Long live Alexander McQueen

The designer's death at 40 is a reminder that thought, precision and wit are rare and endangered qualities

By Stephanie Zacharek

Alexander McQueen and a Spring 2010 creation

There’s a distinction to be made between people who simply don’t follow fashion and those who take pride in asserting how little they care about it. But both groups — in fact, anyone who cares about the culture at large — should take note of the death of Alexander McQueen. For every 1,000 so-called designers who pin a piece of jersey around a mannequin and call it fashion, there’s only one McQueen, an explosively imaginative designer who openly courted controversy (he called one of his early collections, a mix of military jackets and torn-lace dresses, “Highland Rape”) but who also treated craftsmanship as a foundation and not an afterthought (he began his career as an apprentice on Savile Row, helping to construct custom-made suits for the likes of Prince Charles and Mikhail Gorbachev). In a world where fashion churns through chain stores like H&M and Forever 21 at a dizzying and alarming rate, McQueen’s death at age 40 is a sad reminder of the way certain values have been misplaced in our culture: Not just in fashion but in all creative fields, thought, precision, wit and a sense of history are rare and endangered qualities.

McQueen — whose first name was Lee, but who used his middle name, Alexander, professionally — was born in Hackney, London, in 1969, the son of a taxi driver. His early ambitions were modest: He left school at age 16 and, after working on Savile Row for a number of years, had stints doing design work in Japan and Italy (in Milan, he worked for Romeo Gigli). In 1994 he returned to London, hoping to become a pattern-cutting tutor at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, but his design portfolio was so strong that he was encouraged to enroll as a student. And it was as a student that he met his first customer, the British aristocrat and fashion stylist Isabella Blow, who would become one of his closest friends. Blow was so impressed by McQueen’s student work that she commissioned him to make clothes for her. He’d show up to meet her with his latest creations wrapped up in bin liners (or, as we’d call them in the States, garbage bags). She paid him on the installment plan, purchasing one item a month at the rate of £100 per week.

McQueen worked as head designer at Givenchy from 1996 to 2001, during which time he ruffled his share of feathers. But even then, his sense of showmanship never eclipsed his devotion to beauty and workmanship: In a 1999 Givenchy show, he sent amputee athlete Aimee Mullins down the catwalk in a pair of specially made prosthetic legs. These faux legs, hand-made from ash, featured magnificent carvings of magnolias and grapevines, an example of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement ideals brought vividly to life.

After leaving Givenchy, McQueen entered a partnership with Gucci that allowed him to expand his own brand. But in a difficult and often ugly business, McQueen managed to walk a deft line between continuing to make daring and innovative clothes but also — thanks in part to his tailoring skills — making pieces that women could actually wear. The latter category includes the line McQueen designed for Target last year. But McQueen’s most astonishing recent creations definitely fall into the former group. He has designed looks for work-of-art pop star Lady Gaga. For his last show, Spring 2010 (which was streamed live on Show Studio, the web site run McQueen’s friend, the photographer Nick Knight) McQueen sent his models down the catwalk in an array of snakeprint-and-butterfly-wing photoprint dresses, with soft shoulders and bouffant skirts (wearable enough, if you’ve got the right body and the right occasion to don such garments). But the shoes — the shoes! — could not safely be worn by any mere mortal. It was astonishing that none of the models fell off them, and although lots of people in the fashion world clamored to get a hold of them, there were few to be had: These were shoes designed purely for fantasy, not for real life, and McQueen himself knew it.

The shoes can best be described as a kind of an alien bootie, a triple cross between a ’40s platform, a pointe shoe and a Clydesdale’s hoof; some of them were made of python skin, no less. This wasn’t a shoe made for walking, but for show. It represented the apotheosis of obsession. You might call it the footwear equivalent of the Michael Powell film “The Red Shoes,” a cautionary tale, rendered in leather, about how the pursuit of beauty and perfection can destroy you.

Then again, sometimes it can just make you laugh, and McQueen’s designs often did that: Old-fashioned ladies’ walking suits rendered in oversized houndstooth, with jumbo ruffles marching down the front; jackets that resembled painted suits of armor, luxury wear for a warrior queen; lots and lots of tartan, cut into flirtatious curves and bustles. McQueen was scheduled to show his next collection in Paris on March 9. His death, which appears to have been a suicide, came just days after his own mother died. (Blow, his dear friend and patron, committed suicide in 2007.)

But in the interest of turning one very sad ending into a kind of rebirth, I direct you to a link on the Show Studio site, where you can find a pattern — accompanied by very cursory instructions — for a McQueen kimono jacket you can make yourself. It’s not for the faint of heart, and I challenge those who think fashion is only for brainless no-talents to try their hand at constructing it. (And please send me pictures if you do.) Even if you don’t have the guts to commit scissors to fabric, have a look at the pattern pieces and see if you don’t marvel, as I do, at the wonder of something that’s more than just a diagram. How does a flat shape like this become a 3-D confection that comes to life on the contours of a body? Who not only dreams up such a thing, but drafts the essence of it on paper so it can be turned into a reality? Alexander “Lee” McQueen lived in the sweet spot where brashness and attitude meet the poetry of craftsmanship. He didn’t just shock; he could also cut.

: Stephanie Zacharek is a senior writer for Salon Arts & Entertainment. More Stephanie Zacharek

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By Debra S. Ollivier

Topics:Alexander McQueen

All over Paris last week, the harbingers of next spring’s haute couture and prjt-`-porter collections were out in force, a strange amalgam of extremes. On the one hand, women played out prurient Victorian baby-doll fantasies, Cinderella vixens billowing and bondaged in bustles, buntings and bodices. Layered in pounds of plumage and petticoats; ruffled, trussed, corseted and masked like so many Marie Antoinettes walking gracefully, if not a bit self-consciously, to their own executions.

On the other side of the fashion extreme, women dressed as objects — quite literally. They were furniture bolsters, missile silos and mutant vegetables (heads bursting from cabbages). Some sported wing flaps and radioactive aluminum siding; others were wrapped in what appeared to be postmodern death shrouds (“… hooded cape encourages stillness of upper body,” is how one American journalist described this look. Translation: Hooded cape is something you’re supposed to be caught dead in). Some women wore things that looked as if they might live inside your radiator or in your air-conditioning duct. Fumbling for descriptors, Le Monde called it all “test tube beauty” and a “starchy and indigestible [fashion] porridge.”

When — in the bonding and strapping — limbs became a problem, they were simply removed. This month’s French Vogue brings us “Cyber Amazon,” a space-age, bikini-clad gladiator who, with her prosthetic leg and hook arm, can “turn lead to gold, enflame libidos and reduce men to objects.” This limbless trend is the brainchild of Alexander McQueen, a British designer who put Aimee Mullens, the first handicapped model (Mullens had both legs amputated when she was 1) on the runway in London this fall. Benetton recently chose a number of mentally retarded and Down’s syndrome children for its ads. Even the ballerinas in the Palais Garnier’s presentation of “Ghiselle” pranced around in straitjackets and mental-ward attire rather than traditional tutus. All this prompted French Elle to declare, “The handicapped are fashionable,” celebrating a new era of asylum, orthopedic chic: women with or without limbs in a variety of surgical neck braces, wooden body and head casts and prosthetic limbs, soon to be complemented with “futuristic orthopedic-bondage jewelry” from Givenchy. Clearly, employing the aesthetics of medical gear and trauma is a dipstick for measuring the extent to which the fashion world has veered into almost psychotic lunacy.

Of course, no one in Paris really dresses in this boudoir-cum-intensive-care-unit style. Fashion has always been another world, if not downright otherworldly. (“Women are apparitions,” Guy Laroche says in a full-page ad in Le Monde, perhaps by way of explanation.) Still, socio-anthropological speculation aside, one wonders not only who buys these vestments but how women actually sit, lean over or disrobe without inflicting physical harm on themselves or innocent bystanders. One wonders how many French women actually fit into the thimble-size, breastless (whatever happened to darts?) body suits, prosthetic armaments or bust-breaking bodices revamped for the ’90s? One wonders who, besides France’s first lady, Bernadette Chirac, actually buys a new $3,000 Dior handbag in an array of new, minty colors? To find out, I made my way to avenue Montaigne, where the sovereign kings of haute couture have taken up residence like so many houses of lords.

Avenue Montaigne is as dynamic as a still life. Even the traffic, normally in a state of frenzied chaos with pileups all over Paris, seems to mysteriously thin out and slow down there, as if it’s a different high-density gravitational field. I went to the houses of Chanel, Dior and Nina Ricci to see how many people actually shopped there. The answer, it seems, is not many. Every store was absolutely desolate. A lone security guard looked on as a tiny, frail woman examined a tiny, frail watch in a near-empty Chanel boutique. Dior featured a variation on the theme of its basic handbag (its padded square patterns have always reminded me of La-Z-Boy lounge chairs) as well as an assortment of dresses-that-are-anything-but, i.e., assemblages made of what appeared to be upholstery swatches, shag carpet, Native American bone and bead decorations, macrami, rubber ribbings. The colors, like the women who’d wear such get-ups, scream for attention: hysterical fuchsias, maddening magentas and canary yellows. The showroom has the literal and allegorical stuffiness of a taxidermist’s boutique, reminding me of the confused and encumbered chameleon in Eric Carle’s children’s story, “The Mixed-Up Chameleon” — who, with his elephant head, seal flippers, giraffe neck, turtle shell and antlers, was “a little of this, a little of that.” Foot traffic here was nonexistent.

Still wondering where all the orthopedic gear and baby-doll dresses were, I crossed the street to Nina Ricci, with its prominent display of Day-Glo purses in the form of tugboats, lounge chairs, watering cans, telephones and flowerpots. At roughly $2,000 a pop, nobody was buying. Then again, no one was there to buy.

What’s going on here? According to France’s Nouvel Observateur, Dior’s sales rose in the first six months of this year by 76 percent in France, 41 percent in Europe and 48 percent in America (dipping a mere 3 to 5 percent in Asia despite the crisis). But that was a mere blip, due in large measure to the arrival at Dior of fashion deviationist John Galliano, in an otherwise bleaker picture. Just three months ago haute couture tailors took to the streets protesting job losses and boutique closings; it’s been estimated that roughly one-third of haute couture jobs have been lost in the last decade. As the French grapple with massive unemployment, transportation and labor strikes, student protests and dwindling social benefits, has the furious and antic extravagance of French haute couture become somewhat of a joke?

Turns out, the fashion action was not far away at Galeries Lafayette, on the perennially congested boulevard Haussmann. Like many venerated but budget-strapped French institutions, Galeries Lafayette is a mix of the shabby and the elegant (a magnificent iron and stained-glass dome, on the one hand; stairwells and lighting fixtures that haven’t been retouched since the Allied invasion of Normandy, on the other). It has the slightly chaotic, colorful disorder of a child’s room. This week the street was celebrating spring collections by opening its runways to young (read: unknown) designers, and a sea of people had come for a peek. Despite the decor (black-light glow, interstellar tinklings piped in from hidden speakers, mannequins rising out of blasted swamps, cattails and all), the atmosphere was decidedly down-to-earth. The models were young, a little inexperienced and clearly having a good time; they sported ready-to-wear pants and skirts with “military allure” and names like “Free,” “Happy Wear,” “Very Happy,” and “Miss Sixty.” If this gear, in its various shades of gray and khaki, and the crowds who came to see it are any indication, spring ’99 will be much more ordinary and typically unisex than the high priests of haute couture would have us believe. For most of us, it will be about dressing for the tribulations of urban life (which in the case of Paris means downpours, metros, cobblestones and dog shit). Jeans, it seems, will remain a staple for men and women alike.

It’s sad that the tautology of French haute couture has eclipsed what is by far France’s greatest contribution to fashion: denim. Originally called “bleu de Nnmes,” denim was a fabric from the French town of Nnmes. Imported by Levi Strauss in the late 1800s, denim became the foundation for the pants with metal rivets (put in vulnerable spots for miners who needed strong, sturdy pants) that would become an unrivaled, universal fashion staple for millions of men and women, and remain so for nearly 150 years. I’m reminded, however, that it wasn’t until the late ’60s that girls were allowed the right to wear jeans in public school. Jeans! Incredulous, on the first day the policy change was official, I went to elementary school in a dress with my jeans (an egregious pair of purple bell-bottoms) in a paper bag just in case the whole thing — the opening of the portals of fashion freedom, girls unbound by the constraints of dainty dresses and uncomfortable skirts, license to explore new rough-and-tumble worlds, the birth of a true unisex revolution — was some kind of a joke.

It wasn’t.