Alexander McQueen was one of the greatest designers that ever existed, who shaped the meaning of contemporary fashion with outlandish designs in theatrical shows. His creativity had no bounds and he was as fearless in his studio as in his personal life.
McQueen’s tragic suicide in February 2010 left the world in shock, but he left behind a fascinating body of work from a career that spanned more than two decades. This British designer’s collections continue to be questioned, picked apart, and analysed in desperate attempts to better understand and fully appreciate his untamed imagination.
Born in Lewisham, UK, on 17 March 1969, Lee Alexander McQueen left school with just one academic qualification, art. However, it was McQueen’s training at Anderson & Sheppard on Savile Row where his career in fashion design began, sparking a knack for razor sharp tailoring and using methods such as cutting and construction. He went on to attend London’s prestigious Central Saint Martins, where his outstanding technical skill immediately began to emerge. So too, did evidence of a darkly-inclined imagination, apparent in his 1992 graduate collection entitled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims. The designer became fast friends with influential fashion stylist Isabella Blow after she bought his entire graduate collection and persuaded him to use his middle name, which helped launch his infamous career and introduced him to an elite social circle.
McQueen became head designer of Givenchy, a tenure he held from 1996 to 2001, all the while amassing funds and making plans for his own eponymous label. In 2000, Gucci bought a 51 percent stake in Alexander McQueen’s private company, and provided the capital for McQueen to expand his business. In 2003, McQueen was declared International Designer of the Year by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and A Most Excellent Commander of the British Empire by the Queen of England, and was awarded the coveted Designer of the Year Award at the British Fashion Awards four times. Meanwhile, McQueen opened stores in New York, Milan, London, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. With the help of Gucci’s investment, McQueen had become even more successful than he was before.
Already known for the flare and passion of his shows, McQueen produced even more interesting spectacles after leaving Givenchy, and it could easily be said of McQueen’s subsequent collections that anything goes, from taxidermy birds of prey clawing at draping vest-tops, dresses constructed entirely from razor-clam shells, gazelle horns protruding from jacket shoulders, but categorising it in such a way would massively undermine his work. Behind each collection was a profound and thoroughly thought-through concept.
SS99
From his ‘Eshu’ designs inspired by the Yoruba people of West Africa, to the 1997 ‘It’s A Jungle Out There’, and his notorious 1995 ‘Highland Rape’ collection, which saw a chaotic army of blood-streaked models stumble down the runway in shredded tartan dresses, McQueen’s designs always reflected, sometimes in admiration and sometimes in dismay, the complex world he observed around him.
In 2007, the spectre of death would come to haunt McQueen, first with the suicide of Isabella Blow. The designer dedicated his Spring Summer 2008 collection to Blow, and said that her death, ‘was the most valuable thing I learnt in fashion.’ Sadly, just two years later, on February 2nd 2010, McQueen’s mother died, and one day before her funeral, on February 11th McQueen was found dead in his Mayfair, London apartment.
However, this did not cause the demise of an already incredibly successful label, and instead it has flourished with Sarah Burton at the helm. In 2000, Burton was made Head of Design for womenswear, and in May 2010, promoted to Creative Director of the entire Alexander McQueen brand, having worked alongside McQueen for more than 14 years. In April 2011, she received global recognition as the designer of the wedding dress for HRH the Duchess of Cambridge, Catherine Middleton, on the occasion of her marriage to HRH Prince William. Since her appointment as the brand’s Creative Director, Burton has produced critically acclaimed collections with a focus on handcraft, establishing herself as a highly accomplished designer with artisanal and technical expertise.
AW09
Alexander McQueen’s rise from lower-class high school dropout to internationally famous designer is a remarkable story. His clothing was first and foremost an art form, and a business second. He is therefore one of only a handful of designers who can claim to have truly revolutionised the industry. His bold styles and fascinating shows inspired and wowed the world of fashion, and his legacy lives on
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MCQUEEN’S MOST MEMORABLE MOMENTS
Controversial, provocative, and imaginative, these moments celebrate his vivid life and work.
Models walked down a runway made of water-filled Lucite tanks for SS98, wearing tight snakeskin dresses and tailored intarsia suits. They were dressed in all white for the finale and bringing literal meaning to the term ‘make it rain’, golden drops fell from the sky soaking the models and the clothes.
The finale to McQueen’s SS99 show was part live art, part catwalk and instant fashion history. Supermodel Shalom Harlow, dressed in a simple strapless white dress, strode down the runway and onto a wooden plinth. As the plinth began to rotate two mechanical robots sprang to life and spray painted the dress in black and green paint creating a priceless and utterly unique piece of fashion right in front of the eyes.
A scan of McQueen’s brain adorned the photocopied invite for AW03, where a rock and ice-covered runway, with a giant Perspex tunnel suspended above it, set the scene in a hall on the outskirts of Paris. McQueen had melded Eastern and Western influences, with the windswept passage representing the journey from East to West.
After her tragic suicide in 2007, McQueen dedicated his SS08 show to his friend, mentor, and most avid fan Isabella Blow. Known for her bold, fashion forward look, her love of risk taking and her playful way with colour and proportion, McQueen’s collection used all of these to varying degrees along with Prince of Wales check to symbolise Blow’s British heritage, together with hats provided by Blow’s other protégé Phillip Treacy, and a series of pieces featuring a bird motif.
McQueen had touched on taxidermy in a number of his previous shows but never to the extent of placing a veritable menagerie on his catwalk as he did for SS09. Inspired by Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest and the effects of human industrialisation, this highly structured collection was full of colour, print and a youthful energy which set it apart from McQueen’s darker, angrier shows.
For AW09 the set was a scrap heap of debris from the stages of McQueen’s own past shows, surrounded by a shattered glass runway. The clothes were, for the most part, high-drama satires of twentieth-century landmark fashion, parodies of Christian Dior houndstooth New Look and Chanel tweed suits, moving through harsh orange and black harlequinade looks to revisited showstoppers from McQueen’s own archive.
McQueen’s SS10 show made news before it had even begun. The plan had been to live stream it on SHOWStudio, one of the first times this had been attempted, until Lady Gaga tweeted about it 30 minutes before the start and promptly crashed the website. When the show began the clothes, beautiful in an alien meets reptile meets butterfly way, were almost completely overshadowed by shoes so high the models were en pointe.
It was a low-key affair which accompanied McQueen’s last collection for AW10, which was 80% finished at the time of his death. But whilst the mood may have been sombre, the clothes were a fitting celebration of everything that had made McQueen such an influential fashion designer, the rich fabrics, clever structure, intricate embroideries, and genuine celebration of the female form were present in all 16 pieces.
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