Kingdom of Dreams — the making of modern luxury as a ‘gothic fairytale’

The 1990s was a different world when it came to fashion. That much is clear from Kingdom of Dreams, the Sky mini-series that chronicles the time when designers such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford were knocking out jaw-dropping collections in the glare of the media spotlight, while behind the scenes the industry was being transformed into a global money-making machine by nascent luxury conglomerates.

The documentary begins in the mid-80s, when Dior was almost bankrupt, Gucci was mired in family feuds and Givenchy was — and here is the ultimate fashion industry burn — “no longer relevant”.

Enter Bernard Arnault, now CEO and chair of LVMH and the third richest person on the globe. We meet him as he takes control of ailing retail and textile group Boussac Saint-Frères, which was then the owner of Christian Dior. He sacks thousands of staff and sells off most of the group’s assets, earning him the nicknames “terminator” and “wolf in cashmere”. Dior becomes the bedrock of his luxury empire, which soon includes Givenchy and Louis Vuitton.

The series tracks Arnault as he pumps cash and energy into these brands, hiring hot young designers to create buzz and re-engineering luxury fashion’s entire business model. Brands that once focused on making exquisite clothes and handcrafted objects became about selling a dream to the masses via lipsticks and handbags.

The show’s directors, Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, also made 2018’s critically acclaimed documentary McQueen, about the staggering rise and tragic suicide of the British designer. Ettedgui says this series was born from “unfinished business” from that film. “We became fascinated by this idea of designers making a Faustian pact, selling their names and their souls to these at the time new conglomerates for untold wealth, without which they would not have been able to produce their collections.”

The emotional heart of the series is the designers: we track McQueen’s struggles to please Arnault when he is hired at Givenchy in 1996, and Galliano’s unspooling under the weight of vast numbers of collections he must produce at Dior. We see Marc Jacobs fraying at the seams after he is hired to create the first clothing collection for Louis Vuitton in 1997, and Tom Ford spearheading spectacular success at Gucci before the brand is acquired by Arnault rival François Pinault.

It is poignant to see a young McQueen barrelling around the rarefied world of French fashion, playing up his cockney geezer persona for laughs and crying at the beauty of one of his shows, in which a pair of robot arms spray-paint a dress worn by the model Shalom Harlow. It is sad, too, to see a wunderkind Galliano, baby-faced and frequently dressed as a pirate, long before a horrifying anti-Semitic rant ended his tenure at Dior.

The film certainly plays up the industry’s dark reputation, opening with ominous strings, an illustration of blood diffusing in a perfume bottle, a city skyline image that transforms into what looks like a line of cocaine. Then a voiceover says: “You’ve got to love what’s at the core of the industry or it will kill you. And even then, it will kill you,” just in case you missed the subtext.

None of the key players were interviewed for the documentary, which is based on journalist Dana Thomas’s book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre. Instead, the film is grounded in archive interviews and rarely seen industry footage, which brims with drama and indiscretion. There’s Yves Saint Laurent sitting on the front row next to Arnault, bemoaning the “nightmare” of his brand’s takeover by the Gucci Group, begging his seatmate to “get me out of this mess”, before he realises his words are being caught by overhead microphones. There’s Jacobs being booed for keeping a crowd of fashion dignitaries waiting two hours for his show and afterwards telling journalists: “Fuck them. The only opinion that matters is my own.” And behold McQueen delivering a similarly punchy backstage soundbite about his new bosses at Givenchy: “I don’t give a shit, they either like it or not. If they don’t like it they can sack me.”

As a former fashion editor — I spent 2014-21 reporting on the show circuit — I can’t help drinking it all up. The fashion world I covered was the world Arnault built, and it was nothing like this one. Instead, it was generally shiny and orderly, profitable and punctual. There was no swearing in interviews backstage, because most designers were media trained to within an inch of their lives and seldom commented on anything more controversial than this season’s trouser length. More’s the pity.

But while I might feel nostalgia for the party I missed, this era was also redolent with sadness. Ettedgui describes the series as a “gothic fairytale”. In fashion, “it seems like there’s a lot of beauty and light, and at the same time, there is always the vanitas figure. The skull, the memento mori in McQueen, just seemed appropriate for the whole industry. There is this illusion of eternal beauty and youth and perfection. And yet we know that’s a lie, behind which lurks the fact of our mortality.”

Casting fashion people as baddies is not exactly a new idea, stretching from the emperor’s new clothes to Cruella de Vil to Miranda Priestly, the editor in The Devil Wears Prada. The bad guy in this film is presumably Arnault, with his seemingly ruthless obsession with the bottom line, regardless of the fraying, exhausted designers around him. Is he supposed to be the villain of the piece?

Ettedgui tells me he feels ambivalent about that question. “On one side, the same energy and entrepreneurship that might have been talked about with the designers is true of Arnault,” he says, and points out that the designers’ behaviour wasn’t exactly spotless either. At the same time, says Ettedgui, the show’s composer Ilan Eshkeri “couldn’t resist writing music for Arnault that has the impression of a great white shark moving in for the kill”. What he did, adds Bonhôte, is “almost created the world of fashion that we know now. He made it less about designers, but more about the name on top of the door. And that is globalisation.”

‘Kingdom of Dreams’ is available to watch on Now TV and Sky

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