Thierry Mugler, Genre-Busting French Fashion Designer, Dies at 73

The dominatrix-loving couturier turned sex into a style weapon.

Thierry Mugler, the outrageous, genre-busting French designer who dominated European runways in the late 1980s and early 1990s, died on Sunday at his home in Vincennes, outside Paris. He was 73.

His death was announced on his brand’s official Instagram. The cause was not given.

Mr. Mugler was a principal architect of a style that washed away the minimalism of the late 1970s and replaced it with an aesthetic of power dressing that was both bombastic and camp, a comic-book fusion of S&M and high fashion in which a drag queen, a prostitute and a Reaganite social X-ray of “Bonfire of the Vanities” became almost the same person, as if standing before a three-way mirror.