Thoughts On McQueen...

There was an emptiness within me while looking at the images from the last McQueen collection, mostly because I know the man behind these clothes is no longer with us. You know just by looking at these clothes that no other person would be able to create something as spectacular, so steeped in history while charging head first into the future. Even the mightly Nicolas Ghesquiere at the helms of Balenciaga cannot look back into fashions archives, find something of interest, and create clothes that feel so in the now as Lee could. Everything about this show was eerily serene and filled with emotion. 


You could see the care and thought put into every garment, be it the angel wings positioned on the backs of dresses, or the way difficult fabric was manipulated to be effortlessly draped. Like so many British designers before him, his clothes had a romanticism with the past, befitting then, that his final collection would focus so much on it. Excerpts from the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, one of my personal favorites, were digitally printed onto the fabric in a way that only a true master could do it. The shapes of the clothes echoed back to medieval times with fitted bodices, full skirts with curtain pleats, and high neck lines. Of course, all of these attributes have become a signature to McQueen, along with fantastical footwear and his love of feathers. 


There was the clear reference to his Icarus collection at Givenchy, and perhaps much like the story, McQueen reached too high with Plato's Atlantis, falling into a deep emotional spiral that has resulted in his untimely end. Lee himself had meant for this show to contrast his spring show, stripping away the future and technology that helped make Plato's Atlantis so spectacular. The feathers also acted as such a poignant Icarus metaphor, not only in this show, but many of the others that came before it. Through them, McQueen took so many people on a flight into new heights of fashion, sparking our collective imagination of what fashion can achieve. I would hope that those feathers and angel wings have taken him to a much better place where he can finally be at peace. 


You couldn't help but feel that maybe he intended this to be his final collection. Each look perfectly encapsulated what he was about, and you could feel his heart and soul poured into every fold of the fabric. Cathy Horyn said that "Someday there will be a retrospective of the fashion of Alexander McQueen, and if it ends with the 15 pieces shown here in a small salon the survey will indeed feel complete." Her words are certainly true. You felt it looking at the clothes, mentally comparing them to his work at Givenchy and his own label, seeing how they were a perfect ending to such a sad story.