Claude Montana, fashion designer whose look defined the 1980s, dies at 76

Claude Montana, the daring and haunted French designer whose exquisite tailoring defined the big-shouldered power look of the 1980s — an erotic and androgynous tough chic that won him fame and accolades until he was felled by drugs and tragedy in the 1990s — died on Friday in France. He was 76.

The Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode confirmed the death, but did not specify a cause or say where he died.

“His clothes were fierce, with a force that was both militaristic and highly eroticized,” says Valerie Steele, director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “It wasn’t the American power look of the shoulder-padded director. He was a different kind of working woman.”

Mr. Montana often drew inspiration from the world of Paris’ after-hours demimonde: the sex workers and dominatrixes, the denizens of the leather bars he frequented. But he wasn’t just about eradicating fetish gear.

“His tailoring was impeccable,” Josh Patner, former fashion coordinator at Bergdorf Goodman, said by phone. “His clothing consisted of meticulous, beautiful objects. He defined the design language of his time. The power relations of the eighties, the unreasonably tight surfaces, the hard edges made it sensual.”

Although personally shy and recessive, Mr. Montana was nevertheless a born showman. From his first show, in 1977, when he sent out models in full leather regalia, with the epaulettes of their jackets wrapped in chains, his presentations in Paris were among the busiest. Certainly, his shows were among the most difficult to participate in.

“You waited and you waited and you waited,” said Kate Betts, a fashion journalist and author, in a telephone interview. “But they were worth every minute. His tailoring was scalpel sharp. The level of perfectionism was intense.”

Claude Montamat was born on June 29, 1947 in Paris, one of three siblings. He changed his last name in the 1970s, he said, because people kept mispronouncing it. His mother was German, his father Spanish and the family was wealthy. “Very civil,” he told The Washington Post in 1985. “They wanted me to become something I didn’t want to be.”

He left home when he was 17 and moved to London, where he began making papier-mâché jewelry that was featured on the cover of British Vogue. But back home in Paris, where he returned in 1973, he could not find a market for his pieces and through a friend he got a job as a cutter for Mac Douglas, a luxury leather clothing company. A year later he was chief designer. In 1976 he was on his own.

A full obituary will be published soon.