10 strange fantasies of Alexander McQueen

Louise Wilson, the head of the master course in the fashion design department of Central Saint Martins, says that her student Alexander McQueen has always had a history to keep. It was these stories that formed the basis of his collections: the designer could interpret the conflict between England and Scotland or place a number of clowns and a crisis. This year, his brand, under which Sarah Burton is now working, is twenty years old, and we understand what beautiful, painful or strange fantasies have pushed the British designer to create clothes.

JACK THE RENDER, PROSTITUENTS AND THE VICTORIAN EPOCH Alexander McQueen dedicated his graduation collection to Jack the Ripper. Inspired by genealogy, the designer discovered that his relative owned a hotel where a maniac killed one of his victims. There were no photos from that show, and all the items, sewn in a single copy, were bought by the editor of Harper's Bazaar and the future patroness of designer Isabella Blou. A couple of things still exhibited at the recent exhibition of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty in the Metropolitan Museum: this, for example, silk dress with a print in the form of barbed wire, decorated with human hair. Hair - a reference to prostitutes of the Victorian era, who sold their hair to make curls: people then gave them to their lovers. By the way, initially the hair locks in plastic bags were attached to all the clothes of Alexander McQueen, and at first he used his own hair.

Rape scotland The autumn-winter collection of 1995, the designer dedicated to the "rape" of Scotland: by this phrase he meant the country's conflicts with England. Models portrayed something between hysteria and sadness and defiled things in a cage with cutouts. The critics gave the show a wrong interpretation: they accused Alexander McQueen of misogyny.

VAMPIRES The designer thought about the beauty of vampires before the saga-favorite saga came out that made the theme mainstream. In the nineties, he made tops like bloodbags (hello, Christopher Kane's clutches), asymmetrical black silk blouses, and pants with cutouts on the hips. To the heroes of David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve from Tony Scott's Hunger, this collection would obviously taste good.

POSSESS OF DEATH The Dante show sent to the church in Spitalfields, whose parishioners were the descendants of Alexander McQueen from the Huguenots. The soundtrack for the show was organ music, the models were pale and with seemingly bloody lips, and the atmosphere, as conceived by the designer, was supposed to announce an impending death. What about the impending: on the dresses from this collection were printed military photos of Don McCallin.

Slaves Most of the designer collections with social overtones evoke public indignation: remember the recent history of black women and Dolce & Gabbana. The same thing happened with the collection of Alexander McQueen, inspired by the works of German artist Hans Bellmer, whom the fascist party of Germany recognized almost as a degenerate and expelled from the country. Designer attributed all mortal sins, including the glamorization of slavery.

RUSSIA Alexander was not indifferent to Russia. For example, dresses and masks of red lace, in which models walked in the middle of the fire at the show of the autumn-winter of 1998, is a tribute to the shooting of the Romanov family (among the prints were even photographs of the royal children). The 2003 collection he dedicated to the purge.

MENTAL HEALTH The mirror cube and other decorations for the Voss show, which took a week and 70,000 pounds to create, imitated a psychiatric clinic. Models strolled about rehab in dresses of thousands of feathers and shells, depicting the mentally ill, and in the final, journalist Michelle Olli parodied the work of Sanitarium by photographer Joel-Peter Witkin. It is unlikely that any of the current designers will decide on such performances.

STYLE ISABELLA BLOW Isabella Blow from the sponsor Alexander McQueen turned into his muse. In the nineties, he created dresses for her, and after the suicide of the editor in 2007, he devoted her a collection of La Dame Bleue, based on her wardrobe and style. The clothes had many references to Asia, dresses with stuffed birds on the chest and, of course, caps in the form of masks for fencing and clusters of butterflies, created in collaboration with Philip Tracy (another favorite of Isabella Blow).

CLOWNS AND CRISIS Alexander McQueen has always shied away from commerce (at the institute he even refused to write marketing strategies). We are confident that the transfer of his brand under the management of the Gucci Group left an imprint not only on his collection, but also on the inner world of the designer. The financial crisis of 2008 made a great impression on the British: he invented a show with goth-clown models of things that journalists called romantic, but truly ugly.

APOCALYPSE We read dozens of predictions of the end of the world, which, for a moment, will be in a little more than a week. Alexander created his forecast of the apocalypse - the Plato's Atlantis collection - two years ago. This is the first show that was broadcast online: decided to get closer to the masses of fans closed Alexander McQueen - is not a sign of the end of the world?

Watch the video: Alexander McQueen's Most Jaw-dropping Clothes - (November 2024).