The fashion designer who gave women power dressing

When you think of 1980s fashion, everyone automatically thinks of broad shoulders. This is mainly thanks to Claude Montana. This French designer, who started his own fashion brand in 1979, already showed razor-sharp shoulders and tightly constricted waists in his very first collection. ‘Power dressing‘ for career women. Claude Montana died on February 23 in Paris, aged 76.

In the 1980s, designer Thierry Mugler also showed broad shoulders, but Montana far exceeded them in size. Shopkeepers who bought his clothes even complained that they kept falling off the hangers. Cher, Diana Ross, Grace Jones – the biggest style icons of that time were loved to be seen in his clothes. When he introduced a men’s line in 1981, Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis followed. Ultimately, his broad shoulders reached all levels of fashion, making him one of the most copied designers ever. In 1985 the The New York Times that Montana “is for broad shoulders what Alexander Graham Bell is for the telephone.”

In the second half of the eighties he left his motto “shoulders forever!” more and more sailing. From 1988 onwards, all his clothes had shoulders with normal proportions.

He was born in Paris in 1947 as Claude Montamat (Clau-Clau to friends) and grew up in a wealthy family with a German mother and a Spanish father. When he refused to go to college after high school, he moved to London to escape his father’s disappointment. There he designed jewelery made of papier-mâché and rhinestones, which was featured on the cover of the British magazine in 1971. Vogue end up. When he returned to Paris after a few years, he became a pattern maker at the leather brand Mac Douglas, which gave him a lifelong love for leather. Within a year he was promoted to chief designer. In the years before he started his own label, he designed for various fashion houses.

As successful as he was in the eighties, he had so many setbacks in the nineties. From 1990 he started designing couture for fashion house Lanvin. His collections won major fashion awards, but sold so poorly that Lanvin fired him after just two years. In 1993, the openly gay designer, who had been openly gay for many years, married the American model Wallis Franken, his muse since the 1970s, to the surprise of his friends. In 1996, she committed suicide by jumping from the kitchen window of their Paris apartment. A year later he went bankrupt. Then it became quiet. In 2013 he stated Vanity Fair one of his last interviews. He missed fashion, he said.

Montana’s influence has always been visible in fashion. Recent Saint Laurent collections feature jackets and blouses with broad shoulders that appear to be taken directly from him.

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