RIP Alexander McQueen CBE : 1969 - 2010 #2

[shopping247]

^ that's great news! thanks for the info!

 

[educo]

I'm so excited about the 'Unseen' series from Showstudio. They never disappoint!

 

[lucy92]

Inside Mcqueen's relationship with Isabella Blow - excerpt from Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath The Skin by Andrew Wilson

 

[HeaTk]

I never tire of this thread

 

[Phuel]

Thanks lucy for the link to those excerpts.

I think they were both very self-destructive individuals that fed off one another. The meanness, the arrogance and cruelty seems to comes from a place of hurt. I don't feel sorry, nor do I feel distain for them-- they're very human. I admire her for her totally, near-addiction to fashion, and to him. And I admire him for his vision. But outside of that, I don't find anything admirable about them as people.

 

[lucy92]

Thanks lucy for the link to those excerpts.

I think they were both very self-destructive individuals that fed off one another. The meanness, the arrogance and cruelty seems to comes from a place of hurt. I don't feel sorry, nor do I feel distain for them-- they're very human. I admire her for her totally, near-addiction to fashion, and to him. And I admire him for his vision. But outside of that, I don't find anything admirable about them as people.

i did have a chuckle about isabella blow's penchant for exposing her breasts randomly though...

there is another excerpt from the book here.

some of the allegations here are a bit disturbing, mind you.

 

[mistress_f]

i mean it's no surprise he was a really troubled man, but some of the things that people are spilling are distasteful to say the least

 

[Nomar]

Very exciting

 

[dancorpse]

Whether true or not, some allegations are really disrespectful.

 

[lucy92]

Part 3 from the Daily Mail here

In fact, McQueen had had enough of the fashion treadmill and began to wonder what else he could do.
Could he set up a design school? Set up as a photographer? Perhaps open his own gay p*rn studio?
But all these ideas came to nothing. To his friend and former colleague Sebastian Pons, he confided that, in retrospect, he should never have signed with Gucci. ‘But I can’t get out of it now,’ he said. ‘I have built my own prison.’
In spring 2009, he invited Pons for a holiday at a £1.7 million house he’d bought in Majorca, and the two men sat talking one night.
‘I’ve already designed my last collection,’ said McQueen.
‘What do you mean, your last collection?’ asked Pons. ‘You mean your next collection?’
‘No. My last. I have it in my head. In my last collection, I’m going to ***********. I’m going to end this.’
His plan, he said, was to do it during a show, in front of the audience. ‘He told me he’d have a Perspex or glass box, and in the middle of that another glass box,’ recalled Pons. ‘Towards the end of the show, he’d come out from under the ground and shoot himself, so all his brains would drip down the glass.’
Pons was so alarmed by his friend’s deteriorating mental health that he telephoned the McQueen office in London.
The member of staff he spoke to was dismissive: McQueen was fine — there was nothing to be concerned about.

 

[Phuel]

^^^ Thanks again for the link lucy.

The excerpts are very much in the style of dishy, tabloid and soundbites to impress just how mean girls everyone is without a more grounded/ human side to balance things out. It's really not a surprise why they keep on harping on how unattractive he is, as that seems to be something that would create that underdog champion for readers: People do love their ugly underdogs triumphing over the odds-- especially if the odds are the background of the what's perceived to be the superduper glamorous fashion world, when the truth is that many people behind the scene pretty much look like-- and dress, like McQueen... And yeah-- Isabella's constant nipslips are chuckle-worthy only in that it conjured up images of Roger Smith the alien from American Dad having a "nipslip" with a balloon for attention.

I can't help but think had there been just one person that was more grounded and cared just a bit more for him, that he could have been convinced that he could be happy and wanted to live. I really do think that despite all the fame and fortune, he didn't have that one person that fought just a bit harder for him.

Bios are weird to me: On the one hand, I can't help but think how exaggerated these instances may be. But, they could be more honest and truthful than if McQueen the man himself wrote his autobiography. I don't know-- I guess the truth is somewhere wedged in there.

 

[shopping247]

^ thanks for the posts and exerpts lucy92. In a way I am not surprised to read about his tortured inner self. How much of these allegations are true - who knows. Only those who were close to him and who were there to experience these life snippets would know (that is, if they weren't high/drugged out with him).

 

[Chanelcouture09]

 

[lucy92]

Bios are weird to me: On the one hand, I can't help but think how exaggerated these instances may be. But, they could be more honest and truthful than if McQueen the man himself wrote his autobiography. I don't know-- I guess the truth is somewhere wedged in there.

I think most reputable biographers confirm an anecdote with two or three sources otherwise they leave it out.

it will be interesting to see if the accounts in "Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin"match or similar material being discussed in the other book about Mcqueen being published now : Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano by Dana Thomas.

 

[Phuel]

Thanks for the video Chanelcouture09-- never seen it before.

Nick and McQueen produced a lot of stunning imageries in their collaborations, but that was not one of them: it's so overwrought and just burdened-- a total flop to me.

You know, once in a while, there appears a fashion designer that changes the fashion landscape, not just with the fashions they create-- but come with this sheer force of will, of creativity and of vision, and that sense of fearlessness to confront social and political issues, to shake the system, to show us something that transcends beyond fashion. McQueen was that individual, like Gaultier before him, he was able to create something that was about creating a new culture, even a new ethnicity of individuals by infusing all the historical cultures, periods, times, and places of our world. A storyteller. I always saw him as the darker side, the cursed Lucifer to Gaultier's light and joyful Gabriel.

There's no one in fashion like him anymore now. There are still good designs and thoughtful designers, but no more storytellers and fashion really is in the thick of a deathly wintry thrall at the moment... I guess I'm waiting for the return of an Aslan, with all the Annas, Glindas, and Katies as the White Witches that needs to be ridden off in fashion-dom LOL

lucy: I love fashion, and I admire some designers for their vision and skills. But, I've never come close to any behavior like worshipping any of these people, so when I see titles like Gods and Kings in describing them... sheesh, that is worth a chuckle LOL

 

[dancorpse]

There's no one in fashion like him anymore now. There are still good designs and thoughtful designers, but no more storytellers and fashion really is in the thick of a deathly wintry thrall at the moment... I guess I'm waiting for the return of an Aslan, with all the Annas, Glindas, and Katies as the White Witches that needs to be ridden off in fashion-dom LOL

Great saying, Phuel.
He make me believe that pain is beautiful, his design imply such a painful soul which stood out lonely on edge of this noisy world, that was exactly what touch me the most. What the nowadays designers lack is SOUL.

 

[Koibito]

McQueen's plan to kill himself on the catwalk: How tortured fashion genius plotted greatest shock of all


By ANDREW WILSON FOR THE DAILY MAIL

He was adored by the fashion world, but a new biography of designer Alexander McQueen reveals the dark side of his brilliance.
Yesterday, we told of his cruelty to the woman who made him a star. Today, we reveal his macabre plan to commit suicide in public...
When Alexander McQueen decided he had to change the way he looked, he turned first to Janet Street-Porter. Could she give him the number of her personal trainer?
She did so — but after a few sessions, her trainer refused to continue. As Janet recalls, McQueen was ‘always coked out of his head or coming down from being coked out of his head, and doing loads of other drugs, too.
‘So my trainer said he couldn’t work with him in case he had an accident or a heart attack while they were working out.’

By now approaching 30, McQueen had become increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw in the mirror: he was overweight and — in the words of one lover — could easily be mistaken for a scrap-metal dealer rather than a fashion designer.
As creative director of a prestigious fashion house, he was convinced he needed to look sleeker — more like Ralph Lauren or Calvin Klein, say — to stand a chance of becoming a marketable global brand. And thus his long, expensive quest began.
An approach to Jerry Hall’s dentist proved successful: his teeth were finally fixed, and his smile transformed. Indeed, it looked so like Jerry Hall’s that one of his boyfriends started calling him Jerry.
Next, he paid for £3,000-worth of liposuction, which sucked out 8lb of fat from his stomach and thighs. McQueen was delighted, not least because he imagined that he could now eat whatever he wanted with impunity. A few months later, he’d put all the weight back on again.

Desperate, he paid thousands of pounds for gastric band surgery to limit the amount of food he could eat. The results were dramatic and he lost 2st in three months.
On the surface, it seemed, McQueen’s life had never been better. In 2000 — in the midst of all these physical transformations — he was poached by Givenchy’s bitter rival, Gucci, and rewarded with a contract worth more than $30 million and the promise of more than 50 McQueen stores round the world.
For a once-scruffy East London boy who’d specialised in shocking the Establishment, this was heady stuff indeed. Posing happily for photographs, he told everyone that his new look was all down to healthy eating, yoga and exercise.
For a long time, nothing seemed to affect his upward trajectory — not even fashion commentator Brenda Polan’s thunderous denunciation of him in the Daily Mail as ‘the designer who hates women’.

Yet she was by no means alone in condemning shows that seemed to portray women as victims of violence and sexual assault.
Joan Smith, in the Independent on Sunday, accused the designer of degrading women. His show, titled Eshu, had featured a model with a silver mouthpiece that had spikes nearly reaching her eyes. ‘What on earth was going through the mind of the man who designed it?’ she asked.
McQueen could have answered his critics, but to have done so would have left him open to questions about the source of the dark imagery that ran through his work — the abuse he and his sister had suffered at the hands of her first husband.
However, an increasing number of commentators began to see McQueen’s designs as art. Even the Victoria & Albert museum included some of his creations.
Meanwhile, the designer himself was seen flirting with former defence secretary Michael Portillo at the launch party.
‘If I’d been allowed to vote, I’d have got him in,’ McQueen said afterwards, referring to Portillo’s failed bid for the Tory leadership. ‘I’ve always fancied him.’
The deal with Gucci had turned the designer into a ‘celebrity’ who now sat in roped-off VIP areas and earned serious money.
His then boyfriend, George Forsyth, remembered flying with him to New York on the spur of the moment just to buy a couple of Warhol prints for £125,000.
Another whim was the purchase of a £30,000 chandelier, from the Four Seasons hotel in Paris, from which McQueen plucked its hundreds of Swarovksi crystals in order to decorate his Christmas tree.
One night, as they watched a nature documentary together, he asked Forsyth if he’d like to go to Africa. Two days later, they were on a plane — the sole occupants of the entire upper deck, which McQueen had booked just for them. After 48 hours, he’d had enough of the arid landscape and chartered a plane to visit Naomi Campbell on the coast.
‘We spent three days partying and taking drugs there — though Naomi didn’t do any coke,’ recalled Forsyth — who was later to die of an accidental drug overdose.
Back in London, McQueen was losing control. There were, according to Forsyth, parties every night: champagne receptions; cocaine passed around on silver salvers; three-day-long drink and drug binges.
‘I don’t think he really liked going to parties unless he was on lots of drugs,’ said author and socialite Plum Sykes, who had met him when she worked for Vogue.
‘If he was taking lots of drugs, he would be more mean and vicious, but when he was healthy and going to the gym he would be delightful.’
His close friend known as BillyBoy recalls that McQueen’s drug consumption was actually reaching frightening proportions.
‘I was concerned because he was so completely out of it,’ he said. ‘It brought out a whole other person inside of him, like a demon trying to escape unleashed.’

Once, McQueen turned up to a magazine launch, high on cocaine and with a male prostitute on his arm. At work, he was often angry — reportedly screaming at his staff and throwing things at them. At home, when he was suffering from an occasional attack of paranoia, he would sit in the dark for hours with a camcorder, hoping to capture ghosts or spirits on film.
As time went on, he became more and more obsessed with death and the afterlife. Even before the suicide of his mentor, Isabella Blow, in 2007, which affected him deeply, he was regularly visiting mediums.
McQueen’s brother, Michael, a 48-year-old taxi driver who nearly died of a massive heart attack in 2008, recalls the designer plaguing him with questions soon afterwards. ‘Did you see anything? Did you see the gates?’ he asked eagerly. Michael told him to ‘p*** off.’
McQueen’s near-pathological preoccupation with the macabre became more pronounced than ever in his fashion shows.
In one show alone, staged in 2007, there were images of locusts, owls, heads rotting into skulls, flames, blood and naked girls.
It was all too much for the magazine that had once hailed him as a ‘creative god’: American Vogue promptly cancelled a planned feature about him.
Yet McQueen, once so eager for global success, no longer seemed to care. Instead, he was ever more fascinated by death — researching the passing of Marilyn Monroe, for instance, and reading all her post-mortem reports.
At the same time, he found himself facing another personal crisis. Suddenly finding himself without a regular boyfriend — even one of his on-off ones — he started paying up to £200 for sex at the start of 2009.
‘Drugs were involved, p*rn was involved, and probably another escort — he was very much into groups,’ said Paul Stag, a male escort and p*rn star who never touched drugs himself.

After three weeks, Stag and McQueen decided to become a couple. Henceforth, no money would change hands, though it was understood that Stag could continue his freelance escort work.
According to friends, it was around then that McQueen started to experiment with crystal meth, a highly addictive and dangerous drug. To anyone close to him, it should have been obvious that he was desperately unhappy and looking for any possible means of escape.
Stag believed that his new boyfriend was primarily suffering from an overload of work.
‘Lee was working these idiotic hours, getting up early, working all day and working deep into the evenings,’ he said.
McQueen’s brother, Tony, was also worried. Lee, he said, would often sleep on a bed in the office. ‘They talk about all this money he had — but he never went home. As soon as he’d got one collection out, he’d have to start another.’
In fact, McQueen had had enough of the fashion treadmill and began to wonder what else he could do.
Could he set up a design school? Set up as a photographer? Perhaps open his own gay p*rn studio?
But all these ideas came to nothing. To his friend and former colleague Sebastian Pons, he confided that, in retrospect, he should never have signed with Gucci. ‘But I can’t get out of it now,’ he said. ‘I have built my own prison.’
In spring 2009, he invited Pons for a holiday at a £1.7 million house he’d bought in Majorca, and the two men sat talking one night.
‘I’ve already designed my last collection,’ said McQueen.
‘What do you mean, your last collection?’ asked Pons. ‘You mean your next collection?’
‘No. My last. I have it in my head. In my last collection, I’m going to ***********. I’m going to end this.’
His plan, he said, was to do it during a show, in front of the audience. ‘He told me he’d have a Perspex or glass box, and in the middle of that another glass box,’ recalled Pons. ‘Towards the end of the show, he’d come out from under the ground and shoot himself, so all his brains would drip down the glass.’
Pons was so alarmed by his friend’s deteriorating mental health that he telephoned the McQueen office in London.
The member of staff he spoke to was dismissive: McQueen was fine — there was nothing to be concerned about.
‘No, he is not fine, darling,’ Pons replied. ‘He is really messed up.’

In May 2009, feeling lonely and desperate, McQueen took an overdose. It was a cry for help. When he recovered, he asked his legal team to finalise the details of his will, leaving most of his money to a charity called Sarabande, set up to help young designers.
Having signed the will that July, he took another drug overdose — and again survived.
Soon, there was more terrible news: his beloved mother, Joyce, had kidney failure. When she was dying, the family gathered around her bedside — but her youngest son stayed away, unable to cope with the prospect of losing her.
Predictably, he was devastated when he heard that she’d died on February 2, 2010. A few days later, he called his brother Tony and asked what Joyce had said before she passed away.
‘She said she loves you — and you’re not to go and ************* now,’ he was told.
A few days later, McQueen saw his sister, Jacqui. ‘He was lost,’ she recalls. ‘As he was leaving, he stood at the doorway and gestured for me. I thought: “That’s not like Lee because normally he says ‘bye’ and then he’s gone.” But he melted in my arms. He was like a child then.’
Unable to face the thought of working, McQueen, now 40, locked himself away in his flat. Telling no one, he came to a decision. There would be no more cries for help; this time he’d really do it.
With small, subtle gestures, he started to say his goodbyes.
On February 8, he spoke to his nephew, Gary, and asked him to create a gravestone for his mother with an angel in its design. Then he phoned his sister, Janet, and told her that he loved her.
He gave the model Annabelle Neilson his wallet, explaining that he needed a new one, and a photograph of himself with one of his dogs. And he wrote to a male friend in New York, thanking him for always being a good friend.
The exact chronology of his actions in the evening of February 10 and the early hours of the next day is unclear, but we know that, determined to leave nothing to chance, he took a sleeping pill, a tranquilliser and a significant amount of cocaine, and tried to slit his wrists.
Then after one failed attempt, he hanged himself in the spare-room closet.
It was the day before his mother’s funeral.
McQueen died a wealthy man, leaving £1 million in art works, more than £6 million in property and £11,614,625 worth of shares.
He also left a rich legacy that continues to influence everything from couture to designs for the High Street.
Tragically, however, it was the inner torment that helped propel him to the top of the fashion world that also cut short his extraordinary life.

dailymail.co.uk

 

[shopping247]

Alexander McQueen: into the light by Jess Cartner-Morley for The Guardian

The night before Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis collection was to be staged in Paris, on 6 October 2009, Sam Gainsbury, McQueen’s show producer, tried on the reptile-scaled lobster-claw shaped boots that became known as armadillo shoes. The heels were 10 inches high. “I couldn’t walk,” she said. “So I went and found Lee [Alexander McQueen’s given name] and I said, ‘I can’t walk in these, and I can walk in any heel. This could be a disaster. What if the girls fall?’ And he said, ‘If they fall, they fall.’”

Had they fallen, they would have done so in the first catwalk show ever to be live streamed on the internet. With one twist of an ankle that show could have been remembered for callously putting young women in danger. McQueen, bloody-minded, made it into a victory parade. “Before the show Lee was backstage with all these 17-year-old models,” Gainsbury recalled, “looking into their eyes, telling them how incredible they looked, how proud he was, that they could do it. He gave them such confidence. And not one of them fell. It was like a gift, with Lee. He made you feel like you were capable of anything.”


Plato’s Atlantis was to be the last catwalk show at which McQueen would take a bow. Four months later, in the bleak twilight days between his mother’s death and burial, he took his own life at the age of 40. An inquest found that he had taken cocaine, sleeping pills and tranquillisers, before hanging himself.

The armadillo shoes illustrate McQueen’s troubling presence in British culture. His point of view was menacing, disturbing and uncompromising. In 1995, he grabbed public attention with the Highland r*pe show, in which models with matted hair, their eyes blanked out by opaque contact lenses, strode the catwalk with breasts exposed under ripped dresses. Where the audience saw references to sexual violence, McQueen claimed he had intended a political commentary on the Highland clearances of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The brutal imagery of this debut, echoed in many subsequent seasons – Joan, the autumn/winter 1998 show, ended with a model circled by a ring of flames; Voss, spring/summer 2001, came to a climax with a glass box shattering to reveal moths fluttering around the masked face of a naked woman – was matched only, for sucker‑punch impact, by McQueen’s death.

It was probably inevitable that McQueen, the four-times British fashion designer of the year, would come to be defined by shock and violence. In spite of his talent and hard work, success was always fraught with internal struggle. In the aftermath of his death, many concluded that his was a narrative in which darkness was always going to triumph over light. Many felt that this bleak ending had been where his story was heading all along: when he died, McQueen scarves with a skull print motif sold out all over the world. By the end of his life, he was battling depression and drug addiction. His marriage to the documentary film-maker George Forsyth had lasted just one year; after their breakup, his relationships with lovers and colleagues became increasingly fractious. If they fall, they fall; and when they do, that is the part people remember.

Then, within a year of his death, the house McQueen founded emerged from chaos and trauma, reborn under his longtime righthand woman, Sarah Burton. Burton – mild-mannered and soft-spoken, a pink-cheeked blonde to McQueen’s shaven-haired Eastender – gave a kiss of life to the house, bringing it into the light when the Duchess of Cambridge wore a Burton-designed Alexander McQueen wedding gown. Her vision of timeless glamour had the unintentional effect of casting McQueen himself into the shadows. He had to be the bad boy who preceded the good girl.
Five years after his suicide, the work of Alexander McQueen is to be honoured at the V&A with a major retrospective that opens next month. Titled Savage Beauty, it was originally staged at the Metropolitan Museum in New York four years ago. And now that the initial shock of McQueen’s death has subsided, the man who emerges from the exhibition is a more nuanced figure. The Met exhibition was staged so soon after McQueen’s death that it became part of a grieving process; the London incarnation has a more celebratory mood. The inclusion of more of McQueen’s early work, from shows staged before he left London fashion week to show in Paris in 2001, has brought a fresh energy to the exhibition. And with the mourning robes cast off, McQueen appears less a creature of the night. His worldview was dark in the way that Darwin’s or Dickens’s worldview was dark: it was passionate and curious, which is quite different from being nihilistic. His drive to examine the underbelly of the beast was motivated by a sense of wonder at the beast itself.

Sarah Burton still works in McQueen’s light-filled Clerkenwell studio. She worked closely with him for 14 years, before becoming his successor aged 36. When I visited, boards pinned with scraps of embroidery, squares of woven tweed and wisps of lace were stacked against Perspex boxes, containing archived clothes and accessories, towering towards the skylights. On the floor was a pile of McQueen’s beloved reference books: Living Jewels, a huge tome of exquisite closeups of beetles, and another on German artist Rebecca Horn’s installation piece Moon Mirror. A tape measure was coiled on top of a glossy exhibition catalogue of Jenny Saville. A collection of Escher’s graphic art lay between photographs of Siamese fighting fish and William Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy.

“It wasn’t really about fashion, with Lee,” said Burton. “It was so much more than that. It was about everything that was to do with being alive. It was all the difficult parts, and all the beautiful parts as well. He’d come in with an idea for a collection and it would be, ‘It’s about a shipwreck.’ He was fascinated by death and decay, but he was full of energy. When he was up here, doing fittings, it was a whirlwind, like a dance with the mannequin.” Working with Lee, she said, made you feel alive.
Burton had pulled out a stack of box lever files in which were archived the inspirational mood boards and studio fittings for the Plato’s Atlantis collection. What McQueen created, on the catwalk, as a dystopian army representing a human race mutating into underwater creatures complete with prosthetic gills, revealed itself to be, in genesis, a study in natural beauty. An image of two penguins with heads bent together to create a loveheart silhouette was developed, as I turned the pages, into the template for a printed dress with a line of symmetry running down the breastbone. A closeup of dewdrops on the wing of a beetle, and another of lizard skin, became shards of broken mirror and sequins, reproduced as digital prints.

A member of McQueen’s close family, who preferred not to be named, explained that his loved ones have been frustrated by “a picture that gets painted of an angry man. Yes, Lee had his struggles, and darkness makes for a good story, so I understand people want to talk about that. But Lee also had a real romantic side, a loving and beautiful side. He loved children, for instance – he spent a lot of time with his nephews and nieces, and he was so good to them. You never hear about that.”

There is no purpose in a retrospective sugarcoating of McQueen, and no mileage in a hearts and flowers reading of an archive steeped in the imagery of Hitchcock’s women and Hans Bellmer’s dolls. Contradiction and duality lie at the heart of the man and his work. The Savage Beauty exhibition opens with a lenticular hologram by the designer’s nephew Gary James McQueen, used as the invitation to his spring/summer 2009 show. It shows McQueen’s face morphing into a human skull. McQueen, who grew up in Stratford long before it dreamed of hosting the Olympics, was, in his own words, a pink sheep in a family of black cab drivers. (At the same time, he hated it when journalists would ask him about this well-worn backstory. “Is that all you’ve got?” he would sneer.) He had two names: christened Lee Alexander McQueen, he used Alexander when he started his label to avoid jeopardising his unemployment benefit. While most of his friends and colleagues called him Lee in private, he remained Alexander to the press and to his friend and mentor Isabella Blow, simply because she felt it suited him. (“Alexander the Great” was the pet name she gave him.)
The man who realised, aged six, on a family holiday at Pontins, that he was gay – and who, in Stratford, became the only boy in a 40-strong synchronised swimming team – would later leave Bermans & Nathans theatrical costumers because there were “too many queens for me”. His family remember a bright boy with a mischievous, contrary streak: “You had to bite your tongue and not say, ‘Lee, don’t do that’ – because if you said don’t do it, he’d find a way to do it,” I was told. In 2004, McQueen was interviewed by his mother for the Guardian, as part of a series curated by Sam Taylor-Wood (as she was then known). One of Joyce McQueen’s questions was, “Who would your ideal dinner guest be?” To which her son answered, Elizabeth I. Why, she asked. “Because she was an anarchist,” he replied.

McQueen was devoted to his mother, and the relationship set a pattern for a career in which he surrounded himself with strong female figures. It is striking how many of the key players in the McQueen story are women, from the very early days, through his much-publicised 1990s rise, his tumultuous and unhappy tenure at the Paris house of Givenchy (1996-2001), and the transition from avant-garde oik to commercial powerhouse. As well as Gainsbury and Burton there was Katy England, his very first collaborator, a stylist he met in 1994, who became his creative director; and Amie Witton (now Witton-Wallace), who acted as his PR and gatekeeper from 1995. “It was never just like these women worked for Alexander,” remembered Philip Treacy, the milliner who made hats and headpieces for McQueen’s catwalk shows. “He did what he did with Katy. It was Katy who would come to see me, bringing images, books, clothes, and very calmly talk me through everything. Sometimes he wouldn’t see the hats until quite late on in the process. Then I’d go round there with the boxes and he’d be so excited, rubbing his hands together like a kid on Christmas morning.”

The most famous of McQueen’s circle of women was Isabella Blow, who killed herself in May 2007. In March 1992, the day before his 23rd birthday, McQueen’s student work was featured as part of the graduate show for his Central St Martins MA. In the audience was Blow, then an associate editor at Vogue. She spotted McQueen’s talent immediately – his clothes made the girls walk like birds, she told her husband when she got home that night. She decided to make him her project. “Isabella was a very interesting person, and she lived in an interesting way, and she had this amazing house and loved to make her life into stories she could tell,” said Treacy. “And she was an extraordinarily strong character. I wasn’t necessarily too happy about sharing her attention with Alexander at first, but she wouldn’t hear of any nonsense. She insisted we worked together, no two ways about it. And we did, and she was completely right, because we loved working together.”

When he dressed his catwalk models in painful corsets and ripped dresses, blotted out their eyes and stuck animal fur to their limbs, critics saw a fear or hatred of women. But that’s all wrong, his family insists. “It’s not just that he wasn’t a misogynist,” they told me, “he was the opposite of a misogynist. All the women in our family are strong, and then when he was in fashion he surrounded himself with strong women.”

McQueen’s shows often portrayed women in peril: whether the taut drama of a woman in stilettos walking alone in the dark (the Hitchcock-inspired autumn/winter 2005 show, The Man Who Knew Too Much) or the supermodel Karen Elson apparently dancing herself to death in Deliverance (spring/summer 2004). Even when tragic, these women “are never, ever pitiful”, said Professor Claire Wilcox, who as senior fashion curator is responsible for bringing Savage Beauty to the V&A. McQueen often spoke of his clothes as being armour. An early room of Savage Beauty features a bank of film in which models from McQueen’s shows stalk the catwalk. “They don’t look vulnerable,” said Wilcox. “Actually, they look like they might punch you.”

In his last five years McQueen fell out with some, though not all, of these women. A pattern seems to emerge in which McQueen was unable to accept “his” women, as they grew up, putting the needs of husbands and babies first. He demanded, almost, a mother’s love. And yet even those who were cast out defend his memory with a ferocious passion.

Even at their most extreme, McQueen’s shows were not about crude violence. Andrew Bolton of the Metropolitan Museum, curator of the original Savage Beauty exhibition, suggests that the work should be seen as “a meditation on the dynamics of power, particularly the relationship between predator and prey”.

“He had a fascination with the chase and the predator,” said England, who spoke to me from Paris, where she was styling the Givenchy and Jil Sander menswear shows. “It was about the idea that we were all hunted.” McQueen himself identified more with the prey, she said. The distinctive winged black eye markings of the Thompson’s gazelle – the smallest, most vulnerable animal of its kind – were a recurring motif. His graduate collection – which featured strands of human hair in the linings of frock-coat jackets – was called Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims. The paralympian Aimee Mullins, who featured in the show No 13 (spring/summer 1999) wearing elaborately carved wooden prosthetic legs that McQueen had designed based on the carvings of sculptor Grinling Gibbons has talked about how “Lee saw scars not as a reminder of violence, but as a badge of survival … a proud emblem of self-creation. He helped me to find that attitude in myself, and helped me to find empowerment.”


(full article at link below)

From The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2015/feb/10/alexander-mcqueen-into-the-light

 

[mistress_f]

YIKES, WTF?

Les Miz Director to Stage New Play About Dazzling and Tragic Life of Fashion Designer Alexander McQueen

McQueen, a new work from playwright James Phillips that takes inspiration from the dark and elaborate world of late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, will premiere this spring in London.

Phillips (The Little Fir Tree, The Rubinstein Kiss, Hidden in the Sand) penned the play that is billed as a "journey into the visionary imagination and dark dream world of Alexander McQueen, fashion’s greatest contemporary artist."

It takes inspiration from a 2008 McQueen quote: "I've got a 600-year-old elm tree in my garden. I made up a story: a girl lives in it and comes out of the darkness to meet a prince and becomes a queen."

The iconic fashion designer committed suicide in 2010.

John Caird (Les Misérables) will direct the May 12-June 6 run at the St. James Theatre. It will have choreography by Christopher Marney, production design by David Farley, lighting by David Howe, sound by John Leonard and video and projection design by Tim Bird.

Here's how it's billed: "Set on a single London night, it is more than a bio-play. It is stepping into the fairy story landscape of McQueen's mind, the landscape seen in his immortal shows, where with a dress an urchin can become an Amazon, where beauty might just help us survive the night. A girl has watched McQueen's Mayfair house for eleven consecutive days. Tonight she climbs down from her watching tree and breaks into his house, to steal a dress, to become someone special. He catches her, but, instead of calling the police, they embark together on a journey through London and into his heart."

Robert Mackintosh and Julian Stoneman produce McQueen.

http://www.playbill.com/news/articl...-of-fashion-designer-alexander-mcqueen-341595

 

[Phuel]

^^^ Could be interesting if thoughtfully executed... As long as they keep it a modern-day fairy tale and on the surreal side. McQueen the man was a master at walking that tightrope line between the surreal and reality.