The Ghost of Alexander McQueen

Jellyfish ensemble and Armadillo shoes, Plato's Atlantis, (SS10)

Model Polina Kasina. Photo © Lauren Greenfield/INSTITUTE

 

The ghost of Alexander McQueen will continue to haunt the British fashion industry for decades to come, as the current exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum evidences. Savage Beauty is the first major retrospective of McQueen's work to be presented in Europe, but it certainly won't be the last. 

Why? Because he was a fucking genius whose clothes didn't simply make heads turn, but spin with a mixture of astonishment and repulsion until sick and dizzy with disconcerted pleasure. Quite literally, one feels overawed by his designs and many of the dresses displayed are as difficult to view as they would be to wear and as they undoubtedly were to create and manufacture. 

The devil is in the detail, they say, and McQueen's clothes are so detailed that their exquisite beauty and fine craftsmanship doesn't disguise their malevolent and sinister qualities. All fashion designers attempt to give style to the body and this, of necessity, involves an element of cruelty. But McQueen takes this further than anyone; his dark romanticism and gothic queerness occasionally hint at a brutal and austere futuristic even fascist aesthetic, rather than a playful fetishism or an ironic sado-masochism. 

McQueen wanted the women who wore his clothes to look powerful and terrifying; like alien beings from another time and another world. He wasn't interested in simply provoking tabloid outrage or scandalising the middle-classes; rather, he wanted to instill elements of fear in the human heart in the hope it might beat a little faster. 

Notes

I have chosen an image from McQueen's Plato's Atlantis collection (SS10), not because I think it's his best work, but it was his final collection, presented just before his death in February of that year. Inspired not only by the myth of Atlantis, but also Darwin's theory of evolution, it featured fabulous footwear; including the infamous Armadillo shoes. Click here to see the catwalk show.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty runs at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) from 14 March - 2 August 2015. For further information, including ticket prices and opening times, visit the Victoria and Albert Museum website (click here).