Designers Speak From the Grave-To Make the Dead Talk !!

Designers Speak From the Grave

The concept sounds as though it could stretch credulity. But as chief curator of fashion and textiles at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Ms. Golbin has both feet planted solidly on the ground. No spooky seances here.Ms. Golbin draws from interviews,...

Oh, to make the dead talk. 

Curator Pamela Golbin has done that in her latest book, in which she “interviews” 11 famous deceased fashion designers from their graves. 

The concept sounds as though it could stretch credulity. But as chief curator of fashion and textiles at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Ms. Golbin has both feet planted solidly on the ground. No spooky seances here.

Ms. Golbin draws from interviews, biographies and autobiographies with designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Balmain and Gabrielle Chanel to answer her questions. Her literary contrivance is like a spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down. In her primly polite style, Ms. Golbin manages to coax her interview subjects to revelations that make them seem very much alive. “Couture Confessions: Fashion Legends In Their Own Words” will be published early next month by Rizzoli Ex Libris.

The best part of “Confessions” is that the chats could have taken place last week for “People” magazine. “Are drugs inherent to fashion and its stressful environment?” Ms. Golbin asks the late Lee Alexander McQueen, whose 2010 suicide raised questions about job pressure and drug-taking in the fashion industry.

“The job is a drug in itself, and drugs are part of the job,” Mr. McQueen replies in blunt words taken from two interviews, according to the book’s careful end notes. “Yeah. I do drugs. Yeah, I’ve experienced everything there is to experience. Don’t tell me there’s anyone in my business who hasn’t.”

The idea for “Confessions” came from Ms. Golbin’s 2009 exhibit on Madeleine Vionnet, for which she published an imaginary Q&A in the museum’s program. “I got fan mail for Madeleine Vionnet,” who died at 98 in 1975, Ms. Golbin says. “People wrote and said, ‘Would you give this to her?’ ” Initially perplexed, she concluded people were responding to the lively conversational tone, so different from most curatorial texts.

The approach may lead a reader to conclude that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yves Saint Laurent worried in 2002 that fashion had become “all show and not enough content.” Paul Poiret, who died in Paris in 1944, fussed that fast pace of fashion left him too little time to design. 

Mr. Poiret, who banished the corset and introduced dresses designed for brassieres, was nonetheless not quite as revolutionary as he is recalled to be. “Are there fashions you do not appreciate?” Ms. Golbin asks.

“Yes, I am against short skirts,” Mr. Poiret complains, in a comment taken from a 1925 interview in Harper’s Bazaar. “A sad sight!”

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com