Alexander McQueen’s work in the fashion industry exemplified creativity. It was unconventional, dramatic, and innovative. According to the sources gathered for this literature review, artistic would be the most appropriate word to describe his signature style. This comes from the heavy avant-garde influence on his personal taste. The end result would be a fashion collection that was striking and that caught the attention of the fashion industry.
The avant-garde influence on his work began when he started out as a designer creating theatrical costumes for Angels and Bermans, according to his biography. “The dramatic style of the clothing he made there would become a signature of his later independent design work,” (“Alexander McQueen”). Shortly after this work, he went back to London, where he was born, and enrolled at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design in order to receive his Master’s Degree in fashion design. The graduating project for his degree was inspired by Jack the Ripper, which is a clear indication of his creativity and unconventionalism. He became Chief Designer of Givenchy, which is owned by Louis Vuitton. Despite having a prestigious job at a highly reputable fashion company, McQueen felt that the job was constraining. “Even as he was pushing the limits of what people expected from fashion,” (“Alexander McQueen”), such as employing a model amputee to walk the runway on wooden legs, he won the British Designer of the Year Award for several years while he worked for Givency. He moved on to create his own business.
Aside from designing clothes for people to wear, he also designed works of art that were “unwearable and inaccessible beyond the voyeuristic spectacles of his lavish, unorthodox runway shows with elaborate proper’s and presentations which blurred the boundary between runway show and a new kind of installation art,” (Knox, 2010, p. 7). An example of this would be the Spring/Summer 2001 fashion show. This showed a curvaceous nude model reclining, “her face covered by an iron mask adjoined to a network of plastic breathing tubes,” (Knox, 2010, p. 16). This spectacle Knox describes as “Francis-Bacon-meets-Sigmund-Freud,” (p. 16). But this is exactly what makes McQueen’s work so avant-garde and so artistic – he is actually making the fashion runway similar to that of 19th and 20th century paintings and sculpture. Fashion, in his eyes, was something to be admired and beheld in admiration, as well as making an emotional statement about his moods. He would also get political with his fashion shows, such as his Plato’s Atlantis collection for Spring/Summer 2010, which touched on themes including climate change. It seems as though that for McQueen, there was no message or theme that couldn’t be approached in McQueen’s artistry.
It seems clear based on his biography that McQueen was pushing the limits of his own innovation for most of his career. Foley recognized that he “was the mind of a genius,” (2010). He designed work throughout his career that “displayed a theatrical brilliance that awed his audiences [and that] he proved a captivating storyteller, creating deeply realized characters throughout fashion,” (Foley, 2010). Such work that focused on his ability to use storytelling as a work of art include his Highland Rape collection in 1995, which featured pieces that included tattered tartans and pants. These pants also sat very low on the hips, which shocked viewers and garnered immediate controversial attention when he first started his career. Other collections included depicting shipwrecks and a human chess game. It made sense that “his intensity and wild motifs were often at least as disturbing as they were chic,” (Foley, 2010). His 2008 fall collection, The Girl Who Lived in the Tree, was inspired by his respite in India, after grieving the suicide of a dear friend. This collection included depictions of “a sad girl bedecked in gloriously Goth Victoriana, who had shut herself off from the world in a tree [who later] fled the darkness for the light,” (Foley, 2010), as depicted in pieces that were lavished with colorful Indian-inspired embellishments.
McQueen himself said that he does not find his own work aggressive as other people do. Instead, he sees it “as romantic, with a dark side of personality,” (Foley, 2010). Orr (2015), like Knox, writes that there is a Freudian aspect to McQueen’s work. This was shown in his posthumous work, Savage Beauty, which was released after his suicide. In this work, there is a “counterintuitive fact that fashion isn’t about clothes Fashion takes clothes and makes them more fascinating and alluring Fashion is about people and their bodies and their feelings and their minds. Clothes are just about protection,” (p. 33). This collection was reveled in armor, including pieces made of steel, leather, and mussel shells, as if they were trying to protect these inner dark emotions of the late designer. Orr (2015) also writes that “masks appear a lot in McQueen’s art [which] treated face and body with an oddly unsettling, sexualized equality – creepy and attention-seeking, yet denying individual identity,” (p. 33). In his work, he was unable to “change the frailty in humans,” but he meant to express the “human desire to both fit in and stand out,” (Orr, 2015, p. 33).
Alexander McQueen was thus a fashion designer that strived to push the traditional limits of the runway and turn it into a complete visionary experience. As the literature review shows, his work was varied and touched upon various subjects, such as spirituality, sexuality, climate change and the macabre. While some of his designs are unwearable, this was not the complete essence of his art. As suggested by these authors, McQueen was a true artist, using elements of the avant-garde to innovate the fashion industry during his short life.
References
Alexander McQueen: Biography, Fashion Designer (1969-2010). (n.d.). Retrieved December 13, 2015. http://www.biography.com/people/alexander-mcqueen- 541384
Foley, B. (2010, 12 February). Alexander McQueen: A fashion remembrance. WWD, 199(2), n/a.
Knox, K. Alexander McQueen: genius of a generation. London: A&C Black.
Orr, D. (2015, 8 May). Alexander McQueen’s work is a strange and wonderful gift to human culture. The Guardian, p. 33.
