Tropic Sprockets / McQueen
By Ian Brockway
“McQueen” by Ian Bonhôte is an affecting study of the fashion icon
Alexander McQueen. McQueen, whose first name is Lee, grew up in
Lewisham, London obsessed with pop culture and Sinead O Connor. His
father, a driver, wanted him to be a mechanic. From almost day one,
McQueen knew he didn’t fit in and didn’t care. He devoured fashion
biographies and started as a tailor. A prodigy, he surprised everyone.
After an apprenticeship at Anderson & Sheppard he became an expert in
the tailored look, attracting the attention of the theatrical Isabella
Blow who helped him gain his footing. McQueen generated controversy
using serial killers and murderers as narrative themes for his outfits,
assembling torn shreds of fabric as if the models had been raped or
tortured. He also highlighted jeans or skirts that hung low on the hips
exposing the pubic areas of the models both female and male. The press
was outraged and heaped scorn upon the young designer.
After a period of explosive stress, Givenchy asked McQueen to head their
line.
The designer is revealed as a restless soul, always creating and
perpetually unsatisfied. He once said, “I find beauty in the grotesque,
like most artists.” It was the one thing that sustained him. McQueen
lived and worked for shock and emotion. The worst effect is to feel nothing.
Throughout the film we meet his friends and assistants. All now miss him.
In later years, he underwent plastic surgery and sculpted his body.
Friends said fame had changed him.
Still, he remained an impatient outsider with works that merged both the
human and animal, and also the machine. McQueen did not work to champion
beauty, but his visions, either dreams or nightmares, were often
beautiful. In one tableau, a large model is overwhelmed by moths. In
another, bandaged models are left having spasms in a padded cell.
McQueen’s final work “Plato’s Atlantis” attempted to re-imagine the body
in our time of a global warming apocalypse: women born from reptiles or
fish become reptiles once more as the clothes shift from scales to skin
and then regress backwards. A Darwinian fever dream.
A skull is shown to symbolize the stages of McQueen’s life. As the
artist grows weary and disenchanted with work, holes of decay peck at
his immaculate golden skull. These shots illustrate the morbid
voluptuousness of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe.
When McQueen sadly passed in 2011, the fashion realm did not just lose
an icon, but also a Surrealist whose influence is still present today
from the cinema of H.R. Giger to Tim Burton. As one of the most daring
artists of our age, his ghost remains and will linger long before the
catwalk clears of beast or machine.
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