When I was younger, for a few years, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I was a doodler, fascinated with the human form, and fashion designer fit with my interests and ruling-the-world ambitions. My aunt worked in fashion in New York, and she would sometimes bless me with hand-me-down Ralph Lauren purple label (as she still does, thankfully) or Moschino, and for awhile I bought W Magazine religiously, I think mostly to dazzle of my suburban friends.
As much as I studied high fashion when I was younger, I can’t say that I ever really “got” it. I was never focused enough to really learn the history, and thus I never developed much of a critical eye. Plus, I was always an artist first, and fashion differs from art in one crucial way–it all uses the same canvas. No matter how off-the-wall a design may be, there must always be a body involved. Most people extrapolate this fact to mean that all fashion must be practical. I am not such a neophyte. To my limited knowledge, the extent that designers choose to play with (or ignore) this fact, often determines their art. See Martin Margiela for a prime example:
Fast forward to today, when I am 24 and living in New York, where fashion is as everyday as public urination. I work very close to Bryant Park, where I often go for lunch, and during fashion week I sit among the tents, the cameras, and the occasional celebrity. I’ve been to a few fashion week shows since moving here, but I often have a hard time forming an opinion until I read reviews, when my eyes invariably skip past the photos and down to the captions. Numerous friends of mine would kill me for saying this, but a lot of the time, the clothes just looked the same to me.
But something in my understanding shifted when I saw McQueen’s Spring 2010 collection. I recognized immediately the huge strength of this vision–in the futuristic, otherwordly silhouettes and textures. It was completely original, but most astonishingly, I realized after looking several times, this vision somehow didn’t overwhelm the beauty of the clothing, and the women wearing them. Just opposite, it somehow enhanced them. The clothes made the models look incredible–like, weird, beautiful aliens. Every time I looked at the clothes, I noticed some other fold, some other piece of tailoring that I realized I had never seen before, and that I really, really liked.
McQueen’s posthumous show looked incredible. Where before he took reptilian skin and morphed it across textiles, he now plays around with medieval artwork and religious symbology. But it’s not just that–one of my favorite gowns uses cartoon images in its print. All of the images are familiar–the skirts are gathered like curtains, scrolling is reminiscent of the interior design of the room in which these looks were shown–but, as I’m learning was McQueen’s gift, they are reinterpreted into something wholly new and breathtaking.
The below coat, the final piece in the collection, is made of golden feathers and embroidered tulle:
The reviews coming out of this intimate showing are short and evocative, more than one describes it as funereal. Witnessing the outpouring after his death, and coming to appreciate his work, even so late on, I feel like I understand where this reaction, as described in the Times review, comes from:
There were damp eyes among the small audience and sobs backstage — both from personal grief and at the scale of the loss to fashion of this singular designer. In this collection Alexander — Lee — McQueen showed his sensitivity to history, his powers of research, his imagination, his technical skills and his love of women, often misinterpreted or misunderstood, but here evident in every fold and feather.
