darré, who recalls “sleepless nights with Wallis sleeping on the table, being woken up, drinking a beer, and trying things on.” And when Montana joined Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta, and other world-famous designers for the Bicentennial Wool Collection fashion parade in Australia in 1988, he was out of it. “Donna [Karan] was very kind and propped him up,” says Echaudemaison. On cocaine many people become euphoric, but Robert Forrest noticed that Montana was different.
“Claude’s elation was inward,” he says. To a certain extent, that gets scarier. There was also his intolerance to alcohol. “Claude changed when he drank,” says Bergström. “It was as if he was allergic.”
Montana’s depravity was also affecting his decision-making. His company was starting to expand with successful knitwear and leather licenses and fragrances such as Blu, a hit with the club crowd. However, instead of employing a C.E.O. to strategize on the business side, Montana became his own president. “I kept telling him to get a C.E.O.,” says Echaudemaison. “But he refused. For such a huge talent, it was tragic. Claude was his own worst enemy.” Mugler, on the other hand, had Grumbach, who came from the school of thought that believed “a perfume conserves the fashion label” and in 1992 launched the highly lucrative Angel perfume. “I was in charge of the development of the label, which allowed Thierry to fly off to places like Greenland and be creative,” says Grumbach.
In the Montana establishment, Béatrice Paul was the one person who kept it together. For almost 20 years, Paul worked alongside Montana, both in his studio and as his artistic director for communications. “Without her, Claude would never have succeeded,” says Picart. “Béatrice was intelligent, efficient, and really believed in him. Not unlike a Pierre Bergé [Saint Laurent’s business partner], she would go to the factories and quality-control.”
Nevertheless, Paul spoke her mind, which Montana began to resent. And after a decade of working in tandem with Paul, he brought in his sister Jacqueline to be his publicity director. “There was a rivalry between the two women,” says Bergström. “Béatrice was disciplined and tough,” whereas Jacqueline “viewed the fashion house as a family business and did not want to say the wrong thing.”
In 1989, Montana was offered Marc Bohan’s position at the house of Christian Dior. “It was a big buzz moment for him,” says Kate Betts, then Fairchild Publications’ bureau chief in Paris. Since Montana cites Christian Dior’s New Look as one of his chief inspirations, the idea was more apt than it sounds. However, negotiations reached a standoff, and Montana ended up designing couture at Lanvin instead. Montana cites that time as the happiest in his career. “It was a dream to create couture, which turned into a nightmare because of the reviews,” he says.
While most couture houses were producing ladylike day suits and ball gowns, Montana, for his first collection, in 1990, daringly created beaded T-shirts, gold-embroidered leather jackets, midriff-baring blouses, and trench coats with open backs. His approach horrified the American press. “His Lanvin show looked like a graduating art student’s efforts made up by his Mom,” sniped The International Herald Tribune’s Suzy Menkes, whereas Women’s Wear Daily wrote, “Halfway through the show, one important fashion editor commented, ‘If I were the bankers behind Lanvin, I’d dive into the [photographers’] pit.’ ”
Widely viewed as a design visionary, albeit deeply tortured and insecure, it is easy to understand why so many people in the French fashion world still care. “You will be kind about Claude, won’t you?” was a constant refrain throughout my series of conducted interviews. Indeed, even the most hard-nosed business types acknowledge that, yes, Montana flew too near the sun and his career exploded in flames, but his authentic talent deserves respect. “Montana was very much like Yves Saint Laurent,” says Didier Ludot. “He had such a sense of luxury, the way he handled fur and cut leather. Then there was his relationship with color, Yves Klein blue, absinthe green, and mustard yellow.”
When we meet in a café by the Comédie-Française, Montana will discuss everything except Franken. “I’m not going there,” he says firmly. Under the watchful eye of his sister, Jacqueline Montana, he sips apple juice and, in contrast to the pharmacy incident, is courteous and articulate. Physically, he looks shriveled: his slight frame lacks the pads—including the ones that famously filled his leather pants—that made his signature silhouette so dramatically triangular. Montana’s sulky pretty-boy face—blond hair, dark-blue eyes, thin mustache, and pouting mouth, which the designer turned writer Josh Patner describes “as an emblem of pre-AIDS sexuality”—is also different.
Still, Montana is more accessible than in his heyday. “I was shy,” he says. Actually, he was probably high. Initially, it is hard not to warm to his vulnerability. “I miss fashion,” he says softly. “Because when you have something all of your life, it becomes part of you. I miss it all, like holding the fabric in my hands.”
No mention is made of his daily decadence and extravagant lifestyle, which included a villa in Capri and an 18th-century French château. As for his decision to be his fashion house’s president with no previous financial experience, Montana is equally unrepentant. “I like to control everything,” he says. “It’s almost by necessity.”With the aim of giving publicity to the 17th-century French palace, five American designers—Bill Blass, Stephen Burrows, Halston, Anne Klein, and Oscar de la Renta—were invited to take part in a fashion spectacle alongside their French counterparts Marc Bohan for Christian Dior, Pierre Cardin, Hubert de Givenchy, Emanuel Ungaro, and Yves Saint Laurent. Up to that point, the American designers had felt seriously inferior. They were firmly ready-to-wear and lacked the French technique and savoir faire. However, as described by W magazine, “the Americans’ brisk, breezy and very modern 30-minute show far surpassed France’s operatic, two-hour spectacle.”
Suddenly, the American designers were launched as international, and the French fashion establishment seemed old-hat and out of step with disco madness, divine decadence, and the “Me” Decade. New blood was needed, which was where Montana, Mugler, Anne-Marie Beretta, and, eventually, Jean Paul Gaultier and Kenzo Takada fit in. However, far from being respectful to haute couture, they broke the rules and launched the Golden Age of French Ready-to-Wear, which began in the mid-70s. “It was a sort of mutiny within the ranks,” recalls Robert O’Byrne, former fashion correspondent for The Irish Times.
At first, Montana and Mugler were criticized for being raw, disorganized, and extreme.
One season, Montana’s matching motorcycle helmets and metal chains were condemned for being “Nazi-like.” But, being ambitious showmen, they soon hit their stride.
Despite having been friends, Montana and Mugler parted company and formed opposing gangs. “You were either with Thierry or with Claude but not both,” says Vincent Darré, the furniture and interior designer, who was briefly Montana’s assistant.
“Claude was the first to have an entourage [in the fashion world],” says de la Fressange. “You recognized them because they were all in black.” According to Echaudemaison, responsible for organizing the makeup of Montana’s shows, “[Claude] could not breathe without his gang” and “needed to be reassured, reassured, and reassured.”
Their styles also played in direct contrast. “Mugler was very Hollywood pinup, but had no notion of comfort,” says Ludot. “Montana was all about comfort. He was more androgynous and mysterious.” Their shows were also different. “Mugler would show the girls how to walk—it was lively and spontaneous,” says Picart. “But Montana produced this army of Amazonians who walked out in groups and were not supposed to put their hands in their pockets because it would deform them.”
“Well, I was severely reprimanded for doing so,” she says. Montana still gets heated up about the incident. “Inès had a very particular style,” he says. “It’s true that I was very firm about my vision. . . . I wanted women to look beautiful and impeccable.”
Josh Patner, then a fashion coordinator at Bergdorf Goodman, remembers “the amazing fabrics which were sturdy enough to hold the severe lines but also wonderful to touch—military twills in sun yellow or sea aqua.” Afterwards there would be a crazed stampede to Montana’s showroom.
Meanwhile, a certain excessiveness was creeping into the Paris fashion world, enhanced by the arrival of cocaine and fabulous nights at Le Palace, then Les Bains Douches, both nightclubs being the French equivalent of Studio 54. Along with Karl Lagerfeld and de la Fressange, Mugler was one of the few to avoid alcohol and illicit substances.
“[Thierry] was macrobiotic and didn’t drink. To be honest, he wasn’t much fun,” says Darré. “I mean, not to do drugs, drink, or smoke during the 1980s!” Montana, on the other hand, stunned Darré by “the proportion of drugs he consumed.” “I went out with him one night and have never seen so much cocaine in my life,” he says. “The lines were beyond long.”
Montana’s depravity was also affecting his decision-making. His company was starting to expand with successful knitwear and leather licenses and fragrances such as Blu, a hit with the club crowd. However, instead of employing a C.E.O. to strategize on the business side, Montana became his own president. “I kept telling him to get a C.E.O.,” says Echaudemaison. “But he refused. For such a huge talent, it was tragic. Claude was his own worst enemy.” Mugler, on the other hand, had Grumbach, who came from the school of thought that believed “a perfume conserves the fashion label” and in 1992 launched the highly lucrative Angel perfume. “I was in charge of the development of the label, which allowed Thierry to fly off to places like Greenland and be creative,” says Grumbach.
Nevertheless, Paul spoke her mind, which Montana began to resent. And after a decade of working in tandem with Paul, he brought in his sister Jacqueline to be his publicity director. “There was a rivalry between the two women,” says Bergström. “Béatrice was disciplined and tough,” whereas Jacqueline “viewed the fashion house as a family business and did not want to say the wrong thing.”
In 1989, Montana was offered Marc Bohan’s position at the house of Christian Dior. “It was a big buzz moment for him,” says Kate Betts, then Fairchild Publications’ bureau chief in Paris. Since Montana cites Christian Dior’s New Look as one of his chief inspirations, the idea was more apt than it sounds. However, negotiations reached a standoff, and Montana ended up designing couture at Lanvin instead. Montana cites that time as the happiest in his career. “It was a dream to create couture, which turned into a nightmare because of the reviews,” he says.
Montana recovered by retreating to his Rue de Lille apartment. “When I arrived in the salon,” says his sister, “Claude had covered the two large sofas and his floor with all his bad reviews and said, ‘Look at the result of all my work.’” The next season—featuring a stark, sculpted silhouette and elegant fabrics—was viewed as a triumph. More than two decades later, Montana’s work is considered brilliantly modern. “I would die to have his Lanvin pieces in our collection,” admits F.I.T.’s Valerie Steele. However, the entire experience—which came to a head when Montana refused to do Lanvin’s ready-to-wear collection—exhausted him.
“Doing couture at Lanvin was a dream for Claude but it became a curse for him professionally,” says the designer Yvan Mispelaere, one of his former assistants, “because he lost his sense of fashion and being accessible.” Adding a further distraction was Montana’s engagement to Wallis Franken, his former muse, in 1993. “When they came to announce their engagement, there was silence, and our faces fell,” says Bergström. Since Mugler had recently launched his couture collection and was eclipsing Montana with the sudden press interest, Mispelaere wondered if the marriage was not a P.R. stunt. “Getting the cover of Paris Match was discussed,” he says.
Weeks before the wedding, according to Bergström, “Montana locked himself up in the Hôtel de Crillon’s nuptial suite. . . It was quite mad, and either Béatrice or I would go and walk his dog [China, his shar-pei].” Undaunted by his behavior, including his marked penchant for gay S&M clubs and leather bars, Wallis married him. It was strange, but Bergström describes the delightful American-born and wildly popular model as “fairy-like—her feet did not touch the ground.” Prior to the union, Franken and Montana had been decadent partners in crime. “[Wallis] knew Claude in the nighttime better than anyone . . . . he loved the nightclubs, hanging out late, flirting,” Bergström continues. “But when they got married, she really thought she was becoming Madame Montana.” Vast quantities of drugs were consumed, as described in Maureen Orth’s article “Death by Design” in the September 1996 Vanity Fair.
“In one fitting being done on Christine, Wallis fell flat on her face,” Mispelaere says. Cures were organized for Franken but not the designer. There were dark tales of his getting aggressive with her in Miami’s Century Hotel. “He would get out of it . . . and then beat her up,” says an associate. In spite of this, all of Montana’s friends insist that, when sober, he loved her. “He married [Wallis] because she had no future left in fashion,” says Echaudemaison. “It was a gesture of kindness.”
When Bergström received the call about Franken’s suicide, at the age of 48, she felt, “it could have easily been about Claude. . . They were both in a very bad state.” Afterward, Montana became a social pariah. “At the funeral, no one would talk to him,” says Ariel de Ravenel, then at YSL fragrances. And Darré cut Montana dead when he approached him. “No, he didn’t push her, but emotionally he was abusive,” Darré reasons.
For almost a decade, Montana has lived in a large, rented apartment near the Louvre museum. Stylish, it has soaring ceilings and boasts a collection of jungle animal oil paintings by the French artist Paul Jouve, one of the masters of the Art Deco period, as well as a sketch of Christian Dior by Bernard Buffet and an eclectic mix of somber furniture apart from a group of red velvet and gilded chairs that Montana describes as “couture.” Still, since the curtains are closed in most rooms, it lacks light and feels womb-like. Montana’s days are spent walking around (“[Parisians] are less elegant than they were,” he notes) and watching a lot of television—“I like the programs of general interest.”
Aside from the photographer Tyen, who shot some of his advertising campaigns, Montana has virtually “stopped all contact” with fashion folk, dismissing them as “tough and unforgiving.” Two designers he rates highly are Azzedine Alaïa and Rick Owens. However, he wonders if “fashion now plays more on the personality than true talent.”
“It’s showmanship,” he says, adding that “it suits someone like Karl [Lagerfeld, Chanel’s iconic designer], who adores talking and likes bathing in the limelight.” Nevertheless, Montana is not averse to designing again, as shown by his recent foray back into couture. “I really would like to return, but not in the same intense way,” he says. “It was a shock to leave the fashion world. That said, I never could get used to the reviews. I always took that very personally.”
“Doing couture at Lanvin was a dream for Claude but it became a curse for him professionally,” says the designer Yvan Mispelaere, one of his former assistants, “because he lost his sense of fashion and being accessible.” Adding a further distraction was Montana’s engagement to Wallis Franken, his former muse, in 1993. “When they came to announce their engagement, there was silence, and our faces fell,” says Bergström. Since Mugler had recently launched his couture collection and was eclipsing Montana with the sudden press interest, Mispelaere wondered if the marriage was not a P.R. stunt. “Getting the cover of Paris Match was discussed,” he says.
“In one fitting being done on Christine, Wallis fell flat on her face,” Mispelaere says. Cures were organized for Franken but not the designer. There were dark tales of his getting aggressive with her in Miami’s Century Hotel. “He would get out of it . . . and then beat her up,” says an associate. In spite of this, all of Montana’s friends insist that, when sober, he loved her. “He married [Wallis] because she had no future left in fashion,” says Echaudemaison. “It was a gesture of kindness.”
Aside from the photographer Tyen, who shot some of his advertising campaigns, Montana has virtually “stopped all contact” with fashion folk, dismissing them as “tough and unforgiving.” Two designers he rates highly are Azzedine Alaïa and Rick Owens. However, he wonders if “fashion now plays more on the personality than true talent.”
“It’s showmanship,” he says, adding that “it suits someone like Karl [Lagerfeld, Chanel’s iconic designer], who adores talking and likes bathing in the limelight.” Nevertheless, Montana is not averse to designing again, as shown by his recent foray back into couture. “I really would like to return, but not in the same intense way,” he says. “It was a shock to leave the fashion world. That said, I never could get used to the reviews. I always took that very personally.”
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