Alexander McQueen

[kit]

I'm starting a new thread as I cannot find one specifically on Lee's new menswear collection .

THIS is interesting :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,...1192482,00.html

Would you agree with the views expressed here , or is this just a male ' fashion victim ' talking ?

Charlie Porter has JUST started as an assistant editor on GQ UK and writes a column as a style agony aunt !!!

KIT

 

[Scott]

Fashion victim? Hmmm...a tad over enthusiastic,perhaps

 

[chocsta]

It's like he's trying to compete with the designer for the spotlight...

 

[Orochian]

I'm kind of shocked and amused at the same time that such a junvenile level of writing, in both form and content, can actually make the cut to appear in a major website with an international audience like The Guardian.

His tone reminds me of a blog by some silly flaming Chelsea queen....

 

[kit]

Originally posted by Orochian@Apr 17th, 2004 - 11:51 am
I'm kind of shocked and amused at the same time that such a junvenile level of writing, in both form and content, can actually make the cut to appear in a major website with an international audience like The Guardian.

His tone reminds me of a blog by some silly flaming Chelsea queen....

AGREED

KIT

 

[kit]

I really KNEW there was a link on the forum !!! B) B) B)

Look here :-

http://www.thefashionspot.com/forums/index...?showtopic=5792

It all comes together .

KIT

 

[faust]

The writer is from GQ - enough said...

 

[whereisthatsusu]

Originally posted by Orochian@Apr 17th, 2004 - 11:51 am
I'm kind of shocked and amused at the same time that such a junvenile level of writing, in both form and content, can actually make the cut to appear in a major website with an international audience like The Guardian.

His tone reminds me of a blog by some silly flaming Chelsea queen....

exactly

i was wondering..."is this a livejournal or what???"

 

[kit]

Originally posted by whereisthatsusu+Apr 19th, 2004 - 8:16 pm--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(whereisthatsusu @ Apr 19th, 2004 - 8:16 pm)</div><div class='quotemain'> <!--QuoteBegin-Orochian@Apr 17th, 2004 - 11:51 am
I'm kind of shocked and amused at the same time that such a junvenile level of writing, in both form and content, can actually make the cut to appear in a major website with an international audience like The Guardian.

His tone reminds me of a blog by some silly flaming Chelsea queen....

exactly

i was wondering..."is this a livejournal or what???" [/b][/quote]
NO , it's just a short weekly column in the GUARDIAN colour supplement .

Rather than start a new thread , here's an interesting piece on Lee McQueen , by his mother , taken from today's Guardian review section :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/guesteditor...1195507,00.html

Hope it's of interest .

KIT B)

 

[helena]

I couldn't find a better place to put this so I thought I'd revive Kit's old thread.....

from the Guardian

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Boy done good[/font]

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]How did Alexander McQueen, son of an East End cabbie, become the most powerful British designer in the world? At the start of London fashion week, the former enfant terrible tells Jess Cartner-Morley why, for the first time, he's started to care what people think[/font]

[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Monday September 19, 2005
The Guardian

[/font][font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Twenty years ago, as an apprentice in the Savile Row workshop of Gieves & Hawkes, Alexander McQueen, bored one afternoon, wrote "I am a c*nt" in the lining of a jacket destined for the Prince of Wales. Earlier this month, the Prince's stepson, Tom Parker Bowles, married Sara Buys in the society wedding of the season; it was McQueen who designed the bride's dress. It was the final proof, if anyone still needed it, that fashion's ultimate enfant terrible has grown up. [/font]
[font=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]
</IMG>A decade ago, the fashion industry watched Alexander McQueen's catwalk shows with wide-eyed, titillated horror, peering from between their fingers like schoolgirls at a Halloween sleepover, at locks of human hair sewn into jacket linings in reference to Jack the Ripper, or, on one memorable occasion, at an impromptu, post-show moonie from the designer himself. Few would have predicted then that in 2005 the same designer would be a must-have label for department stores from Dubai to Moscow to Los Angeles, or that high street stores would look to him as one of the leading figures behind the most important trends of the season.


And yet that is exactly what has happened. McQueen has just launched his second fragrance, a traditional commercial money-spinner; his new range of luxury handbags has waiting lists all over the world. These days, the industry takes what McQueen does very seriously indeed.

McQueen himself still sounds more like a character from Only Fools and Horses than Absolutely Fabulous, with a distinctive, softly adenoidal voice. Imagine a male version of Miss Adelaide from Guys and Dolls, only from Stratford instead of Brooklyn. His catchphrase, uttered at least once every five minutes, is "I don't give a f*ck". But then, this what-you-see-is-what-you-get persona, the like-it-or-lump-it posturing, is itself a disguise of sorts.

McQueen is the son of an East End cab driver; as a teenager, he joined the Young Ornithologists' Club and whiled away the after-school hours birdwatching from the roof of his block of flats. He retains to this day the mentality of an outsider. His abrasive speaking manner is less a sign of rudeness - if you can ignore the coarse language, he is perfectly polite - than a way of keeping the fashion world at arm's length.

Tonight McQueen will take his business another leap forward, with the London fashion week launch of a range of trainers he has designed for Puma. The trainers are the first step towards a new direction for McQueen, who wants "to expand into a different, a younger age bracket" now that his Paris catwalk label, whose clients including Gwyneth Paltrow and Joan Collins, has become so high-end.

The trainers themselves are, inevitably, quite strange. Turn the model entitled My Left Foot Bound upside down and a cast of McQueen's own left foot is visible through the sole, suspended in transparent rubber. That's a bit, well, creepy, I say; McQueen beams. "Exactly. A bit Damien Hirst, isn't it? Quite weird. Nicey nicey just doesn't do it for me."

Lee Alexander McQueen - he dropped his first name as a struggling designer who was still signing on - was born on March 16 1969. Joyce, his mother, was a social science teacher who became a genealogist; she has traced her family's roots in the East End back 250 years to the Huguenots who fled persecution in France to settle in Spitalfields. Lee was the youngest of six children; one of his brothers became a cab driver, like their father and one of their uncles. He was close to his three sisters and to his aunt Renee, at whose house he remembers watching Hitchcock films in the afternoon. At Rokeby school, the local, all-boys' comprehensive, he daydreamed and filled notebooks with drawings, leaving with one O-level in art. He has described himself as the "pink sheep" of his family - a misfit, but not rejected. He told his family he was gay when he was 18, although he had known for at least 10 years; after a rocky period, his family accepted his sexuality.

McQueen knew quite well from a young age that he wanted to be a fashion designer. When his mum saw an item on the TV news bemoaning the lack of apprentices on Savile Row, he saw a way in and went knocking on doors. He was taken on at Anderson & Sheppard, and then, after two years, moved to neighbouring Gieves & Hawkes. From here, he moved to costumiers Angels & Bermans, where, among other things, he worked on the outfits for Les Miserables. With this grounding in tailoring and theatrics under his belt, McQueen went to Milan, spending a year as a pattern cutter for Romeo Gigli, then at the height of his fame. Aged 21, he returned to London and applied for a job teaching pattern cutting at Central Saint Martins, which he didn't get; instead, he was offered a coveted place on the MA design course, which he took up with the help of a £4,000 loan from his aunt Renee. His entire graduate collection was bought by the fashion editor Isabella Blow, who became his muse and an influential supporter. He began staging shows during London fashion week, and his name rapidly became infamous, most notably for his extremely low-slung, and largely unwearable, "bumster" trousers.

One morning in 1996 McQueen, who had still produced only eight collections, was in bed with his boyfriend in the curtained-off living area of their Hoxton Square studio when the phone rang. It was a job offer: the post of designer of both the ready-to-wear and ultra-exclusive haute couture collections for Givenchy, the Paris house founded in 1952 by Count Hubert Taffin de Givenchy. McQueen stayed four years, although it was not a happy time - something he now takes some responsibility for. "I treated Givenchy badly. It was just money to me. But there was nothing I could do: the only way it would have worked would have been if they had allowed me to change the whole concept of the house, to give it a new identity, and they never wanted me to do that. [Bernard] Arnault was never going to allow Givenchy to overshadow Dior; to him, Givenchy is just a perfume."

During this time, McQueen continued with his own label, staging catwalk shows in London; in December 2000, he allowed Gucci Group, arch rivals of LVMH, to buy a 51% stake in the Alexander McQueen name. Unsurprisingly, such a slap in the face to his employers heralded the end of his tenure at Givenchy.

It was at this point that something seemed to shift at McQueen. The catwalk presentations were still breathtaking, full of passion and ideas - at the end of the October 2003 show, a dance piece choreographed by Michael Clarke and based on Sydney Pollack's film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, even the impermeable Anna Wintour sprang to her feet, applauding wildly. But there was a new purity to the clothes, as if more sunshine was being allowed into McQueen's world. The reference points were still deliberately twisted and severe, but the clothes themselves were increasingly pretty and decorative, allowed to sell themselves without psychological baggage. The show in October last year, for instance, was inspired by the Peter Weir film Picnic at Hanging Rock, but the mood of the film was evoked with the lightest of touches. A tiered dress, layered from sunshine-yellow cotton, broderie anglaise and sprigged florals, was unashamedly pretty. His most recent show, in March, was by far his biggest commercial hit to date: a parade of beautifully cut pencil skirts, coats and cocktail dresses based on Hitchcock heroines that had buyers and editors alike salivating, and has been one of the most influential collections of the season.

As McQueen puts it, this focus on fashion over fireworks is down to his own growing confidence. "For a long time I was looking for my perfect equilibrium, my mojo. And now I think I'm getting there: I've found my customer, my silhouette, my cut. You can hide so much behind theatrics, and I don't need to do that any more."

McQueen has always been more about psychology than clothes. He is not particularly interested in pretty faces or pretty clothes simply on a superficial level. ("David Beckham is vainer than the veins on my dick," he once said, with consummate delicacy.) Psychological themes crop up time and again. As well as shows based on Hitchcock and Picnic at Hanging Rock, there have been collections inspired by Lord of the Flies, chess games, and asylums. McQueen calls his shows "my own living nightmares", but part of the power of the shows is due to the fact that they have an emotional resonance with audiences as well, McQueen having the outsider's ability to take a clear-eyed look into the fashion world. Sometimes he feels like the fashion industry's therapist, he jokes.

On several occasions, he has come up against accusations of misogyny, most infamously with the 1995 Highland r*pe show, which featured torn bodices and tampon strings hanging from the skirts. At the time, McQueen said that he had been misunderstood; he was trying, he said, to make a point about how 18th century Scotland has been romanticised, and it wasn't all about "beautiful women drifting across the moors in unmanageable chiffon". The referencing of 1950s Hitchcock heroines in the latest collection may arouse some of the same questions.

If there is undoubtedly a spikiness to McQueen's view of women, he would insist that the sharp edges are directed outwards. "I grew up with three older sisters, and I saw them go through a lot of sh*t, I always wanted to be able to protect them." This he did very much in his own way. "They would call me up to their room and I'd help them pick out clothes for work. Just, you know, what skirt with what cardigan, but I was always trying to make them look strong and sheltered."

His clothes, similarly, he has described as "armour". "When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there's a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful," he tells me. "It kind of fends people off. You have to have a lot of balls to talk to a woman wearing my clothes." It is this sense of impenetrability, he says, that gives his clothes their sex appeal: "When a woman gets dressed up to go out at night, she wants to give 50% away, and hold the rest back. If you're an open book, there's no allure." As you might expect for a designer who speaks of armour and designs to defend, McQueen is uncomfortable when the spotlight is directed on to him. When I ask him if his rules apply to the way he dresses himself, he begins to fidget manically, spinning his ashtray and cigarette packet in opposite directions, and his voice rises at least an octave: "I just want to be a wallflower. Nondescript. Just not anything. I don't want to see me."

His inspirations are intriguing: he tells me that this morning he was listening to possible music for his upcoming show and he heard a Siouxsie Sioux record. "That was it ... I had a dress in my head." A dress of razor clam and mussel shells worn by Erin O'Connor in a London show came about after McQueen, walking on a Suffolk beach one day with his then partner, saw the shells, immediately saw the dress in his head, and started picking them up.

McQueen, who describes himself as naturally monogamous, married the young documentary film maker George Forsyth in a non-legally binding ceremony on a yacht off the coast of Ibiza in 2000, but the relationship has since ended. These days, he spends his weekends at his country house near Hastings, where he is learning to kite surf. His London home is home to his art collection, which includes "lots of Chapman brothers, a bit of Warhol, lots of Joel Witkins, lots of Sam Taylor-Wood". He has never developed a taste for fashion parties - he doesn't even like champagne - and, when I ask if there's anyone in the industry he really likes, he says he is "courteous with most people, but I'm not sure if I like them. Like is a big word for me." McQueen moved his catwalk show from London in 2000, as part of Gucci's plan to establish him as an international brand; his Paris show will take place on October 7. Rather touchingly, he admits to being nervous for the first time ever. "I've never been someone to give a f*ck what people say about the collections. I do what I want. But even so, I am feeling the pressure, because after the last one being so successful, everyone is going to be looking to see what I do now." Naturally he won't tell me what it will be; I have just one measly clue. "It won't be florals. It's about what's happening in my mind, and I just can't think in florals"[/font]

 

[fashionologie]

lovely article. thank you, helena

 

[Scott]

That's a marvelous article,Helena. Thank you

Everytime I read his quotes,I find myself admiring him more and more. This is no exception.

 

[gallianoboy]

Alexander Mcqueen vs. John Galliano......JOHN GALLIANO!!!! HANDS DOWN...Mcqueen is good but not THAT GOOD!!!!! And as the article states "the former enfant terrible"....that title goes to JEAN PAUL GAULTIER....again Mcqueen can't touch Gaultier!!!!!

 

[Scott]

^What does rivalry have to do with anything? And enfant terrible isn't exactly a singular slogan anyway...there are loads of those,obviously. McQueen,Westwood & Gaultier are all part of that.

But I will say,one thing I've come to realise in comparison with most of his calibre is his sense of integrity. He's actually a pretty human designer...his work has alot of soul. Much like his peers in Demeulemeester and Van Noten.

 

[Diorling]

Alexander Mcqueen vs. John Galliano......JOHN GALLIANO!!!! HANDS DOWN...Mcqueen is good but not THAT GOOD!!!!! And as the article states "the former enfant terrible"....that title goes to JEAN PAUL GAULTIER....again Mcqueen can't touch Gaultier!!!!!

No competition between McQueen and Galliano...It's a tie, and Gaultier is above them simply because he has been brilliant since before I was born.

 

[Spike413]

Where'd this competition come from? I think the three of them are among the most daring, innovative and creative modern designers there are, not to mention that between the three of them they share a truckload of talent.

 

[Diorling]

What is this new fragrance he launched? I cannot find anything about it...Anywhere...

 

[Spike413]

My Queen is the name....

 

[Diorling]

My Queen is the name....

Very sharp. It makes me chuckle...

 

[Honey~Blade]

I loved that article! Many thanks Helena! The man cracks me up and he's so down to earth. I dig what he wrote on the lining of the jacket - it was spot on considering who it was going to.