Drake, Alicia 1968-

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Drake, Alicia 1968-

PERSONAL:

Born May, 1968; married. Education: Studied at Cambridge University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Paris, France. Agent—Lizzy Kramer, David Higham Associates, 5-8 Lower John St., Golden Sq., London W1F 9HA, England.

CAREER:

Freelance writer. Also worked as a tour guide in France.

WRITINGS:

A Shopper's Guide to Paris Fashion, Metro (London, England), 1997.

The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris, Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including International Herald Tribune, Vogue (UK), and contributing editor to W and Travel and Leisure.

SIDELIGHTS:

Alicia Drake first traveled to France while studying at Cambridge University. She was a tour-group leader for a group of nearly fifty American students. Drake kept returning, however, before ultimately moving to Paris with her husband. Drake worked as a freelance writer, particularly on the fashion industry, with a number of periodicals, including W, International Herald Tribune, Vogue (UK), and Travel and Leisure magazine. In an interview with Terrance Gelenter in Paris through Expatriate Eyes, Drake recalled the day she had an epiphany when she "realized that I had to write a book—I couldn't write another magazine article…. I remember a very dramatic moment. I took all of the magazines in which I had articles and piled them into great big pile in the middle of the room and realizing that they were all I had to show for all my angst and fear and work and it couldn't go on. From that moment I had an overwhelming desire to write a book."

In 2006, Drake published The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris. Accumulating more than one hundred interviews with fashion industry leaders and insiders, Drake retells the decades-long tit-for-tat squabbles between fashion behemoths Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld. Although the industry strives for perfection on the surface, Drake got beneath the superficial level to show both the achievements and failures of these men. Reviews of the book were mixed. Thom Barthelmess, reviewing the work in Booklist, said that "Drake makes a good case for the extraordinary nature of [Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent's] achievements and the revolutionary effect of their competitive energy on the fashion industry." Writing in the London Times, Colin McDowell was less impressed, saying that The Beautiful Fall was "a cold collation of a book, warmed over at the edges but only palatable to readers who are interested in the spectacle of two ageing fashion designers living preposterously luxurious and artificial lives and wondering who is the greater, or to those lost fashion souls who like gossip so much that they will still lap it up." Stacy Hinojosa wrote positively of the book in a UniversityChic.com review. Hinojosa thought that Drake "brilliantly chronicles the escapades of both designers and their entourages with explicit details provided by first-hand accounts as told to Drake by the very people who held court with Lagerfeld and Saint Laurent during the tumultuous decade."