(tense upbeat music) (crowd chattering)
- [Reporter] New York Fashion Week is now in full swing,
a time when who you wear matters as much as what you wear.
- This is a huge to-do here in New York City, twice a year.
It's when all of the top designers
preview their upcoming collections.
Great parties.
On any given day you'll see celebrities,
socialites, supermodels.
- It's Fashion Week in New York,
and CNN's Gail O'Neil has been braving the crowds.
Morning, Gail.
- Morning, Carol.
I'll tell you, this is the biggest media crush
I've seen so far, and it's all over maternity wear.
- It was going to be the first-ever
maternity clothing fashion show
during New York's Fashion Week, so that was a big deal.
- Here we have the designer, Liz Lange, herself,
and several of her models,
who you can see are actually with child, very pregnant.
- Why would a woman wanna take a year off
of looking fashionable, feeling pretty, feeling great?
The show starts, you're backstage,
you're kind of peeking through the curtain.
You're watching the show,
you're watching the audience reaction.
And halfway through the show, I saw that the CNN cameras
were kind of running out of the tent mid-show.
I'd say within 10 minutes of walking out of my show
that the world had changed.
- We're gonna go live right now
and show you a picture of the World Trade Center,
where I understand...
Do we have it?
- [Reporter] We have a breaking news story
to tell you about.
Apparently, a plane has just crashed
into the World Trade Center here in New York City.
It happened just a few moments ago.
- [Eyewitness] It's quite terrifying.
I'm in shock right now.
I came out of the subway and I saw a big ball of fire.
- I thought the building was gonna topple over,
and I don't know what it was.
What was it? A bomb?
- [Bystander] Somebody yelled, "The Chrysler Building,"
but it's fine.
- [Reporter] Yves Saint Laurent party's
supposed to be tonight with Tom Ford,
I'm sure he's gonna cancel.
- Oh, absolutely.
I mean, Giorgio Armani's
canceled everything. - Are they here?
Is Tom Ford in town now? Is he here?
- [Bystander] Come this way.
(bystander shrieking)
- I remember thinking,
"Why is anyone gonna want to wear a ballgown
"or party dress again?
"Why is anyone gonna want to read a fashion magazine
"when they've gone through this?
"Why does anyone care about clothes?"
(gentle somber music)
- There was a lull for a moment,
but then, within a few months' time,
people started to consume.
It was almost like your patriotic duty to be a capitalist.
(climatic dramatic music)
(delicate pensive music)
♪ Ah, ah ♪
♪ Ah ♪
(dramatic thoughtful music)
(delicate pensive music)
(traffic whooshing) (tense thoughtful music)
(tense thoughtful music continues)
(audience cheering) (audience applauding)
- Since John arrived we sell 50% more every six months,
so I hope it will continue.
(audience applauding)
(tense thoughtful music continues)
(flames whooshing)
- When I signed with Gucci,
I just continually just, like,
pushed myself to get stronger, physically and mentally,
and this is the outcome.
(tense thoughtful music continues)
(camera shutter clicking)
- 10 minutes, then first looks.
(people chattering) (gentle tense music)
- [Bystander] Oh, gorgeous. Look at her.
- Thank you. - Amazing.
- I wanted really each one of these girls
to look like candy, in a way.
Something that was so beautiful, so tempting,
you know, you really just wanted to just... (chomps teeth)
(gentle tense music continues) (camera shutters whirring)
Yellow and blue, and sugar pink and white,
and things that really, you know, very candy colours.
(audience cheering) (audience applauding)
- The House of Gucci with Tom Ford
is the winner in Milan for me at the moment.
You cannot go wrong with Tom Ford.
He is the buzzword, he's hot,
he will be hot, he will continue to be hot, it is hot.
The word hot is not appropriate.
The word brilliant is appropriate.
The word top is appropriate.
He is the like the T Model Ford for Gucci.
- Some of Tom's campaigns were the most controversial.
- [Reporter] You shaved a G in a model's pubic hair.
- I know, and I actually did shave the G
in that girl's pubic hair myself.
I wanted it exactly that way.
I had to fill it in with an eyebrow pencil a little bit.
- People were scandalised by this, but, you know,
it's kind of the oldest trick in the book, right?
Sex sells, and he was milking it, you know, to the max.
(tense thoughtful music continues)
- It wasn't porn.
But it was just racy enough to titillate
without being vulgar.
- It was a commentary on where we were with branding.
We had pushed branding to the absolute limit.
Everything was branded.
So why not, you know,
a guy branding his girlfriend's public hair?
(suspenseful dramatic music)
- The power of icon, the emoji of its time.
Logomania was part of the democratisation of fashion.
You needed something
that was instantly recognisable as what it was
for the people that were buying into your ethos
so that they had something that their friends
would instantly be able to identify.
- The frenzy for these logos, fuelled by celebrities.
The billboards, the magazine ads, the commercials,
the placement in movies, the logo-heavy marketing,
switched the reason that everyone had purchased
these products in the first place,
from what they were, beautiful, hand-crafted, luxury items,
rare, special,
to that the represented,
wealth, success, power.
- That is the genius of the people
who are at the head of these conglomerates.
They are magicians, they magic desire.
- You weren't buying a Louis Vuitton bag,
you were buying the Louis Vuitton marketing message.
And it has the logo on it, it's shouting the brand.
- You'd pull out that lipstick and put it on,
and there was a logo on the lipstick.
So it looked like you could afford the dream,
but you just had a little piece of the dream.
You couldn't afford the couture gown,
that had 100 hours of embroidery and cost $120,000,
but you could get the lipstick for $35 in the duty-free.
- It's easy for us to become consumed, in a sense,
by materialism.
Now, materialism is fine.
We live in a material world.
I'm not saying that beautiful things
don't enhance our lives.
But in our culture, we're never happy.
It's, "When I get here I'm gonna be happy,
"when I have those new shoes, when I go to that new party,
"when I get that country house, when I get that new job."
You know, we will never be fulfilled
because this will continue until the day we die.
- And you are to blame!
- But, no, it's bigger than that.
It is our entire culture.
Of course, I was a part of it. We're all a part of it.
(delicate upbeat music) (sewing machine rattles)
- [Jeanne] Hi!
How gorgeous have you become?
Look at you! I can't stop looking at you.
Oh, God! That's very fabulous, to see you like this.
This new incarnation.
Sort of the new and improved McQueen.
- I had to become stronger myself
and strong physically for Paris
because I realised I was gonna show here for good,
and I was gonna be competing with the big league.
And mentally and physically, you have to be strong for this.
(gentle thoughtful music)
- At Gucci I think they gave him
what he wasn't getting at LVMH.
He got healthier and happier
when he could focus back, entirely, 100% on his own brand.
(audience cheering) (audience applauding)
- Didn't he look great?
I said, "I am so fed up"
"with seeing these tracksuits and things.
"Show us the tailoring in the show,
"and let's see you looking sexy too."
He's gone slightly Tom Ford.
- Alexander McQueen really looked up to Tom Ford,
and he idolised him as kind of the model of the designer
and the man that he wanted to be.
He would start dressing like him and acting like him,
and eating like him.
And so it was a way for him
to kind of move himself into a different level,
a different firmament.
- He wanted more acknowledgment,
and he got it from Tom and Mr. De Sole.
- I know he adored his mother,
and I would made a point, she was leaving Scotland,
to send my driver to pick her up
and take her to the fashion show,
and invite her to the dinner,
just to be attentive and show that I really care.
(gentle thoughtful music)
- It was time to renegotiate their contracts,
and Dom and Tom did not wanna give up
the power that they had earned
by turning Gucci from a nearly bankrupt company
into a global conglomerate.
- [Reporter] There's been some rumours
about you and Domenico.
- You know, rumours are always rumours.
It is true that both my
and Domenico's contracts are up next year in 2004.
Both of us have worked so hard
over the last 10 years to build this company.
We have an enormous emotional attachment to it.
And I can't imagine leaving it, so those are just rumours.
- Tom and I felt it was our company.
In our mind, that's our company.
Though we didn't own it,
and we respect the fact that you had to generate success
and dividends, et cetera, for the shareholders,
but we owned the company.
(audience applauding) (gentle somber music)
- It was a very emotional moment, I remember.
I never cried in my life,
even when my parents died, I didn't cry.
But I did cry telling the senior people
of the company I was leaving.
(audience applauding)
(gentle somber music continues)
(audience applauding)
- You know, it's Monsieur Pinault's company,
and obviously, there were differences,
and we just have to all move on, as I'm sure Tom is.
- I remember the press saying, "Gucci's dead.
"Gucci without Tom Ford cannot be Gucci."
I also remember thinking, "Maybe the word Gucci
"is still more powerful than the word Tom Ford."
- At the end of the day, because they had succeeded so well,
the superstar was Gucci, not just Tom Ford.
- I all of a sudden felt lost.
I thought, "Well, what do I contribute to the world?"
You know, "What am I doing?
"Who am I? What is this?"
Because I had worked so hard for so long
and I didn't really realise how it would feel
when I no longer had that platform or that voice.
I felt quite lost.
- He said his 40s the entire decade was an absolute waste of decade for him
It completely threw him.
Everything that he'd been doing
once the cork was out of the bottle
just exploded into his private life and swallowed him whole.
(gentle thoughtful music)
- Alexander McQueen was bereft.
He had lost his mentor
and there was a new era in place at Gucci
where the brand was going to be dominant.
- The Gucci Group sent in all little men in black suits
and black ties and white shirts,
coming in and watching us all work
and trying to dictate things to us.
- He hated the idea that there was a group called Gucci
that could tell him, "No, you won't have
"this budget or that budget.
"Yes, you can do this but not that."
(tense thoughtful music)
- [Alexander] It can be really lonely.
And I think there's more to life than fashion
and I don't wanna be stuck in that bubble
of this is what I do.
Because everyone in the office,
they go home and they can shut off,
but I'm still Alexander McQueen after I shut the door.
- You have these incredibly creative people,
you know, like Galliano and McQueen,
who had staged these kind of very theatrical shows
that felt like theatre to perform in,
inside an industry that is so demanding of them.
You would never take an artist
and force them to make 14 shows in a year,
and expect all those shows to be brilliant,
and expect them to kind of have the creative inspiration
and juice to just keep producing, almost like a machine.
(audience applauding)
- [John] Along with all the successes came more collections.
At that moment, I was producing 32 collections a year
between the House of Galliano and the House of Dior,
and each collection would comprise
of up to 1,000 pieces.
The drinking did creep up on me.
- He started to take longer and longer and longer
to get into a state where he was remotely presentable
to anyone else, 'cause he was so out of it.
- Do you want me to stop?
- [Reporter] No, I don't care.
It's for you. It's your image. (laughs)
- It's tarnished, you can't change it! (laughing)
After I had my last toboggan ride
down the great Chinese Wall,
and there I was and arrived at McDonald's.
I mean, there you go, that was the collection. (laughing)
Joe DiMaggio and where was Marilyn?
In rubber.
- [Reporter] Would you say that it takes a lot of courage
to give an artist such a free artistic reign?
- Yes, it's courage but also we have some reward, huh?
Because sales of Christian Dior since he arrived
have been multiplied by six.
So it's quite good, don't you think?
(suspenseful music)
- There was a total fear of Bernard Arnault
and anyone putting a foot wrong in front of him.
You know, maybe John was scared
that this man could just erase
all the success that he's had.
And he's at the height of his career,
it's just so far to fall.
- [Jeanne] When we think of John
and the incredible things that he's done
for the image of the House of Dior,
it seems to us that he must have carte blanche
as a designer, artistically.
- Absolutely, yes. Absolutely carte blanche.
- [Jeanne] So you let him run with the ball
in any direction?
- As long as the business is going how it is going.
The business is booming, so, yes, carte blanche.
(audience cheering)
- [Bystander] Go, Johnny, go!
Mind your ego!
- His image became more and more extravagant,
to the point where, often, he would come out,
after his shows, with a full look.
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
- [John] If you're gonna do something
I just think you have to go all out for it,
otherwise just don't bother.
Do you know what I mean?
It's something that, if you believe in something,
you have to do it to the end.
(climatic dramatic music)
(camera shutter clicks)
- How do you deal with pressure, and stress,
and all that, before a show?
Or do you get stressed and feel under pressure?
- I take Calgon baths.
No, I'm joking. It was a joke.
(both laughing)
I don't deal with pressure too well.
I go off my diet, I smoke twice as many cigarettes,
and I sometimes get a little angry or rude.
But I don't think I deal with it so well.
(tense suspenseful music)
(crowd chattering)
- He was a little bit.
Marc was getting a little bit out of control there.
In hindsight, you see the psychology twist,
and you see the shows becoming more and more,
not frantic, but confrontational.
(crowd booing) (crowd hissing)
It was a fairly major moment, I think, for Marc,
for his show to run two hours late
and to have that audience waiting for it,
people like Catherine Deneuve and Kanye West,
and Sophia Coppola.
(crowd chants)
There was a little bit of a "fuck you" quality to it,
I thought.
Mr. Arnault, after sitting there
for really a long, long time, he pecks at his phone,
and then seconds later the lights come down
and the show starts.
(audience applauding) (audience yelling)
(audience cheering)
(tense suspenseful music continues)
- I think when a designer
expects his audience to wait two hours,
unacceptable, ill-mannered, and totally arrogant.
(audience booing)
- All these people who need to rush home to their family,
I say they shouldn't come to fashion shows.
They should retire and stay home. Fuck them.
I'm not afraid of anything. I'm shameless and fearless.
- [Tim] I think what fashion
was seeing across the board at this point
is its wunderkinder acting up.
- [Marc] The only opinion that matters about me is my own,
and that's it.
- They'd been so indulged for so long
that everything had become a little bit screwy.
(tense suspenseful music)
You did feel a reckoning coming.
Fashion was kind of capturing something in the air.
(tense suspenseful music continues)
(gentle delicate music)
- Stephen Robinson was John's right-hand man.
That's how we knew him in the business,
John's right-hand man.
John was the one who would give you a smile
and Stephen was the one that did not.
It was this. And so you never knew if he liked you or not.
- [John] Stephen was there right at the beginning,
I mean, he came as a student placement, counting buttons,
and then worked his way through,
and then became my right-hand man.
(group chattering)
(models cheering)
(audience chattering)
(models cheering)
(group applauding)
Stephen and I started this adventure
when things weren't working out, and Stephen believed in me.
And together, we left London.
Didn't have any money.
I don't how we got to Paris, we did.
And we slept on friends' floors.
And as long as I could see the moonlight I was happy.
- Stephen Robinson became a wall around John, right?
So everything had to pass through Stephen to get to John.
So John really lost contact with the outside world.
(gentle ambient music)
- Stephen took a lot of cocaine.
So, one day, he went home for a vacation,
he just, like, hoovered, hoovered up
massive amounts of cocaine
in a very short time by himself at home,
and he suffered a massive heart attack and died.
John was destroyed.
(gentle somber music)
- That kind of loss must have been devastating for him
and it just must have been really difficult to process.
The questions I would here people go, "Will he be okay?
"Will he be able to design?
- [Jeanne] How hard is it going on now
without Stephen around?
- Very. You know...
Yeah, it's very, very hard.
- I mean, we all saw the transition happening,
and it was never nice to see him
in this state of, you know, pain.
Obviously, there was pain there.
He lost someone that meant a lot to him.
- I just remember Anna telling me,
"I have a meeting with Mr. Arnault,
"and he's basically asked me to come in
"and talk to John about what he's doing."
I just had this impression that any moment
John might have gone off the rails.
But rather than trying to control him internally,
they would call Anna, and Anna would do whatever she does.
(gentle thoughtful music)
(gentle thoughtful music continues)
- [Alexander] This world I live in,
this fashion world I live in,
it's so unrelated to what's going on around the world.
So what I try to do is take parts of the world
people don't wanna see and bring it to them.
- When we walked in the auditorium
was lit in this hellish red.
Huge pile of rubbish from the detritus of his old shows.
So it was a comment on waste, you could look at it that way.
It was a comment on environmental degradation.
(suspenseful music)
- [Alexander] By nature, I'm a very melancholy person,
so I like to see the good and also the bad in things
because life is like that.
I don't like to put like a smokescreen
over everything you do to make the world a prettier place,
because it's not.
(waves whooshing)
- [Reporter] Fashion is the second most
polluting industry in the world,
and people are buying massively more
than they did 15 years ago.
- Obviously, we're very aware, as other industries are,
that we have been at fault,
and what we can do in the relatively short amount of time
we have to course correct.
- [Reporter] So it's an urgency for you?
- [Anna] It's an urgency for everybody within the industry.
- I feel like he was often putting the fashion world
in an uncomfortable position to confront itself.
The fact that so much of fashion nowadays
is thrown away, is disposable.
3/4, they think,
of the 80 to 100 billion garments made every year.
So literally tens of billions of garments
end up in landfill.
Fast fashion is just a disposable attitude to fashion.
It's an idea that fashion should be cheap
and shouldn't last a long time.
We should be buying and buying and buying a lot
and that's why it's fast, right?
Fast production, fast consumption, fast waste.
- What the Pinault and the Arnault of the world
created was desirability.
By becoming so big and so powerful,
they obtain more visibilities.
And all the stores around the world
and all those ads in the magazines around the world,
created aspiration and desirability.
The real problem is the level of consumption
and that it's got out of control.
If a pair of jeans costs less than a coffee,
and so it's less costly to throw it away than to wash it,
it's obviously not okay.
But also, it's the human cost.
It's the human right.
- Six people are now under arrest
in Bangladesh in connection
with a building collapse on Wednesday
that killed hundreds of garment workers.
- [Reporter] On Tuesday,
police inspected cracks in the building
which housed five clothing manufacturers.
Survivors say their bosses told them to keep working.
- Most consumers, even though they claim that they care,
it's something that is done over there.
They never see it.
If you ever go into a factory where sneakers are made
and you see and smell the gasses
that they emit from all the rubber
and different machines they use to make a sneaker,
you would never wear another pair of sneakers again.
- [Reporter] Western retailers
have openly criticised the factories
for unsafe working conditions but continue to place orders.
- In this last 30 years of growth of the luxury industry,
it has now sacrificed humanity
and the planet for the sake of profit.
McQueen was disgusted by this,
and he felt like he needed to make a statement about it.
So he steps back and he just looks at how all this fashion,
consumption, production, money, glitz, glamor, advertising,
magazines, fashion shoots, stores, stores, stores,
all this fits into the bigger picture
that is the world today.
- The creation was coming from inside his heart.
So, probably, he visit some very sensitive areas.
For sure, you get something ultra-emotional, for sure,
and you get something quite unique.
- What makes a great fashion designer?
Someone with tremendous endurance and focus.
You've gotta be very careful. You've gotta protect yourself.
You've got to love what's at the core of the industry
or it will kill you.
And even then, it'll kill you.
(audience applauding) (audience cheering)
- You became a product with a huge pressure above your head
from people expecting things from you, lot of collections.
You sign paper, it's too late it's been signed,
you are agreed.
It's too late, you're trapped.
And for a wild wolf like him,
get trapped means death.
(gentle somber music) (camera shutters whirring)
(police radio chattering)
- [Reporter] Alexander McQueen,
the darling of British fashion,
has been found dead after, apparently, committing suicide.
Paramedics were called
to the designer's London home this morning,
but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
- I think that he had had enough.
And then his mother died,
and I think it was all just enough.
- The last time I saw him
he just seemed in a really good mood that day,
and that was the day before.
And up until then, he was like a shadow of himself.
And on that day, he just seemed like
everything had been lifted for some reason.
Maybe it was just the thought that, you know,
it'll all be over soon.
(camera shutters whirring)
- I understood that loneliness,
that pain.
We're in such perfection,
we're setting that bar impossibly high.
We don't understand why we're doing it,
and people say, "Wow, how are you gonna top that?"
And we're like, "Yeah, we're going to. Don't worry.
"That's what makes us wake up in the morning."
I was very sad.
(gentle orchestral music)
- I think Galliano is really the incarnation of Dior today.
And he's the reason why
it fits so well with the House of Dior.
- The way I look is usually the end of the creative process
because I live it.
I believe it. I become it.
I'm drawn by candlelight.
There's a narrative,
the models are my silent movie actresses,
the script is their clothes.
- [Reporter] And do you think it's important
for a brand like this to have such a showman?
- I think the key of success, in a brand so famous as Dior,
it's key to such level of creativity and inventiveness, yes.
(majestic music)
- [John] Sometimes I was acting like God.
I was a fully functioning addict.
It started cyclically after each collection,
after each creative high, there'd be this crash.
But, of course, with the increase in collections,
that cycle became faster and faster and faster
where there was like a collection every four weeks.
- You're on such a high and everything is such a fast pace.
Remember all these creative minds
are coming together to create something.
The dress has taken two to three months
or maybe sometimes longer just to create.
For a 20-minute show, I mean, that adrenaline is just like,
it goes and it goes and it goes and it goes,
and then Fashion Week is over with.
And then, you go through the blues afterwards.
It becomes very gloomy, actually.
- [John] It was getting worse and worse
and I was mixing alcohol with benzos.
By then I was a slave to alcohol.
Then I would take the Valium to stop the shaking
so I could do the fittings.
And then the sleeping pills so that I could sleep.
My life became unmanageable.
- We have a situation where John has a problem,
alcohol, I suggest, but nothing I being done about it.
He needed looking after.
He was crying for help.
- When designers start to misbehave
to the point where both sides of the relationship
are getting a little...
Maybe the designers not getting what he wants
and certainly, the businessmen
are a little tired of the whole situation too.
Sometimes letting things fizzle out
in the most unexpected ways
might be a blessing in disguise for some people.
Look what happened to John Galliano at Dior.
- [Bystander] Ah, yeah. Yeah, too much.
- Could it have been avoided?
I think so, I do.
- He had rung me, saying that he was really frightened.
He was being asked to work so hard.
He said, "Help me, Amanda."
- Only beautiful people.
- [Customer] Awful.
(tense somber music)
- [Reporter] On Thursday evening John Galliano
was arrested for the suspected verbal abuse
of a female customer.
- [Reporter] The British fashion designer John Galliano
has been sacked by his employers, Dior.
(camera shutters whirring) (reporters clamouring)
(gentle tense music)
(camera shutters whirring)
(tennis ball clattering)
(gentle ambient music)
- What happened to the four designers,
like Tom Ford, John Galliano, Lee McQueen, and Marc Jacobs,
is an incredible coda.
There is the beginning, the middle, and an end,
and it's so dramatic that each of those ends is dramatic.
Tom deposed, Lee dead, John career suicide,
and Marc in a kind of limbo.
(clock ticking)
(clock bell gonging)
(water fountain whooshing)
- We all dress to show the world
what we want them to see
and the knowing demi-monde of Paris
has always been coolly dressed in black.
So when we tried to think about
what we gonna do for the set,
I just said, "Let's use bits of the sets from the past
"and just make them black."
I mean, you know, just all black.
(gentle pensive music) (water fountain whooshing)
(gentle pensive music continues)
- It was probably
one of the most difficult things to achieve
that I have ever done.
I bought everything single peacock feather in Europe,
and they were all coming in trucks from different places.
Every hat work in Paris I knew of was working on them.
I hadn't been to bed for two days
so I could barely stand up.
Marc and I were just standing next to each other,
he turned to me and said,
"This is my last show for Louis Vuitton, I'm leaving."
We were like, "Oh, my God."
(audience applauding)
He knew but he hadn't told anybody.
He wanted to do the show and then leave.
It's not like he wanted to make this big drama out of it.
We were all very sad and it was a very emotional time.
I think we all burst into tears, of course, it's fashion.
(crowd chattering)
- Felt very emotional for me. - Did it?
- [Reporter] For me.
- It didn't feel like so emotional to me.
Well, I mean, it's always emotional to me
and it's emotional to all of us
'cause we put our heart and soul into it, you know?
That's why we do it. We love fashion.
(gentle thoughtful music)
- Superstar designers, I think, were absolutely crucial
to a particular phase of the luxury industry,
which is building it up from becoming a name
to becoming a brand.
But once they had become real brands they were businesses,
and therefore, you can find people to work in that business
who have creativity but who are a bit less larger than life
than some of these designers were at the time.
- [Bystander] We love you, Marc.
- Oh, thank you. Thank you.
- Bye-bye, Mr. Jacobs. - Bye-bye.
Sorry, bye.
(gentle delicate music)
- In the end, the tycoons, the gods,
in a sense, overlooking this kingdom, reigned omnipotent.
And their princes, they treated them very well,
they gave them all the riches,
they gave them everything that they ever wanted or desired.
But when it was time for them to go
or they cracked up and fell on their own, they were gone.
The tycoons, the gods, they were the untouchables.
None of this sad, dirty, side of fashion,
luxury, dirtied them.
- Actually, before I went to rehab,
I did try to reach out to them
but my calls were not accepted.
And quite recently I tried to reach out, as well,
but the message I got was that perhaps it was too early.
(sirens blaring) (gentle suspenseful music)
- [Dana] In the age of globalisation and hyper-capitalism,
the luxury fashion business
grew into a monster of a business,
just gigantic in a way that I don't even think
Bernard Arnault could have originally imagined.
Greed and envy are what drive fashion tycoons
in the kingdom of dreams, who whip up this exaggerated,
unobtainable idea of glamor and beauty.
♪ Ah, ah ♪
♪ Ah ♪
- [Dana] What they sell you is a marketing dream of beauty,
of hand-craftsmanship, of the finest materials.
Of the most glorious designs.
It reminds me a lot of the Emerald City
in the "Wizard of Oz."
It just looks like this glittering, glamorous,
beautiful place made of emeralds that sparkle.
And then, in the end, there's a man behind the curtain
with a machine turning on the sparkle,
and it's all just smoke and mirrors, that's what it is.
♪ Ah, ah ♪
♪ Ah ♪
♪ Ah, ah ♪
(climatic dramatic music)
(delicate pensive music)
(delicate pensive music continues)
♪ Ah, ah ♪
(delicate pensive music continues)