Lee Alexander McQueen 1969-2010
I saw an Alexander McQueen leather jacket one time, it was incredible. Made like medieval armour, boned like a corset, perfectly fitted, many many hooks and tiny pattern pieces and perfect craftsmanship. I’ve seen quite a few of his pieces up close, they weren’t always my taste but always memorable. I have admired his work over the years, often the menswear, and was particularly taken, along with the rest of the fashion world, with last year’s fall-winter 2009 womenswear show.
While the rest of high fashion was figuring out how to respond to the global financial meltdown, McQueen fearlessly presented an over-the-top critique of the fashion system via a collection of impeccably tailored, impossibly expensive clothes that overrode their luxury with a message opposing the whole enterprise that was sending them down the Paris runway.
The grotesquely made-up models teetered around a huge pile of trash painted black on heels so high they could barely propel themselves and the often enormous dresses they wore, while Marilyn Manson’s goth anthem “Beautiful People” blared in the cavernous hall.
The clothes themselves were stunning. Fitted dresses made of feathers, huge ball gowns with magpies printed on them, coats and dresses in oversized houndstooth check with lines and shapes that showed a mastery of tailoring and paid homage to the art of patternmaking.
It seems strange now that I saved this comment of his I read back on March 9, 2009,
“This whole situation is such a cliché. The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity.”
Alexander McQueen dropped out of school at 16, ended up apprenticing on Savile Row and then working as assistant to the designer who perhaps influences me the most, Romeo Gigli. I didn’t know that until reading the obituaries today, and now see Gigli’s influence in McQueen’s clothes.
At the same time last March, I was looking at Romeo Gigli’s new collection. Gigli has had many business problems over the years and shows only sporadically. Along with McQueen’s show, I admired Gigli’s and saved his comments, along with McQueen’s, as an indication of how tired designers must be, enslaved to the endless cycles of collections and neverending demand for something new. Gigli showed garments with innovative shapes characteristic of his work over the past 25 years and said,
“I was thinking I would like my dress to be free of time.”
Romeo Gigli March 2009
alexander mcqueen, fall/winter 2009
alexander mcqueen, spring 2010
piped cotton jacket with lace trim
McQueen black silk suit
fall-winter 2009
fall-winter 2009
