Justin Mckinney presents … Alexander McQueen Day *

* (restored)

“I like blowing people’s minds. It’s a buzz. Like a fix, for 20 minutes. I like the spontaneity of doing it there and then. We broke the mold by not using the fashion-show-production people. I found Sam Gainsbury, who’d been doing pop video. So it became more cinematic.” – Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen was the quintessential bad boy made good. He had brains and brawn, having survived over ten years as a solo designer and being brought into the Gucci Group stable, which bought a 51 per cent stake in his company 2002.

Born in 1970 in the East End of London – the son of a taxi driver and one of six children. He left school at 16, with one O-level in art, and trained on Savile Row at Anderson & Sheppard, whose clients included Prince Charles and Mikhail Gorbachev, after he saw a television program about the apprentice shortage in traditional tailoring. He reportedly once embroidered a suit for the Prince of Wales with the words “I am a cunt” (in the lining). He went on to work for Gieves & Hawkes, theatre’s famous Angels & Bermans costumiers, and then worked in Japan and Italy, and returned to London in 1994, hoping to work as a pattern cutter tutor at London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins fashion school. Thanks to the strength of his portfolio, he was persuaded to enrol on the course himself.

Central Saint Martins MA graduate portfolio, Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims, Fall/Winter 1992.

Isabella Blow

In 1994 his entire degree show was bought by influential stylist Isabella Blow, whose later suicide in 2007 led to him dedicating his entire spring/summer 2008 collection to her memory. He earned his master’s degree in fashion design from London’s Central Saint Martins (formerly Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design) in 1995.

Fall/Winter 1994, Banshee

Spring/Summer 1994, Nihilism

His “Highland Rape” Collection was about the “rape” of Scotland by the British, self-referential retrospective to the experiences that have shaped his own ethnic-cultural location and identity. For the actual showroom, McQueen transformed a loft-like industrial space into a brooding battleground of mayhem to symbolize 1746’s Battle of Culloden in which his actual ancestors, the Jacobite Highland-Scots, were defeated and then subsequently ousted by the British troops under the Duke of Cumberland, “the Butcher.”

Moreover, he insisted that his attitude towards women is informed by his having witnessed as a child scenes of violence involving his sister: “Everything I’ve done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naïve,” he was quoted in The Independent Fashion Magazine in 2000, “models are there to showcase what I’m about, nothing else. It’s nothing to do with misogyny.” The show introduced the “Bumster” trousers and immediately made him one of the most talked about faces in the industry.

Bumster trousers

“It was an art thing, to change the way women looked, just by cut, to make a longer torso. But I was taking it to an extreme. The girls looked quite menacing, because there was so much top and so little bottom, because of the length of legs. That was the concept, nothing to do with a ‘builder’s bum.’” – Alexander McQueen, on the “Bumster” Trousers

Fall/Winter 1995, Highland Rape

The president of LVMH, Bernard Arnault, controversially installed McQueen as John Galliano’s successor at Givenchy in 1996. A rebellious nature saw him quoted as saying the founder of the famous house was “irrelevant”. McQueen told Vogue in October 1997 that his debut couture offering for the label was “crap”, but he stayed with the house until March 2001 – continuing to create challenging collections, including one featuring car-robots spraying paint over white cotton dresses, and double amputee model Aimee Mullins striding down the catwalk on intricately carved wooden legs – until the contract which he said was “constraining his creativity” was ended.

Spring 1998

Spring 1998

In the fall of 1998, McQueen presented a collection called “Joan” within the confines of an abandoned industrial trash depot. Green warehouse lanterns began to sway ominously over an army of chain-mail clad, head shaven models with blood red eyes. The clothes, operated within a strict color palette of black, ashen grey, and a menacing scarlet red. Metallic black patent leather waistcoats paired with sadomasochistic red lace voyeur masks suggested a humorously sobering hardcore aesthetic not geared toward the faint of heart. The somber crackling of burning wood chips over the speakers was quickly offset by a red backdrop that tore open like a gothic portal to reveal a model navigating the asphalt slab runway. The finale of the show was marked by a blaze of fire that encircled a bondage-clad representation of Joan of Arc’s ghost in order to celebrate the power of femininity against the institutionalized machismo of both French military leadership and modern dayreligious institution. While the set reflected the ecclesiastical cell of Joan of Arc and the clothes themselves were given a medieval context, it was apparent that McQueen is contained and operates in a suspended past space as a way to process structural inequalities on the social and economic level.

Fall 1998 Joan

Fall 1998 Joan

Fall 1998 Joan

The Fall/Winter 1999-2000 collection Overlook was based on Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining. The collection explored the psychological manifestations of haunting set in a simulated tundra. With an actual snowstorm taking place, McQueen’s eerie mannequins maneuvered an arctic plane while Kubrick’s twins, who were murdered by their father in the film adaptation, stared wrathfully at the crowd of onlookers.

“Oh, there have been some right old moments! That show, I had Miguel Adrover chucking more and more snow into the wind machine, with me shouting, ‘More snow, more, more! I want it to be like a snow-shaker!’” – Alexander McQueen on the Overlook collection.

Fall/Winter 1999, The Overlook

For McQueen’s Spring/Summer 1999 runway show, two mechanical robots were stationed around legendary model, Shalom Harlow on a spinning wooden platform. A sense of suspense was built up by the way the robots pensively moved, as if they were contemplating what they should do. When a decision is reached, the way the model reacts is up to our own interpretation. The story is given to us and we are the creators of what is actually happening. It takes a true artist to involve his or her viewer without literally interacting with them.

Spring/Summer 1999

For the Spring/Summer 2001 Asylum collection the audience sat around a mirrored cube forced to stare at themselves for a whole hour. When finally lit from inside, the cube revealed itself to be a mental-hospital holding cell. Demented girls, wearing hospital headbands and everything from extraordinary mussel-shell skirts to impossibly chic pearl-colored cocktail dresses, slithered and strutted while uselessly attempting to fly over the cuckoo’s nest. There were gothic, theatrical pieces, like a dress with a miniature castle and rat posing as a shoulder pad; a top made out of a jigsaw puzzle; and a huge feathered creation with stuffed eagles suspended over the model’s head, poised to attack à la Hitchcock. But amidst all the insanity, there was a cornucopia of startlingly elegant—and wearable—pantsuits, flouncy party dresses, and even a spectator pump or two.

How to top off such a climactic presentation? After everyone thought it was all over, another cube within the psychiatric ward-cum-runway opened up to reveal a nude Michelle Olley, her face covered by a mask, breathing through a tube, surrounded by fluttering moths. It was a truly shocking and enthralling tableau: Francis Bacon via Leigh Bowery and Lucien Freud. In a word, sublime.

“Ha! I was really pleased about that. I was looking at it on the monitor, watching everyone trying not to look at themselves. It was a great thing to do in the fashion industry—turn it back on them! God, I’ve had some freaky shows.” – McQueen on forcing his audience to stare at their own reflection for over an hour.

Asylum 2001

For Autumn/Winter 2002 Supercalifragilistic collection McQueen showed in the eerie medieval hall of the Conciergerie, the place where Marie Antoinette spent her last days, brought out many of the props that have made his shows so theatrical, including torture chamber neck-braces and Clockwork Orange bowler hats, and added a pack of caged wolves, and a stage designed by Director Tim Burton, to set the macabre mood.

“It was kind of Tim Burton, about little girls, a macabre Walt Disney kind of thing. And I had Little Lilac Riding Hood, with the wolves, but the wolves were her pets! Were they wolves? Ha! Mixed breed, I think. Half wolf, half mongrel.” — Alexander McQueen on the wolves in Supercalifragilistic.

Supercalifragilistic Part One

Supercalifragilistic Part Two

At Paris Fashion Week in 2003, Alexander McQueen put his models in an arctic wind tunnel and dressed them in long, flowing fabrics, so the wind would show off the shapes and structures in a way that walking never could. McQueen said he “wanted it to be like a nomadic journey across the tundra”.

Autumn 2003

In 2004, McQueen hosted one of his most theatrical presentations with “Patheon as Lecum”. Pantheon As “Lecum” expressed McQueen’s fascination with alternate states of consciousness, aliens and space travel – when he first interviewed Sarah Burton for her job he had asked her whether she believed in UFOs. At the end of the show the lights went down and onto the darkened stage stepped a ghostly figure that drifted across the stage, the woman’s silvery, lampshade-like dress a vision of light illuminated by an LED necklace. The music faded and was replaced by the sound of a heart monitor. The heartbeat slowed until it finally flatlined and the model, bathed in a beam of light, raised her palms towards the sky and waited to be transported to the next dimension. The image articulated McQueen’s desire for transcendence, for a state beyond his earthly existence.

Autumn/Winter 2004 Pantheon As Lecum

McQueen designed the 2005 collection “It’s Only a Game” around the idea of a chess match between America and Japan. Each ensemble corresponded to a particular chess piece.

The queen wore a short, thigh-high dress, which was wide at the hips, a silhouette based on the eighteenth century. A kimono collar, obi sash, and an undershirt beautifully embroidered to look like tattooing were all drawn from Japanese culture. Next to her, the king appeared as an American football player, with shoulder pads and a helmet covered in Japanese tattooing.

In the runway show, the models moved as if they were pieces in a life-sized chess game, an idea inspired by a scene from Harry Potter. Taken as a whole, the collection revealed McQueen’s remarkable ability to look across cultures for inspiration.

Spring/Summer 2005 It’s Only a Game

Only Alexander McQueen could have provided the astonishing feat of techno-magic that ended his Fall 2006 show. Inside an empty glass pyramid, a mysterious puff of white smoke appeared from nowhere and spun in midair, slowly resolving itself into the moving, twisting shape of a woman enveloped in the billowing folds of a white dress. It was Kate Moss, her blonde hair and pale arms trailing in a dream-like apparition of fragility and beauty that danced for a few seconds, then shrank and dematerialized into the ether.

This vision was in fact a state-of-the-art hologram—a piece by the video maker Baillie Walsh, art-directed by McQueen. The gown, a pale cascade of multiple organza ruffles, wasn’t just an optical effect, though. It subsequently reappeared in the collection’s victory line up, which wound its way around the glass box as the audience was still reverberating with wonder at witnessing this incredible event.

Fall 2006 (Kate Moss hologram)

On the circular runway of the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, Alexander McQueen presented a Spring/Summer 2007 collection that would rectify his love for grand theatrics and his desire to please the critics that had so relentlessly criticized him (either for being too theatrical, or for forgoing theatrics altogether). Looking to the past for inspiration, the collection was a confection of 19th century silhouettes, dresses of architectural marvel, and covetable, wearable items like sleek grey trousers and ornamented tunics.

A baroque chamber orchestra was set up in the middle of the round, performing works befitting of the highly ornamented, couture-worthy gowns under a stunning chandelier. There were menswear-inspired looks with fantastic trillby hats, dresses made of swaths of chiffon that floated across the runway, and gowns with exaggerated hips and angel-wing shoulders. However, the most stunning was perhaps the final gown, completely covered in real flowers. As Tanya Dziahileva slowly made her walk down the round, flower heads fell off of the dress, leaving a trail of them on the runway.

Spring/Summer 2007 Sarabande

McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 2008 collection centered on a fairy tale narrative devised by McQueen about a girl who descends from a tree to marry a prince and then become a queen. It was inspired by a 600-year-old elm tree in the garden of the designer’s Sussex home. At the center of the set stood a giant tree swathed in fabric, inspired by Bulgarian artist Christo, who is renowned for wrapping buildings with material.

Autumn/Winter 2008 The Girl Who Lived in a Tree

The stage for Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2009 runway collection was a cheeky environmental scene- with a globe of the Earth revolving in the background, models emerged through a runway of taxidermy-like stuffed animals, from peacocks to elephants and zebras. Entitled “Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection”, it was a clear reference to Darwinism, both industrial and humanistic.

McQueen didn’t take the show in as dark a direction as would have been expected at the time, however: the collection was full of light colors and easy fabrics, albeit alongside skintight jumpsuits encrusted with jewels and leather corset belts. While much of the clothing had McQueen’s signature drape-y and sculptural silhouettes, the shoes and hair-styling were universally flat to the body- shoes that molded to each toe, or had nude stockings clinging to the ankles, and hair that was flat against the face, held on by mesh face masks.

Spring/Summer 2009 Natural Dis-Tinction, Un-Natural Selection

For his fall 2009 collection McQueen sent models down the runway wearing elegant skirt suits and dresses in shades of red, black and houndstooth that mirrored couture in craftsmanship and execution. As for the beauty look, make-up artist Peter Philips gave models bleached brows and now iconic extreme, oversized lips – exaggerated to the point of ridiculous and reminiscent of Leigh Bowery’s smeared lip. For the models who weren’t wearing Philip Treacy hats, hairstylist Guido Palau created sculptures on top of each model’s head with aluminium drink cans and plastic wrap. Echoing the beauty aesthetic, the collection was meant to poke fun at traditional French couture, with garments made out of trash bags and what looked like bubble wrap.

Autumn/Winter 2009

The Spring/Summer 2010 collection “Plato’s Atlantis”, was live-streamed on Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.com, intercut with the photographer’s premade video footage. That was the plan anyway, but SHOWstudio crashed. Which may have replicated, in a whole new audience, the sensation of a young hopeful stuck outside a McQueen presentation, waving a standing ticket and being unable to get in. McQueen, according to an internal logic detailed in a press release, was casting an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdown of the world: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea, and we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves. There was a sparkling, illuminated runway in which two sinister, robotic movie cameras on gigantic black booms ran back and forth, while a screen played Knight’s video of Raquel Zimmermann, lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body. Then the models came out, dressed in short, reptile-patterned, digitally printed dresses, their gangly legs sunk in grotesque shoes that looked like the armored heads of a fantastical breed of antediluvian sea monster.

Plato’s Atlantis

“I didn’t plan out my life like that, when people recognize and respect what you do, that’s nice, but I don’t think you ever do this to be famous. Fame should be left to the film stars. We’re just offering a service.”
Lee Alexander McQueen , March 17 1969 – February 11 2010

McQueen And I – Alexander McQueen Documentary

BBC Documentary ‘The Works’ – Alexander McQueen ‘Cutting Up Rough’ 1997

The Story of Alexander McQueen | FTV.com

 

*Text collaged from various sources
**Special thanks to Black Acrylic, Patrick, and Yury

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, it’s a no lose situation. You don’t get a whole lot of those in your life. I used to really like the prickly sensation of smiling with chapped lips, I don’t remember why though. Maybe it’s obvious. The last time my lips got really chapped was when I was in the Antarctic. And boy, were they chapped. I could’ve declared the facial skin around my lips a National Park. How did you guess that the Permanent Sparkler was the thing I coveted the most. Maybe that’s obvious too. Thank you, in other words! Love bringing Alexander McQueen back to life to design the launch event for the new SCAB, free of charge of course, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, yes, I remember. Oh, your MacMahon will appear here on Friday, the 25th. ** Bill, Thanks! My weekend was mostly pretty damned ok. How was yours? ** Misanthrope, The list of best blogs ever maybe. I think Ton was always into it. I saw some very, very late Mike18 video somewhere, and he looked like Lou Ferrigno. A good dictator is the ultimate oxymoron. Grr about your snow. We’re stumbling into spring here. The sky is being very schizo at the moment. Hope your weekend skyrocketed upward. ** l@rst, Did your weekend pan out as planned? I was on board with its concept. Okay, Chuck Tingle … I’ve only read about his thing and looked at some cover art so far, but, yeah, what a thing he’s got going on there. And it’s actually, you know, good or at least fun, you say? My next step is to tiptoe into the writing itself. So I’m a still kind of blinking newbie. Thanks for the turn on, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, interesting, I don’t know Nathan Coley’s stuff. I’ll pursue. Thanks, pal. Very mixed reports from my Netflix-sporting friends about that Warhol thing. I guess I should test it at least. Leeds lived to fight another day! Congrats, man. Warmest hugs about Wednesday. Stay as strong as you can be. Love from here and me. ** John Christopher, Hi. Oh, cool. About ‘QatD’. Did you know he was also almost swept into the stratosphere in a dreadful ‘Twister’ knock-off TV movie called ‘Night of the Twisters’? After checking his IMDb page, I really do need to do a Devon Sawa Day. And I’m on it. So on it. Later gator. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yet another reason not to see ‘The Batman’. The director went into ‘Queercore’ knowing very little about it, and he grabbed the first and easiest approach he could and went with it. Same deal (in a different way) with his bad Burroughs documentary. ** R yn / ANGUSRAZE, I did have a pretty good weekend for the most part, thanks. Yours sounds to have been on the very far and high end of good, for sure. Did you get much of what you’re working on done? Man, excellent if you can make that video you dreamed up. Having made films, that’s a lot of work. But obviously worth it. Write it down! Always! I have a weirdly great memory, but I do anyway because you just never know. I hope your Monday is a checkered flag. ** Right. Years ago another long lost d.l. of this blog made a paean to Alexander McQueen for this place, and I thought I would breathe some life back into it and see what happened, and that’s your call. See you tomorrow.