Dressed to Thrill the Critics

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 Givenchy, 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- dreyW 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,” John Galliano, 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 Dior. (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 116 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2011 TNY—2011_05_16—PAGE 116—133SC.—LIVE ART AT TOP OF PAGE—PLEASE INSPECT AND REPORT ON QUALITY Pieces from the Autumn / Winter 2008-09 “The Girl Who Lived in the Tree” collection. Photograph by Martine Fougeron. 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.

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