psychology an astute reading. McQueen THE CRITICS was an omnivore (literally so; he always struggled with his weight), and the rich- ness of his work reflects a voracious con- sumption of high and low culture. He felt an affinity with the Flemish masters, Gospel singing, Elizabethan theatre and its cross-dressing heroines (a line from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was tattooed on his right biceps), contempo- rary performance art, punk, Surrealism, AT THE GALLERIES Japan, the ancient Yoruba, and fin-de- siècle aestheticism. In most particulars, however—including his death—he was DRESSED TO THRILL an archetypal Romantic. Bolton has grouped the exhibits Alexander McQueen at the Met. according to McQueen’s “Romantic” fixations: historicism, primitivism, nat- BY JUDITH THURMAN uralism, exoticism, the gothic, and Dar- winism. (In his last complete collection, hen Hubert de , the makes sense if you take it to mean “kill- “Plato’s Atlantis,” McQueen envisaged aristocrat who had dressed Au- ing you with grief.” You have to wonder the females of a devolved human spe- Wdrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Ken- if, for mercy’s sake, McQueen hadn’t cies slithering chicly back into the sea in nedy, retired, in 1995, he was replaced at been biding his time. scaly iridescent minidresses.) There is the house he had founded in 1952 by While McQueen had many anxieties, a section on “Romantic Nationalism,” , a plumber’s son from running dry wasn’t among them. He was which in McQueen’s case means Scot- South London, who left after a year for supremely confident of his instincts and tish tribalism. His paternal ancestors an even more exalted job, at Christian his virtuosity. That ballast freed him to came from the Hebrides, and he never . (Galliano was fired this March, improvise, to take wild chances, and to lost his abiding rage at England’s treat- after a series of anti-Semitic rants.) An- jettison received ideas about what cloth- ment of his clansmen in centuries past. other working-class British upstart of ing should be made of (why not seashells “Fucking haggis, fucking bagpipes,” he prodigious talent and flamboyant show- or dead birds?), what it should look like said. “I hate it when people romanti- manship then stepped up to the hallowed (Renaissance court dress, galactic disco cize Scotland.” The idea of its bleak- plate in his Doc Martens. The new chief wear, the skins of a mutant species), and, ness, though, seems to have warmed designer at Givenchy was a chubby hel- above all, how much it could mean. The him—it resembled the climate of his lion of twenty-seven, with a buzz cut and designer who creates a dress rarely invests mind. a baby face, who once boasted, “When it with as much feeling as the woman McQueen’s pride in his ancestry had I’m dead and gone, people will know that who wears it, and couture is not an ob- been ingrained by his mother. (A collec- the twenty-first century was started by vious medium for self-revelation, but in tion on the theme of witchcraft was ded- Alexander McQueen.” McQueen’s case it was. His work was a icated to one of her forebears, who was McQueen committed suicide, at form of confessional poetry. hanged in Salem.) His father, Ronald, forty, in London, on February 11, 2010. Last week, a retrospective of Mc- drove a taxi, and Joyce stayed home until The housekeeper found his body hang- Queen’s two decades in fashion, “Savage her son left school, at sixteen, when she ing in his Mayfair flat. He had been Beauty,” opened at the Metropolitan took a teaching job. McQueen was the under treatment for depression, and a Museum, in the Iris and B. Gerald Can- youngest of their six children—born in week earlier his mother, Joyce, had died tor Exhibition Hall. Even if you never 1969—and they christened him Lee Al- of cancer. (Her funeral had been sched- bother with fashion shows, go to this exander. (He started using his middle uled for February 12th; the family went one. It has more in common with “Sleep name at the outset of his career, because ahead with it.) In 2004, Joyce was invited No More,” the “immersive” perfor- he was on welfare and he didn’t want to to interview her famous son, by then at mance of “Macbeth” currently playing lose his benefits.) When Lee was a year his own label, for the arts page of a Brit- in Chelsea, than it does with a conven- old, the family moved from South Lon- ish newspaper. In the course of an ex- tional display of couture in a gallery, don to Stepney, in the East End. Trino change that was fondly pugnacious on tent, or shop window. Andrew Bolton, Verkade, who was McQueen’s first em- both sides (it was obvious where he’d got the curator of the Met’s Costume Insti- ployee, and was part of the Met’s instal- his scrappiness), she had asked him to tute, has assembled a hundred ensem- lation team, told me that the area had been name “his most terrifying fear.” With- bles and seventy accessories, mostly a skinhead bastion. “Lee was never a out hesitation, he replied, “Dying before from the runway, with a few pieces of skinhead,” she said, “but he loved their you.” Normally, it is the parent who couture that McQueen designed at hard and angry look.” dreads losing the child, but the answer Givenchy, and he gives their history and McQueen had realized very young ABOVE: PHILIPPE WEISBECKER

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TNY—2011_05_16—PAGE 117—133SC.—LIVE ART—R 20882—EXTREMELY CRITICAL PHOTOGRAPH TO BE WATCHED THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE PRESS RUN—PLEASE PULL KODAK PROOF FOR PRESS COLOR GUIDANCE that he was gay, but it took his family edo with a bustle and long dagger-shaped rapher Sølve Sundsbø took the catalogue some time to accept him as what he lapels lined in blood red is at the Met.) pictures. It looks as though he bought the called, with deceptive offhandedness, its Blow and McQueen were inseparable for mannequins from a junk dealer, and it is “pink sheep.” His puberty coincided with a while, then, as his fame increased, less startling to learn that they are live mod- the explosion of AIDS, which is to say so. She, too, suffered from depression, els disguised as dummies. Their bodies that he was forced to witness a primal and killed herself in 2007. Her legendary were coated with white acrylic makeup, scene that haunted the youth of his gen- collection of clothing was saved from dis- and articulated at the joints by black eration: sex and death in the same bed. persal on the auction block by her friend strings. In the retouching process, they Art, swimming, and ornithology were his Daphne Guinness. lost their heads. But here and there—on primary interests at the tough local com- McQueen’s five years in the Givenchy a torso, a thigh, an arm—the makeup has prehensive school. He didn’t have the cre- couture ateliers taught him, he said, to worn away, and a bruiselike patch of pink dentials for university, but he always use softness, lightness, and draping as skin shows through, as if the flesh of a knew, he said, that he would “be some- foils for the austerity of his tailoring— corpse were coming to life. The freshness one” in fashion, and when Joyce heard and of his temperament. Some of his of the shock is pure McQueen. that Savile Row was recruiting appren- best work is his most ethereal. But Paris “Savage Beauty” is a shamelessly the- tices, he applied. At his first job, with An- didn’t teach him docility, and he some- atrical experience that unfolds in a series derson & Shepherd, one of Britain’s most times took impolitic swipes at his bosses. of elaborate sets. In the first gallery, ex- venerable bespoke tailors, he learned, Givenchy is owned by the French luxury amples of McQueen’s incomparable tai- painstakingly, to cut jackets. (He later conglomerate LVMH. In 2001, when loring hug the walls of a raw loft. A silk claimed that he had sewn an obscene its chief rival, the Gucci Group, offered frock coat from the Ripper collection, message—“I am a cunt”—into the lining to back McQueen’s own label, he and with a three-point “origami” tail, in a of one destined for Prince Charles. The Givenchy parted company. print of thorns (I mistook them for firm is said to have recalled every garment barbed wire), has human hair sewn into for the Prince that McQueen had worked lienation often accounts for a maca- the lining. There are several versions of on, but no message was found.) He moved bre sense of the marvellous. At the McQueen’s signature “bumsters”: drop- to a competitor, Gieves & Hawkes, then entranceA to “Savage Beauty,” there is an waisted trousers or skirts that flaunt the to a theatrical costumer, and on to the ate- evening gown conjured entirely from cleavage of the buttocks. But his outrages lier of an avant-garde designer, Koji Tat- razor-clam shells. Antelope horns sprout were generally redeemed by an ideal of suno. McQueen ended his adolescence from the shoulders of a pony-skin jacket, beauty, and the point of the bumsters, he in Milan, working for his idol, Romeo and vulture skulls serve as epaulettes on said, was not just to “show the bum”; they Gigli—the modern Poiret. Gigli, he said, a leather dress. There are angel wings elongated the torso, and drew the eye to taught him, by example, that a designer made out of balsa wood, and worms en- what he considered the “most erotic” fea- can’t flourish without a talent for self- cased in a bodice of molded plastic. “I’m ture of anyone’s body—the base of the promotion. inspired by a feather,” McQueen said of spine. When McQueen came home to Lon- all the duck, turkey, ostrich, and gull The second gallery is an ornate, don, about a year later, he thought that plumage in his clothing—“its graphics, spooky hall of mirrors consecrated to he might teach pattern-cutting at the art its weightlessness, and its engineering.” McQueen’s gothic reveries about bond- school that has educated the élite of Brit- One of his most demented masterpieces age and fetishism. One of the loveliest ish fashion, Central Saint Martins. is a glossy black-feathered body cast that dresses—with a lampshade skirt of There was no job for him, but the ad- transforms its wearer into a hybrid crea- swagged jet beading—has a necrotic- ministration invited him to enroll as a ture—part raptor, part waterfowl, and looking jabot of lace ivy that reminds you postgraduate student, waiving the aca- part woman. what a fetish mourning was to the Victo- demic requirements. In 1992, McQueen Bolton had full access to the Mc- rians. Leather abounds, masterfully tor- presented a master’s-degree collection Queen archives, in London, and the sup- tured into submission, as in a zippered entitled “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Vic- port of McQueen’s associates (his house sheath with fox sleeves latticed by an tims.” (At Givenchy, he based a collec- co-sponsored the show). Sarah Burton, elaborate harness. “It’s like ‘The Story of tion on the character of a “mad scientist who succeeded him, was busy in London O,’ ” McQueen said. “I’m not big on who cut all these women up and mixed with Kate Middleton’s wedding dress, women looking naïve. There is a hidden them all back together.”) There is a lot of but she was interviewed for the cata- agenda in the fragility of romance.” sympathy for the Devil in McQueen’s logue. The Norwegian fashion photog- “The Story of O” proves that a work work. Bolton suggests that you consider of art can be distilled from stock porno- it as “a meditation on the dynamics of graphic imagery, and McQueen—who power, particularly the relation between has a lot to say, in the wall notes, about predator and prey.” the sexual thrill factors of rot, fear, and Isabella Blow, a freelance stylist who blood—manages to find beauty, as he later became one of the great “noses” of put it, “even in the most disgusting of the fashion world, saw the Ripper show, places.” Beyond the hall of mirrors is a recognized McQueen’s gifts, and bought “Cabinet of Curiosities,” where inventive the collection in its entirety. (A black tux- instruments of consensual torture in the

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TNY—2011_05_16—PAGE 118—133SC— LIVE SPOT ART R20879I_PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY. form of jewelry, headgear, footwear, and disability as a publicity stunt. He bra- stories and feelings, and one has the corsets are displayed like talismans. Vid- zenly courted scandal, revelled in most of sense that the dolls’ play of fashion was eos from selected runway shows flicker it, asserted that “hot sex sells clothes,” such a tool for McQueen. He was fasci- high on the black walls, and the animal and certainly subjected his models—like nated by the work of Hans Bellmer, the sounds of a cheering crowd and a woman the mannequins in the catalogue—to ex- mid-century German artist who created moaning issue from hidden speakers. In treme trials. They were caged in glass a life-size, ball-jointed mannequin—the a clip from one of McQueen’s most rad- boxes or padded cells; half smothered or figure of a pubescent girl—and photo- ical collections (Spring/Summer 1999), drowned; masked; tethered; tightly graphed it in disturbing tableaux. “La an homage to the German artist Rebecca laced; straitjacketed; and forced to walk Poupée,” McQueen’s Spring/Summer Horn, the Shalom Harlow re- in perilous “armadillo” booties, with ten- 1997 collection, paid tribute to an artist volves on a turntable, cringing in mock inch heels. In “Highland Rape” (1995), with whom he shared a kinship in per- horror as two menacing robots spray her the breakthrough collection that earned versity. Yet McQueen felt an even white parachute dress with paint guns. McQueen, at twenty-six, his notoriety deeper sense of identity with the broken The most striking artifact from this col- as a bad-boy wonder, bare-breasted di- and martyred women who stirred his lection is a pair of exquisitely hand- shevelled girls staggered down the run- fantasies, and whom he transfigured. carved high-heeled wooden prostheses way in gorgeously ravaged lace, sooty The real agenda of his romance with fra- that McQueen designed for Aimee tartan, and distressed leather. According gility may have been hiding in plain Mullins, a bilateral amputee and Amer- to feminist critics, the show eroticized sight, tattooed on his arm, in the yearn- ican Paralympic athlete. She modelled violation. According to McQueen, it ing line spoken by Shakespeare’s Hel- them on the runway with a bridal lace commemorated the “genocide” of his ena—a scrappy girl who feels that her skirt and a centurion’s breastplate of Scottish ancestors. “We’re not talking true beauty is invisible: “Love looks not molded leather, sutured like Franken- about models’ feelings here,” he said. with the eyes but with the mind.”  stein’s skull. “We’re talking about mine.” In fact, he There were always critics who ac- always was. newyorker.com/go/photobooth cused McQueen of misogyny, and he Therapists who treat children often was chastised for “exploiting” Mullins’s use dolls’ play as a tool for eliciting their Images from the Alexander McQueen show.

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