‘It will show you what a Beauty will become in order to please a Beast’1: McLaren and Moore’s Fashion Beast as commentary on the fashion industry

The result of a collaboration in the 1980s between provocative fashion industry insider Malcolm McLaren and leading comic book writer Alan Moore, the graphic novel Fashion Beast (2013) has an inherent interest. The fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, as retold in Jean Cocteau’s film La Belle et La Bête (1946) formed the basis for their reinterpretation of Christian Dior’s life as a ‘fashion beast’. McLaren and Moore’s scepticism towards authority and capitalism and Moore’s rejection of Thatcherism have also left their mark on the story. Using mirrors as structuring metaphors, Moore lets struggles over values and identity play out in a dystopian urban environment centred on the House of Celestine. My study introduces McLaren and Moore’s collaboration on Fashion Beast. I then outline the plot of Moore’s graphic novel. The bulk of the study focuses on status-seeking model Doll Seguin, trickster–provocateur and aspiring designer Jonni Tare, and Jean-Claude Celestine, the Dior-like ‘fashion beast’ who is creative director of the House of Celestine. Through these characters, Moore exposes the ‘bestial’ nature of the fashion industry’s preoccupation with style and appearance, which goes hand in hand with its cultivation of the status-enhancing power of the image. Moore’s open-ended plot makes us wonder if there is any solution to the problems plaguing the fashion industry as depicted in Fashion Beast.