What will happen to alexander mcqueens line
The Highland Rape collection was informed by his Scottish heritage, referencing the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries, when tenants in the Scottish Highlands were forcefully evicted. McQueen was particularly inspired by the 19th century, drawing frequently on Victorian Gothic. Radical re-presentations of historical narratives continued throughout his career.
McQueen was also inspired by global influences. Africa, China, India and Turkey were all places that sparked his imagination, though Japan was perhaps the most thematically and stylistically significant. The Japanese kimono was a garment that McQueen endlessly reconfigured in his collections. McQueen's exploration of polarities — man versus machine, or nature versus technology — was a recurring theme in his work.
McQueen was known for the dramatic intensity of his fashion shows, inspired by performance art and theatre. By then, McQueen's reputation was such that over 3, people gathered in the Museum's grand entrance, hoping to see the event.
McQueen worked with a loyal, close-knit team and was known for his ability to recognise talent in others, whether jeweller, milliner or filmmaker. For his spectacular catwalk shows, he commissioned an array of one-off creations, not intended for production. To realise this vision, he worked with a diverse range of materials and craftspeople — from skilled woodcarvers to 'plumassiers' feather workers , embroiderers to leather workers.
His collaborative projects included working with PUMA on a special line of trainers; launching McQ, a younger, lower priced diffusion collection ; releasing the fragrances Kingdom and MyQueen ; and a collection of cosmetics for MAC inspired by the actress Elizabeth Taylor in her film role as Cleopatra. McQueen's accolades included being awarded the title of British Designer of the Year by the British Fashion Council four times between and In February , McQueen was found dead in his London flat.
Sarah Mower, who reviewed McQueen's final collection for Vogue, wrote at the time that "the circumstances, sad as they are, allowed his friends and colleagues to share a long and poignant moment to look at what the man achieved, and to grieve for him. As Business Insider previously reported, shortly after his death, McQueen's assistant Sarah Burton was tapped as the new creative director of his brand.
She presented her first collection later that year. In , the critically acclaimed documentary "McQueen" was released.
It was described by Harper's Bazaar's Ella Alexander at the time as being "among the most accurate, sensitive, and moving" depictions of the designer. It sold over , tickets there, and became one of the most popular exhibitions at that museum as well. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.
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Executive Lifestyle. Dominic-Madori Davis. Alexander McQueen is considered to be one of the most influential and innovative designers in fashion history. Beginning his career as a tailor in the UK, he went on to start his eponymous line in and also had a brief stint as the creative director of Givenchy. McQueen was known for his extravagant, lavish runway shows, and for implementing new technology into his fashion shows.
More than a year after his death, the Metropolitan Museum of Art showed a posthumous exhibition of McQueen's work entitled " Savage Beauty. Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories. Alexander McQueen is often regarded as one of the most innovative designers of all time. His father was a taxi driver, and his mother was a teacher.
He was the youngest of six kids. In , McQueen launched his eponymous line. From to , he was the creative director of Givenchy. He would go on to win this award three more times throughout his career. VOSS was displayed in a large container, the public was seated outside this enormous cube with nothing to look at but their own reflections in the mirror cube.
They waited for the show to start while listening to the sound of a heartbeat in the back. After an hour, the container lit up and revealed a glass box that looked like a psychiatric ward in a hospital. Again, Kate Moss opened the show, walking inside the giant cube, behind her the models started following in a very performative way; they looked insane, their bodies moved like they were dancing, but also suffering.
The clothing seemed like a second layer of skin moving with them. They could not see the audience or the space in the other side of the glass, they were in a fictional space isolated from the real one. This is important because the relationship with space of the models is different from the public and had different outcomes. This fashion show had the most accurate concept of beauty for Alexander McQueen. For him, beauty was uncomfortable and transgressive, but also transparent and organic.
Beauty was in the fiction but also in the reality, and the space where they meet; in the sane but also the insane. Beauty was in the way the body became one with his designs. The vision of beauty that McQueen had is important because at the end, beauty is a fictional concept which we take as absolute reality. That is what McQueen wanted to transform, the way in which beauty was seen in fashion.
The designs were skirts and dresses made from razor-clam and oyster shells; taxidermy birds were like crowns in some models, other designs were filled with feathers and moved with the body of the model like she was going to fly away. All the models had bandages in her heads, McQueen wanted them to look like they just had a clinical intervention. He was constructing a fictional narrative inside the cube. He played with the space which is our primary perception.
Alexander McQueen built once again a heterotopic space: light, ethereal, transparent space, or again dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal.
The walking was quite unnatural, against the collection which was inspired in nature. He brought into the fashion world atypical materials, redefining the relationship between fabric and flesh, opening the body to the unknown, to the nature of sea creatures and plants.
At the end of the catwalk, the heartbeat that sounded in the back throughout all the exhibition, stopped, and a flat-line monotone made the way for the small box that was inside the cube to open slowly. The glass box revealed the voluptuous, naked figure of fetish writer Michelle Olley, reclining, her masked head bowed and attached to a breathing tube, the lights dimmed and left the audience to ponder the meaning of beauty.
Alexander McQueen expressed what he saw in the limits of the body, how materials and clothing can affect the way a body exists in a space, and how it creates new relationships in fashion.
Fashion is nothing but that, a space that is constantly in tension, controversial and finding ways to express the body through clothing. At the end, fashion is a heterotopia. McQueen showed us the elasticity of that heterotopic place, he pushed the boundaries and made it even more evident, that fashion is a place where the blurry line between reality and fiction disappears. And the way in which McQueen designs through anamorphosis in textile unveils a way of the body being in reality and fiction at the same time.
He made the body emerge from the moment that natural materials in his design represented an extension of the body; feathers, oysters, glass, multi-textile, put together unwrap a new body in fragments as it walks in the space. His materials were always innovative, his patterns complex, forming a dialogue between the natural and synthetic materials. Every fashion show had something from him. McQueen questioned symmetry and proportions as the canon and wanted to express his own vision of beauty through sensuality and vibration and new body structures.
Fashion is a language that expresses complex ideas and concepts. It aims to challenge the way we experience clothing and goes beyond simply utility. Focused always on making complex designs and innovative materials, McQueen achieved the fluidity and dynamic in his designs, he set the body in motion in every collection through new shapes, lines, and outlines, redefining the relationship between textile and body, and took us to the unknown, breaking the boundaries of fashion.
She was an editor at London-based fashion magazine Tatler. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. Bethune, Kate. Encyclopedia of Collections in Alexander McQueen.
Foucault, Michel. Geczy, Adam and Vicki Karaminas.
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