![]() It was a metaphor, as explained in McQueen, for the designer’s feeling that the fashion industry had sucked the life out of him at that point, he was designing 14 collections a year between Givenchy and his own label and was feeling, according to friends and family in the film, that LVMH was pitting him against John Galliano at Dior. ![]() Get unlimited digital access to Vogue for 24.99 12. The Spring 2001 show, titled Voss, featured a curvy nude woman with a breathing tube attached to her face and moths fluttering around her body, inspired by Joel-Peter Witkin’s 1983 photograph Sanitarium. Alexander McQueen Spring 1995 Ready-to-Wear Collection Vogue. His Fall 1997 show, It’s a Jungle Out There, was a response to the terrible reviews he received for his debut at Givenchy. Fashion fanatics call him a god to this day, but even after seeing his work inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art several years ago, few understand how interconnected his clothes were to his personal narrative. The runway and studio footage in McQueen is a reminder of how much glory the designer had in his terribly short life. “The big creative challenge for us,” Bonhôte says, “was to take these very different archive sources and blend them together effectively so that it feels like they all belong in the same film.” He could be a bit prickly around the press, and much of the time made himself unavailable to show reviewers backstage. Again, this kind of footage, especially the more formal BBC interview, was rare in the heyday of Alexander McQueen the label. These scenes are intercut with old BBC footage from a special on McQueen's first couture show at Givenchy, as well as still photographs taken by Anne Deniau, who followed the designer over a period of 13 years. “We don’t reckon Lee thought of these home movies as anything more than novelty fun, and several times in the film, the camerawork goes a bit crazy as Lee seizes the camera and plays around with it,” notes Bonhôte. Teamed with a badass boot and a handful or two of McQueen’s tough and tender jewelry, they made for looks in which to seize the present by the scruff of its neck and make unapologetic hay.McQueen's former art director, Simon Costin, provided the majority of the home videos shot inside the designer’s original studio and the Givenchy atelier. These wonderful pieces included sweetheart neckline, puff-sleeved, and mega-skirted dresses in scarlet and ultramarine dresses that paired sculptured scuba-material bodices with more expansively gathered skirting and open-backed V-neck dresses in pink or red. These forced unions of adjacent but distinct cultural traditions in clothing worked well enough, yet this collection flew highest when focusing on pieces whose raison d’être was less about telegraphing meaning and more about being wonderful to wear and watch. Unlike the many other hybridists out there-gathered most densely in Japan-this McQueen team always counters the apparent anarchy of its garment clashes with a rigidly enforced symmetry akin to the protocols that still adhere in Savile Row. Examples included a high-waist peak lapel tailored coat in wool conjoined with a poly-faille parka peplum shirting and shirt-dresses in crisp white cotton poplin countered by poly-something sections of sporty rib at the cuff and waist and a camel coat spliced against MA-1 bomber arms. This season saw Sarah Burton and her team observe its go-to McQueen dichotomy in a plethora of hybrid garments that countered formal against informal and frothy against severe. ![]() Looking at this collection, however, all that hoo-ha flew out the window as serenely as the (Matisse-y) doves that featured on satchels, shirting, and hand-crocheted knits. So reviewing any collection made in his name right now creates a tempting peg upon which to contemplate the ironies inherent in the post-Brexit, Union-busting schism that may well lie ahead. One of Alexander McQueen’s many dichotomies was to be simultaneously staunchly English and fiercely proud of his Scottish roots. ![]()
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