She stands atop the Empire State Building wearing a stainless-steel evening gown and sporting cut-glass fingernails. Her eyelashes are made of scorpion stingers. Her elaborate coiffure is fashioned from platinum wire. She doesn’t care if she gets struck by lightning. She is lightning. Her laserlike pupils are searching the sky for passenger planes. She will destroy them with her gaze. She is Cruella de Fabulous. She is Cunty von Mugler. Thierry Mugler—the founding designer of this storied house—took the cruelty and beauty and madness of fashion, and magnified it and pumped it full of steroids and doused it with gasoline, torched it and owned it. His vision had staggering breadth and imagination. Within Thierry’s universe, there were myriad archetypes: vampires, space aliens, Sicilian widows, B-movie sluts, praying mantises, superheroines, ascending virgins, homicidal secretaries and jump-suited communistic cult members. The Mugler frame of reference was broad and rich, and the designs, perfectly expressing each theme and variation, were always exquisitely and meticulously executed.
