Author of "Gods & Kings" Dana Thomas in Santa Barbara

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - April 5, 2015 - PRLog -- If you’re a ‘fashionista’ then you need to save Saturday, April 11 at 2 pm to come and meet Dana Thomas, the author of “Gods and Kings, The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.”  Buy a book, get it signed and ask her your questions about the fashion world at The Book Den, 15 E. Anapamu St., in downtown Santa Barbara.

Just thirty years ago, haute couture catered to a few hundred socialites globally and was in the hands of a few European family firms.  Today, it is a major cultural force, and the CEOs of the great fashion conglomerates are some of the world’s richest people.  Dana Thomas reveals how this momentous change came about. This American girl began her career in modeling but eventually moved over to reporting on the fashion scene from the hub of couture’s wheel… Paris, France for places like Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Times.  She also authored, “Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.”

Reviews on her current book are outstanding:

“A compelling drama about the high-stakes world of couture culture….This is a dark story about excess, commerce, aristocracy and fashion as high theater that is as operatic as the dizzying shows it describes. A deep dive into the provocative art of creation and the toll it exacts from those touched by its gifts.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Dana Thomas has written a real-life saga that is as engaging and compelling as a work of great fiction. By taking us inside the fascinating world of fashion, she gives us a startling tale of ambition, creativity, ambition, fame, and ultimately tragedy. This is a terrific book.” —Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson and American Lion

"McQueen and Galliano were two peas in a perverse pod who revolutionized fashion. No one but Dana Thomas could have explained with such insight how their fantasies became ours and directed our dreams."— Richard Johnson, Columnist, New York Post

“Comprehensive, detailed, coldly accurate yet extraordinarily sympathetic, Dana Thomas’s Gods and Kings is a fascinating double biography of two dressmakers of genius. But it's also a riveting, definitive history of the three decades in which fashion devolved from a coddling cottage business to a cutthroat industry quite capable of killing its young. As commerce triumphs over art, you can only cringe, but you also have to admire Thomas's exhaustive account of what fashion folk would no doubt refer to as a moment that will never, and can never, be repeated.”

—Michael Gross, author of Model and House of Outrageous Fortune

“John Galliano and Alexander McQueen raised the bar creatively and theatrically with their high-impact fashion shows. In Gods and Kings, Paris based fashion writer Dana Thomas digs deep with the zeal of a historian, to chronicle the parallel dramas of the British fashion wunderkinds, whose careers ended tragically, way too soon.”—Teri Agins, author of Hijacking the Runway and The End of Fashion

Remember -- Saturday, April 11 at 2 pm, Dana will be at The Book Den, 15 E. Anapamu in Santa Barbara from 2 – 4 pm to autograph her book “Gods & Kings” about the famous fashion leaders – John Galliano and the late Alexander McQueen.

Questions? Contact Maureen “Mo” McFadden  - mcmpr101@gmail.com

See you there!