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"In the summer, a short 32-year-old man with long sideburns and the docile face of an overgrown infant became the most famous man in America. It happened, as these things do, after an unpredictable turn of events that can never be replicated. I had a baby this summer, so I missed pretty much the whole life cycle, but here's how I understand it: First he had eight kids, then he got a show on a cable channel about it, then he and his wife had a kind of public breakup on the show. And then all hell broke loose. Jon and Kate Gosselin became this peculiar kind of famous, infamous more like, where the people who are obsessed with you complain all the time about how you shouldn't be famous. At what might have been the very apogee of his famousness, at the moment he commanded the most attention he will likely command for the rest of his life, Jon Gosselin appeared in the C\u00F4te d'Azur with his new 22-year-old girlfriend on the yacht of a fashion designer named Christian Audigier. During a photo session on the streets of St-Tropez, Audigier announced he would be designing a children's line with Gosselin (something he later said he won't actually do). This was just a few months after Audigier announced a joint clothing venture with Madonna. Which was not long after he was seen shopping with Michael Jackson, who, it seemed, was living in a house owned by Audigier's CEO at the time of his death. Audigier was designing clothes with Michael Jackson, too.\n\nIn the next few days, Christian Audigier became even more visible than he normally made himself\u2014standing next to Gosselin in photographs, in a pink T-shirt, pink jeans, short-cropped gray hair, and the kind of tan you normally have only if you're 97 and have been sitting by the pool in Boca Raton for three decades. Many people, like myself, did not really know who Christian Audigier was. We live a sartorially sheltered life. A life of muted colors and subtle designs. An existence with the first fashion principle of offending no one. Christian Audigier, though, is arguably the most successful independent clothing designer of the past decade. His most popular brand is called Ed Hardy. Or more accurately, Ed Hardy by Christian Audigier. The aesthetic is what he describes as tattoo lifestyle\u2014mostly extremely expensive \"luxury\" T-shirts and sweatshirts drenched in layered images of bulldogs and jaguars and skulls and roses and cryptic phrases, especially love kills slowly, not to mention bright colors, metallic overlays, sequins, and rhinestones. Last year, he says, he did in the neighborhood of $80 million in business.\n\nChristian is also the man (mostly, or maybe partially) behind the infamous brand Von Dutch. The man who claims to have brought us the modern trucker hat, or at least the idea that you could sell them for more than $100 each on a mass scale. The man who claims to have invented the idea that to market a brand, all you need to do is put clothes with big logos on celebrities. Regardless of how you feel about the product, Christian Audigier started two unpredicted and very popular trends in succession with basically no traditional marketing budget. He could be said to know something about us and what we want.\n\n As soon as I'd found out who he was, it was like I'd always known. It was like I had been willfully blind to Christian Audigier, the French king of denim and bling. I realized I'd been seeing people everywhere wearing his clothes, though I'd pretended not to. Men in rhinestone-skull trucker hats, women in sweatshirts jungled in Christian Audigier's initials, with little grenades sprouting gold-leaf angels' wings with crowns hovering over them. It's like a veil was lifted. I saw dead people.\n\n And it is a kind of blindness, really. The rest of the fashion world also denies the existence of Ed Hardy and/or Christian Audi-gier. Barneys, Saks, even New York Fashion Week, where American designers have their fashion shows\u2014in none of these places are the names Ed Hardy or Christian Audigier breathed. The fact that he sells this stuff\u2014not just literally tons of T-shirts and caps but tons of luxury-priced status items unapproved by the luxury-status complex\u2014reflects something about ourselves that people in positions of fashionable power would rather not admit. Christian Audigier is an inconvenient truth.\n\nOn the home page of his Web site, Christian Audigier appeared in a photograph, naked from the waist up, in a swimming pool. On his back was a giant tattoo, which reads christian audigier est. 1958. I found the \"contact us\" link on the site and sent off a message\u2014can I come out and interview Christian Audigier? As a writer for GQ, I send out e-mails like this every day. Many of them\u2014like the e-mail I sent to Bernard Madoff's lawyer asking if I could come over to the penthouse for an interview\u2014simply disappear into the Internet. I think it was about thirty-eight seconds later that I got an e-mail response from a woman who worked for Christian named Nicole. She said yes, I can come interview him. How about next week, or maybe the week after? Yeah, sure, either week, that works. Can I come to his office? Yes. His trade show (which is, seriously, called When I Move You Move)? Yes. Will he fly me to the show on his private jet? Sure. Can I make love to his really tall Brazilian wife on the white fur bedspread at their Topanga Canyon ranch? Totally. Everything (except of course that last bit, which I didn't ask) she said was totally fine. All I had to do was show up.\n\n\n\nIf you want evidence of what Christian Audigier has made himself into, look no farther than his new offices in Beverly Hills. A far cry from Avignon, motherfuckers. A far cry from being a 14-year-old dropout working at the Jean Machine shop in the South of France in the '70s, where he began his long, recursive climb through the world of denim sportswear. (If you invented a name for the place Christian Audigier came from, you couldn't do better than the Jean Machine. Or, wait, I think I may have done it: Frenchy Pimptown.)\n\nAudigier Brand Management is housed in what you'd more likely call a palazzo than an office building. A freestanding brick mansion with grand filigreed stone casement windows, a mansard roof, a driveway where your Bentley is parked in a designated space. The door is heavy and wood, with iron detailing; the front desk is paneled in leather; there's a perfectly weathered Ralph Lauren\u2013like heavy bag in the waiting room, a large moody black-and-white R&amp;amp;B-record-cover-style portrait of Christian in the entryway. And once I entered and could take in the whole balustraded open floor plan straight up to the skylight, I saw laid out on the white marble floor a stuffed albino peacock, a long leather bench with a fur thrown over it, and what appeared to be a precise replica of the chopper from Easy Rider, with the Stars and Stripes carapace and everything. It was not immediately clear what any of these items meant, but it did give you a feeling. It made you feel rich and male; it made you feel like drinking champagne with a beautiful prostitute. It brings to mind the kind of place that makes us wonder, once the IRS comes to seize everything, how could we not have known about the fraud? Which, let me be clear, is not what I'm accusing Christian of\u2014whatever fraud he's perpetrating is not the secret kind.\n\n It wasn't long after the tour of the building that Christian had us assembled in the office of his personal assistant, Carol Leffler\u2014me, Carol, Christian, a guy named Tracey, whose job it is to be friends with rappers and professional athletes, and Nicole, the woman from marketing who said I could come here in the first place. Christian smelled great. He was even tanner than he is in his publicity shots. He's built low to the ground, with a wide nose and black eyes buried deep in his face. If he was never on a rugby team or in the Russian Mafia, he really missed his calling. He was wearing dark jeans and a cream-colored long-sleeve T-shirt. He almost never wears the clothes he designs, which leads some people to wonder whether he actually likes them.\n\n \"I'm going to be in a movie with 50 Cents!\" he said, sitting in Carol's office. He probably realizes he doesn't always get the plurals right in English, but fuck it. He never took any English classes or anything, but that never stopped people from understanding him. And maybe there's no one better positioned to exploit the fact that we, as a society, have moved past the importance of meaning than the European denim-sportswear designer.\n\n \"Seriously?\" I said. \"You're going to be in a movie?\"\n\n \"Yeah!\" he said. \"I will play a French designer with a troubled past. 50 Cents play my bodyguard.\" As he was giving a plot synopsis, he dialed his cell phone and had me talk to an agent named David Weintraub, who was producing the movie. Christian grinned at me as we spoke. Weintraub is known for both producing and being in reality TV shows that are called things like Sons of Hollywood and Sober House; he will subsequently become the spokesperson for that lady who was in the naked video with Eric Dane and Rebecca Gayheart. Weintraub told me it was he who'd introduced Ed Hardy clothes to his dear friend Tori Spelling a few years ago, and that it had basically saved her birthday party.\n\n \"It's going to be 48 Hrs. meets Shanghai Knights,\"he said.\n\n Can he act?\n\n \"The guy is a natural,\" David said. And then he said Christian Audigier was going to kick people's asses in this movie. \"Christian is into fighting, boxing, martial arts. And he wants to show people that side. That skill set.\" (By the end of the summer, David Weintraub would no longer be working with Christian. Carol and Nicole would also be replaced.)\n\n When I had given him his phone back and he'd wiped off the ear grease on his jeans, he told me that he was also putting out an album. His intermediary needed only five minutes to sell Universal on the idea. (Of course, that deal would later get cloudy.) He would call the album My American Dream. Kanye was going to be on it, and 50 Cent.\n\n \"I am not shy,\" Christian said. \"I have a vision. The industry of music is dead. The industry of film is dead. So I am going to go full-in to create something new.\"\n\n It was afternoon in Beverly Hills. Yellow sun fell through the heavy wood slats and onto the marble floor. Christian sat on the sofa and played with his lighter. Carol looked at him and just couldn't keep from smiling. What I'd notice, being with Christian, is that he's always surrounded by devotees. People seem to understand that their job might only be to hang around Christian and smile at him. A man in a white server's jacket and black tie came in carrying crystal glasses filled with water.\n\n I asked everyone what his favorite perk of working here was\u2014like was it the free clothes, or the private chef, or going to Las Vegas for trade shows, or waiters bringing you crystal glasses of water in the afternoon? I figured this would be a good topic for people who worked in what looks like an episode of MTV's Cribs. But somehow it turned into this game where everyone went around the circle saying what it is they loved about working with Christian Audigier.\n\n Nicole spoke first. She used to be a Laker Girl. Christian met her when she was working at a restaurant and hired her on the spot. \"If you're hungry and you believe in him,\" Nicole said, \"he'll let you shine.\"\n\n Christian beamed at her, as if he were just discovering that she could turn into a parrot and then turn back.\n\n \"Christian really does believe in us,\" his assistant, Carol, said. She's pretty, the kind of fortysomething woman who wears spandex leggings, which is what she was wearing. He hired her out of a restaurant, too. \"All he asks is that you believe in him and you don't ever tell him, \u2018No, I can't.' \"\n\n A film crew came into the room then and stuck a boom mike over Carol's head while she talked. For the past five years or so, Christian has employed a film crew to follow him around wherever he goes. He says someday he will make a documentary about his life.\n\n \"Christian gave me an enormous amount,\" Tracey said. The camera crew shifted toward him. Tracey is the brother of a former NBA player and Lil Bow Wow's uncle. He introduced Christian to Puff and Kanye and lots of other people. \"I never thought of my friends as a way of business. Christian showed me how to do that.\"\n\n Christian's makeup artist, who I guess keeps him camera-ready during all his waking hours, came in, opened her tackle box, found a little sponge, and touched up his nose as he smoked his cigarette out of the corner of his mouth.\n\n \"People say I am a m\u00E9galo__!\" Christian said then. I think m\u00E9galo is French slang for, you know, narcissist. \"I am not a m\u00E9galo. I am an artist. That's it. Putting my face on a poster. Going onstage. That is what artists do.\"\n\n\n\nIt's amazing how many people don't think he's French French. Like, isn't he really Moroccan? Or Iranian? One of those kinds of Francophones? At least Jewish? I don't know what it says about us that we don't think French people are capable of selling really loud clothes at a huge markup.\n\nBut as far as I know, he is French French. I'm going to gloss over most of the early biography. The childhood in Avignon, the absconding of the father at an early age, the period in which he worked at the Jean Machine and became the greatest salesman that little town had ever seen. I'll gloss over the part where he becomes a jeans designer at age 15; his precipitous rise to the station of King of Denim (an actual phrase used to describe him) and freelance designer for twenty different brands; his precipitous fall and bankruptcy (forgot about the payroll tax!) and the five-year hiatus in Bali, to which he'd escaped with enough money to open a few stores and bars and restaurants. Other events I'll gloss over: his first two marriages and the birth of his first child, Crystal Rock Audigier; the fateful afternoon when he was with Jean-Claude Van Damme in Cannes (dude, think about that for a minute) and he met the very tall, very beautiful Brazilian woman who would bear him three children and to whom he is now married. We'll pick up the thread at the famous Las Vegas trade show known as Magic, in the year 2002, when a former Tae Kwon Do champion from the Netherlands, who had just licensed the work of an obscure '50s car-culture artist and rumored neo-Nazi named Von Dutch, hired Christian to design a denim line for him.\n\n \"I was thinking I make this into Levi's,\" Christian said. \"I was dreaming all my life of America, of the blue jean, of Marlon Brando. And the trucker hat.\"\n\n Marlon Brando. And, you know, the trucker hat.\n\n The thing about the trucker hat that no one had taken advantage of, Christian said, is that you can see the logo really clearly when it's on the head of a famous person in a photograph. If Lindsay Lohan were wearing 7 for All Mankind jeans when she crashed into a Pinkberry and got her picture taken doing a sobriety test, who would know? Not the case if she were wearing a Von Dutch hat. One afternoon, after he'd designed the line and they'd opened the Von Dutch boutique on Melrose, he saw Britney Spears shopping and chased her down. One thing Christian can do is talk to famous people. He does it with just the right mixture of enthusiasm and brazenness and ass-kissery.\n\n \"And three weeks later,\" he said, \"she split with Justin Timberlake. They was on People magazine, both of them, with the page cracking, you know. Was her with the cap Von Dutch, was him with the cap Von Dutch, and Fred Durst who she was dating at the time with the T-shirt Von Dutch. And\u2014\" he snaps\u2014\"this is where the story start.\" (Von Dutch was all over magazines like People and US Weekly, but this particular story doesn't appear to exist.)\n\n I asked him who the first label was to put clothes on celebrities as a market strategy.\n\n \"I was.\"\n\n Really?\n\n \"At this time this kind of pop culture is completely new. Remember, it is just ten years ago that start reality shows and video clip and all this stuff\u2014same time as Von Dutch. L.A. was the city for it. I get specialize on celeb over here.\"\n\n He continued. \"My demo is tabloid magazine. I am different from the other designer. Because what they say they hate, I love. They say they hate it but they always looking at it. We all look at OK! magazine. We pretend to don't be. But we all want to see.\"\n\n Just like, most likely, Jon Gosselin, Von Dutch was extraordinarily popular for a time and then virtually disappeared. A microfad, extreme in its intensity and brevity.\n\n What was the error Von Dutch made? Why doesn't it really exist anymore?\n\n\"Their mistake? To let me go. When I left, we were at the top of the moon. Now they are crash.\"\n\n Tonny Sorensen, the Netherlandish Tae Kwon Do champion, said that Christian believed Von Dutch was his brand. He wanted to change the name to Von Dutch by Christian Audigier. Things got tense on Melrose. The Netherlandish former Tae Kwon Do champion says the man from the Jean Machine gave an ultimatum: It's my brand, or I leave.\n\n Ed Hardy was born not long thereafter, nine weeks after Christian had quit Von Dutch, after his heart attack just days later (the aftermath of which was filmed covertly at the hospital), after the period of quietude and self-reflection that followed. As he tells it, he bought a T-shirt on Melrose with the image of a tattoo by a once semi-obscure counterculture artist who lived in Hawaii named Ed Hardy. And when he wore the shirt out that night, everyone went so apeshit over it that he went back to the store the next day, found out who designed it, then flew Ed Hardy to Los Angeles and, in fifteen minutes, licensed his work for a new brand.\n\n That's what he told me, anyway.\n\n He told the head of fashion at Macy's (which does an obscenely enormous Ed Hardy business) a different story, about how a guy named Caleb introduced him to Ed Hardy. And Ed Hardy himself says that Christian told him another story, that he'd been obsessed with Hardy's designs and searched him out. He recently settled a lawsuit with Ed Hardy about, besides the question of royalty payments, the fact that Ed Hardy didn't understand that he no longer really controlled his name and his images anymore\u2014essentially the same problem Christian had with the Tae Kwon Do champion. It's kind of like the story Christian told me about how he funded Ed Hardy. He said he used money he'd saved from his time at Von Dutch, while Tonny Sorensen might have claimed the seed money came from Christian's having put in extremely large requisition orders to suppliers before he left the company, with no paperwork, in exchange for kickbacks\u2014alleged in another lawsuit. That suit has been settled, and neither party is legally permitted to discuss the terms of settlement.\n\n Now, I'm not saying who's right and who's wrong. But I'm not sure getting the story straight is Christian's primary concern. It's not a new idea, perception being more important than, and arguably defining, reality. But Christian Audigier seems to have internalized this idea uncommonly well, or to have appeared on earth with the idea already installed in his brain. Consider the giant photographs of Christian being interviewed by Larry King on the walls of both his offices, even though those episodes were never on television. Or the tattoo he has on his actual person saying that his Christian Audigier brand was established in 1958. Or that Ed Hardy is actually a man, and a man who isn't Christian Audigier. If he can be said to be lying, it's not Clintonian, the kind of passionate lying in which the person lying has hypnotized himself into actually believing what he's saying. It's more like: Being too interested in the actual facts kind of insults what I'm doing here.\n\n\n\nFor a long time on Sunday morning, they didn't arrive, and we were waiting\u2014me, the pilot, the flight attendant. And then all at once they stormed out of black Denalis and onto the plane, seven aging Frenchmen, a wash of bergamot-top-noted aftershave and denim, a mound of Goyard bags, at least one pair of black wraparound shades per man, a dozen packs of Marlboro Lights, gray hair\u2014gel-spiked and slicked back and long and grizzled. We all buckled ourselves into the leather sofas, and the pilot climbed into the cockpit and took us onto the runway and up and out of Van Nuys.\n\nJoe, with the long gray hair and the assassin sunglasses, who could look no more like he'd been sucked through a wormhole from St-Tropez were he sitting here oiled up in a gold lam\u00E9 bikini, was next to Christian. When we got to cruising altitude, he said, \"Look, I get Botox.\"\n\n \"Bullshit,\" Christian said. \"If you get Botox, it didn't work. You get your money back.\"\n\n Everyone laughed. Cigarettes were lit. Christian called for a round of espressos. We were living a French remake of Wild Hogs.\n\n This was a chartered jet for the VIFs (pronounced veefs and meaning both \"Very Important French\" and \"fast ones\"), an accordioning group of five to ten guys whom Christian has known for most of his life. The flight to Las Vegas, where When I Move You Move, his trade show, would start tomorrow, took almost no time at all, barely long enough to eat some cured salmon and read Le Monde. Somewhere over the desert, the inhuman landscape unspooling in the windows, we got to talking about photo treatments for this story. This whole journalistic enterprise, this profile of Christian Audigier, was an unusually collaborative effort. After every little thing that happened, he'd call me over, \"Darren, Darren, this is cool, right? You gonna make a beautiful story?\" Or he'd sit me down and start scrolling through his cell-phone contacts, telling me whom I should interview. Britney Spears. Stallone. Puff. Randy Jackson. \"Here's Larry King's number. You call him in the morning; he's great in the morning. Say, \u2018I am Darren from GQ.' \" (I never did get him to call me Devin, though I did get him to call me GQ instead of Darren.)\n\n \"How about this idea for a photo,\" Christian said, two plane windows in the big lenses of his sunglasses. \"I am sitting in the corner of a plane smoking my cigarette, and the pilot is there, and the door is open to a desert. My motorcycle is strapped into the plane like I am going to take my bike to the desert to ride.\"\n\n I acknowledged that this evokes a certain kind of manliness.\n\n \"Or something like this,\" he said. \"Me on a horse. And there are ten horses around me with no one on them. On Melrose Street. Something like this.\"\n\n He's a good designer, Christian had said, but his real knack is marketing. To him, the most important principle in marketing is getting people to notice you.\n\n \"Is like Obama,\" he said. \"Obama was 200 percent advertising. I promote myself to sell my brands. Because now I am a kind of celeb. I have paparazzi on me, I have all of that. I am in a different world than the fashion industry. I am with Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Madonna. I build me as a celebrity.\"\n\n\n\nThere were a lot of us waiting for Christian to come onstage. Me and the French guys and the inner circle of Dedicated Audigier Ladies, we were all sitting on leather sofas in the VIP section inside the Augustus Ballroom at Caesars Palace. It was day three of When I Move You Move. The first two days of the show were epic (colossally boring, too\u2014it's an apparel trade show). The theme was Audigier Ranch, and he'd flown in wooden fence posts and an entire fake saloon and silver rhinestone cacti and a mechanical bull and faux hay bales and twenty black stallions made out of some kind of glossy epoxy which all inexplicably had their genitalia exposed (each identically hung like a horse). The Pussycat Dolls performed at the show every day (they're a \"cabaret\" act from Los Angeles; one of them works for Christian). At other times, there was a guy who'd put volunteers in really tight Ed Hardy T-shirts and then cut away most of the fabric with shears, making elaborate shirt-bikinis. It was mesmerizing. There were fashion shows every day in which the models dressed up like cowboys and Indians, where a man might walk onstage in, and this is a real example, a tattooed hoodie, a dead wolf, and a bathrobe. Every night Christian would take us all\u2014the VIFs, other assorteds, Ramses III (his personal hairdresser)\u2014to dinner at the same overpriced seafood restaurant at Caesars, I think because they treated him like a king and there wasn't likely to be anyone more important who'd show up and Bigfoot us. One night, Joe the VIF brought two very attractive prostitutes to the table and said, \"One for me and one for you, Christian.\" It was just a joke. Another night we were eating when we saw Bill Clinton walking through the casino, and we staked him out while he perused a trinket shop until Christian could negotiate a photo with him, which went immediately onto his Web site.\n\nBut this concert was the grand finale of the show. Christian was going to perform his new song, \"My American Dream,\" live.\n\n Dave Stewart came out first, and the DJ gave him a rolling intro. Most of the people I talked to didn't know who Dave Stewart was\u2014he's the guy from Eurythmics (and also a crack songwriter for people like Gwen Stefani and Christian Audigier). Stewart was leather-pantsed, bearded, pale, in big iridescent glasses, looking like he should be smoking weed and writing songs for Katy Perry at a house in Laurel Canyon. His sequined blazer was from the line he does with Christian called Rock Fabulous. He warmed up the crowd while reminding them who he was.\n\n He played a few bars of \"Sweet Dreams\" and mumbled into the mike, \"I think you'll recognize this one as it builds.\" At the end of the set Christian came out from somewhere in the dark behind the stage. He was in a black motorcycle jacket and nice jeans and black leather boots, looking like a man who'd been momentarily separated from his Aston Martin. He was tanner than I'd ever seen him, and he looked like he smelled fantastic, even if you couldn't smell him from here. He stepped to the mike, which had a long gold Ed Hardy scarf tied to it \u00E0 la Steven Tyler, and addressed the crowd.\n\n \"I am going to sing you a song,\" Christian said. \"When I come here I was dreaming of this! To perform like this for you! This is my American dream!\"\n\n Stewart struck a few anthemic chords. The backup singers, all three of them terri-fyingly talented and assertive performers, addressed themselves to their task. And then\u2026nothing.\n\n \"This is the most smash-hit single ever to be sung in French and English,\" Dave Stewart said. \"But we need someone to put the fucking words on the prompter.\"\n\n The band stopped playing, and someone ran across the stage in a booty pack, presumably to fix the teleprompters. Christian disappeared into the shadows backstage. In ten minutes, Christian strutted out again, like he'd never seen the crowd before, like it hadn't just been revealed that he didn't know the words to his song, and started to sing\u2014mostly in French, except for the chorus: Nah nah-nah-nah-nah / My American dream! You couldn't call him a virtuoso, but the man was in control of the crowd.\n\n \"This is my dream,\" he screamed. \"This is your dream! My American dream!\"\n\n All the people working the show watched from their booths. They were mostly young women, sitting with samples of one Christian Audigier\u2013affiliated product or another: tees, hoodies, denim, bags, sunglasses, suits, something called velour sets, watches, barware, dresses, \"ecological fur,\" underwear, leather jackets, ties, scarves, bathing suits, children's clothes, crystal cell-phone cases called Icing, snowboards featuring topless ladies, snowsuits in tiger camo, Ed Hardy Smart cars\u2014there were three parked in the Augustus Ballroom. (And that's not including the licensees Christian has that weren't part of the trade show: ros\u00E9 wine, tequila, vodka, motorcycles, boats, energy drinks, bedsheets, something called structured water, limousines. He'd also like to start an airline, a hotel chain, and a bank. There was a deal in the works to make dildos, too\u2014you know, not those schlock ones; the, as he says, Chanel of dildos. It's not like he's worried about diluting the brand; it's more suggestive of a guy who realizes there's a horizon on this stuff and he might as well cash in now. On everything.) Nicole and Carol and the intern from Arkansas who was in a micromini and took her internship deadly seriously, even while moving fake hay bales\u2014they all screamed their heads off as he pushed on toward the song's crescendo. Next to me, a woman in an Ed Hardy silk bikini fitted with a western gun holster shivered in the air-conditioning.\n\n In the Augustus Ballroom, everyone had the perfect breasts she deserved and a fresh French manicure. This is what the world would look like if it were populated only by Christian Audigier's people. There are folks who are very scared of this proposition. At some of the more picky clubs in Los Angeles, for instance, they will not let a customer in if he or she is wearing anything Audigier. I talked to someone about this, Darren Dzienciol, who opened the exclusive Guy's, a club in Hollywood. He said he simply thought the clothes were d\u00E9class\u00E9 and invited the wrong kind of customer.\n\n \"I'm not going to name any races,\" Darren said. \"But you do see a lot of Muhammads getting out of [Mercedes] SLRs in them.\"\n\n The knock against the clothes is that they're \"too L.A.\" in that kind of off-duty-stripper way. That they appeal to people who have more money than taste.\n\n \"That's good,\" Christian said when I asked him about this impression. \"The strip club is full of people! I know all of them when I go over there. Who don't go to strip club when they are in L.A. or in whatever city? Las Vegas. I believe there's no bad people.\"\n\n After the show, he was still keyed up. We all trailed him through the giant corridor behind the event space, past the forklifts and the Ed Hardy Smart cars being packed off. He'd had a lot of screwdrivers to take the edge off, and he ducked into a doorway and peed right there in the hall. I guess when you're paying a million and a half dollars to put on a show, casino security will let you pee where you want to.\n\n \"You see what I do?\" Christian said when we were moving again. \"Everywhere I go, buzz. It's like addiction. If they are not here, they feel stupid. If you go to that other trade show instead of this, you suicide yourself!\"\n\n The night ended at 3 a.m., in the casino. He sat with a few thousand dollars of chips in front of him. He gave two of the women who worked for him some chips so they'd sit next to him and gamble. The VIFs, the Dedicated Ladies, some of the licensees in their going-out dresses\u2014we just stood by and watched. But if you had asked anyone the next day what they'd done last night, they would have said, I went gambling with Christian Audigier and it was crazy. Christian played roulette. He'd put all his chips, $6,000, down on, say, the number 23 and lose everything, then borrow more money from whatever VIF was nearby.\n\n \"My name is Christian Audigier,\" he yelled, standing up at his stool after he lost. \"And I will own this fucking casino!\"\n\n\n\nDevin Friedman is GQ's Senior Correspondent"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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