The Other Claude Montana

The French designer, who died on Friday in Paris, was a gifted couturier. He was also a cocaine-addled wife beater.

In 1996, Tina Brown, then-editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, assigned me an investigative piece about the suicide of Wallis Franken Montana, the wife of French fashion designer Claude Montana. It was the most upsetting story I have ever reported.

As the piece wended its way through The New Yorker’s rigorous editing and fact-checking process, we got scooped by Vanity Fair, and Tina killed my story. I hadn’t thought about it again until last night, when I saw that Montana, a 1980s fashion star known as the “King of the Shoulder Pads,” died, at 76. No cause of death was given, though he had long suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

Claude Montana and Wallis Franken at their wedding, Paris, 1993.

This weekend, you will read in all the papers and on social media about how gifted Montana was as a designer. He was—and he was extremely arrogant. One of the tidbits I gleamed while reporting the piece: In 1989, Christian Dior owner Bernard Arnault offered Montana the artistic director’s job at Dior, and Montana turned it down; he went to Lanvin instead, as director of haute couture, believing the house to be grander, and more important, than Dior.

Arnault hired Italian designer Gianfranco Ferré, who stayed eight years. (He was replaced by John Galliano.) Montana lasted two at Lanvin, during which, in a cocaine-fueled mania, he terrorized assistants, and the company lost $50 million. He was fired. (I heard all about the toxic environment in Montana’s Lanvin studio while working on my book, Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano; one of Montana’s assistants, John Flett, was John Galliano’s first steady boyfriend.)

What you probably won’t see in the mainstream media, and what I learned while reporting this story, is that Claude Montana was also a drug-addled, physically violent monster who drove his American fashion model wife to kill herself.

Upon reading about his death this morning, I decided to pull the spiked piece from my archives, and post it here on The Style Files.