![]() 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.” 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. Although it marked the latest chapter in a turbulent relationship with the press, it was seen as the show that put him on the map.Photos by Pascal Rossignol and Kieran Doherty and Reuters Some had their breasts hanging out of otherwise conventional black dresses, whereas others wore skirt variations of the iconic ‘bumster’ – already one of his staples, despite being only a few seasons deep into his career. McQueen took this to the extreme, staging a theatrical show filled with bloodied, frenzied models darting onto the runway, their clothes appearing slashed by force. To commemorate this rare unveiling of the designer’s fabled archive – a full catalogue of which can be found on the auction house website – here’s a selection of the standout collections available to, at least, partially, bid on.Īrguably McQueen’s most controversial show ever, Highland Rape saw the designer explore his Scottish heritage through a series of looks spiced together from lace and tartan – plenty of which, from jackets to pencil skirts, are on auction, and predicted to draw hundreds of thousands of dollars.Īlthough critics accused the designer of romanticising sexual assault, the ‘rape’ in question actually referred to Great Britain’s frequent invasions of Scotland, specifically during the 18th and 19th centuries. Die-hard fans can get their hands on patterns, sketchbooks and rare show invitations from some of his earliest shows, as well as key pieces like the Highland Rape tartan and the sharp-shouldered, tailored grey jacket, worn in The Hunger over a latex corset filled with live maggots. But as a result, he often didn’t have the budget to properly archive the pieces – so many have been incredibly difficult to find.Ĭouturier Ruti Danan, who worked alongside McQueen throughout the 1990s, has preserved a series of pieces from various collections, scheduled to be auctioned in Boston this weekend. Stories like these only add to the reverie around McQueen, an influential maverick whose earliest collections were DIY spectacles with controversial, meticulously-researched concepts. He bundled them into bin bags and left them outside a King’s Cross nightclub. Despite quickly garnering critical acclaim, the designer went out after the show and found himself too broke to pay to put the clothes into the cloakroom. In 1993, mere months after graduating from London Central Saint Martins fashion school, Alexander McQueen set about creating a collection called Taxi Driver – a reference to the Martin Scorsese film, but also a nod to his own dad’s occupation.
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