#Alexander mcqueen runway looks update#

In the middle of the runway is a pile of garbage, including recycled props from past McQueen shows. Models present creations by British designer Alexander McQueen as part of his “Horn of Plenty” ready-to-wear women’s collection during Paris Fashion Week on March 10, 2009. There is no longevity,” he said at the time. McQueen didn’t parse words when he mocked the establishment. “The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. “It was also a story to tell through those garments.” And his collections were also themes, embedded with social, political and personal messages, he said.Īt the time, The New York Times called the collection a “slap in the face” to the fashion industry. “It wasn’t just beautiful grandiose garments,” Marquez said. In the middle of the show was a pile of trash, spray painted black. Several models wore upturned umbrellas, while others wore coke cans, woven baskets and car parts atop their heads.Ī model with a white plastic bag above her head has a backstory, but the world she inhabited told a loftier tale. In his 2009 “Horn of Plenty: Everything But the Kitchen Sink” collection, all the models wore various detritus on their heads with houndstooth skirts to match. His shows were performance art.Ī model wearing a red hooded cat suit, stands among a ring of fire during the finale of British designer Alexander McQueen’s autumn/winter 1998/1999 fashion collection on the last day of London Fashion week.

Nature, after all, follows the Fibonacci sequence. “He thought that nature was the best creator ever,” Marquez said. “He really played with the form, the body, and tried to stretch it as far away from its natural form as he possibly could.”Īnd if McQueen too often turned his models into beasts, like the horned creatures in the 1997 collection, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” it’s because he viewed the natural world as a constant source of inspiration. “It was unusual at the time, but he brought a heavy influence of body modification, or transhumanism,” Marquez said. The bumster became a hallmark of the McQueen brand that reappeared in subsequent shows. “To me, that part of the body - not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine - that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.” “I wanted to elongate the body, not just show the bum,” McQueen told The Guardian Weekend in 1996. In 1995, McQueen introduced the world to the “bumster,” the low-rise pant that showcased the builder’s bum. McQueen’s play with form can be traced to his early years in the industry. Wilson said in McQueen’s imagination, he wanted to create garments and dresses and suits that would actually protect women, a kind of armor that would inspire fear in the spectator.Ī staff member amid the dresses from the Alexander McQueen Plato’s Atlantis 2010 collection in the “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” exhibition in London on March 12, 2015. She added that his shows were a display of “supposedly ‘ludic’ misogyny.” “When you’re basically there to write about clothes, what are you to make of models tottering along the catwalk in ripped dresses, looking like blood-stained rape victims?” Joan Smith said in the Independent, shortly after McQueen’s death. McQueen’s models, who have been caged, bloodied, or as in “The Birds” collection, actual roadkill, also welcomed accusations of misogyny, a portrayal critics of the designer continued to debate after his death at the age of 40. He wasn’t a designer that wanted to be pretty, she said. “He took ugliness as a starting point, instead of beauty,” Hyland said. It would appear his muse wasn’t necessarily Tippi Hedren, the iconic Hitchcockian heroine in “The Birds,” it was the chaos of a town terrorized by the winged creatures.

The spring 1995 collection, named after the film, also featured models wearing opaque white contacts and dresses covered in bird silhouettes. “I thought: ‘Birds, road, car tire, splat!’” McQueen is quoted as saying by Simon Ungless, a longtime friend who designed the tire print, in Dana Thomas’ biography “Gods and Kings.”

#Alexander mcqueen runway looks update#

In the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock’s blonde heroines exuded a fashionable sophistication on the silver screen, so much that film versions of Kim Novak or Grace Kelly have longed inspired designers to update the prim pencil skirts, leather gloves and long dresses for the modern runway.īut only McQueen could look at 1963’s “The Birds” and come out with a series of garments with tire marks. Photos by Pascal Rossignol and Kieran Doherty and Reuters