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| Photograph by Chris Moore |
See images at http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/F2010RTW-AMQUEEN or http://huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/alexander-mcqueens-final_n_491773.html
Reviewed by Kristina Olson (kristina.olson@mail.wvu.edu)
and Janet Snyder (janet.snyder@mail.wvu.edu)
The
last collection by fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) debuted
during Paris Fashion Week a month after
his death. Models with delicate thin necks and a serene air wore exquisitely cut Jacquards and silks printed with imagery from Old Master paintings, textures of encrusted pearls, cabochon jewels and feathers, rich colors of crimson, gold,
black and ivory, and accessories including head wraps and sculpted stilettoes. Presented at
the ornate 18th Century Hotel de Clermont-Tonnerre
without the celebrated showman’s usual dramatic staging, these sixteen outfits
were a departure from the street-savvy, hyper-sexualized creations that made
McQueen’s reputation and a return to the medieval designs that had been an
enduring source of inspiration for his work.
Any
discussion of McQueen’s interpretation of medieval visual culture must begin
with a definition of the Long Middle Ages, one that reaches from the twelfth
century through the Early Modern Period. His was a selective articulation of essential details of medieval design
enclosed within the outlines of his simple and pure forms. The extremely rich surface texture of his
final collection may have been inspired by carved ivory, gold relief, pearled
embroidery and metalwork as well as intricate details of panel paintings,
gilded mosaics, and drawings. McQueen’s
was not an interpretation of the medieval but a re-imagined medieval
sensibility, carefully extracted from Holbein, Botticelli, Bosch, and Leonardo,
from the silk-weavers and embroiderers of the tiraz of Roger II, and from the
goldsmiths and ivory workers who produced fine crafts and reliquaries.
The
designer had a life-long interest in the history of many cultures, material that
he mined for his own creations. This
historical curiosity was fed by his mother, Joyce, a teacher, florist, and
keeper of the family genealogy. His
father was of Scottish decent and a London cabbie. Raised in working-class South London, McQueen
was close to his mother and devastated by her death (he took his own life the
evening before her funeral). Realizing
he wanted to be a fashion designer from a young age, he left school at sixteen and
soon became a tailor’s apprentice to one of the most respected firms on famed
Savile Row, the London street known for its shops offering traditional bespoke
men’s clothing. McQueen always gave
credit to this foundational experience, “I come from Savile Row. What I learned at sixteen is that to change
menswear, you have to be like an architect; you work on the cut and proportion... You’ve got to know the rules to
break them. That’s what I’m here for, to
demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” [1]
McQueen
became fascinated with the traditions of historical garments while working
freelance on theatrical costumes for the stage in the early 1990s. During this period he discovered Juan de
Alcega’s Tailor’s Pattern Book of
1589, a source for some of his own early designs. [2] This mastering of
traditional tailoring and historical influences was counter-balanced by his
immersion in contemporary London’s Punk scene and gay culture where young
designers self-identified as iconoclasts challenging the conventions of French
haute couture. After a stint as a
pattern cutter in Milan, McQueen returned to London to study design formally at
the prestigious Central Saint Martins College and to finally launch his
astonishing, if brief, career as a solo designer.
The
observant scholar can easily discern an underlying medieval essence in his
work. McQueen’s medieval encompassed a thousand years of design at the same
time that it embodied a modern conception that medieval coincides with faith
and prayers answered. In his final collection he did not appropriate specific
designs; rather, he embraced medieval images for inspiration and moved on to
articulate and extend his understanding of their essential meaning. His medieval is something original and
redefined, in the manner of the Pre-Raphaelites [see metmuseum.org/toah/hd/praf/hd_praf.htm].
For example, in
these last sixteen ensembles, McQueen-designed textiles poetically recreated
the quality of experience expressed in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Memorare and immortalized in Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Paradiso, one that articulated the most fervent faith of the
medieval true believer, aspiring to the kind of hope that, even today, arises
unbidden when one visits soaring medieval interior spaces transformed through
light – at the cathedrals of Amiens or Chartres or Bourges. McQueen’s designs [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshows/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#13] used color,
movement, and form to invoke the immediacy of personal reverence expressed
during the Middle Ages through symbols of purity: the sacrificial lamb, the
lily, the fleur-de-lis. In this final collection, the textiles of gowns in
looks 10, 11, and 12 recalled the tender petals of spring’s first peonies like
a Botticelli Primavera (1477-82) [see uffizi.org/artworks/la-primavera-allegory-of-spring-by-sandro-botticelli] or the daVinci Annunciation (c.1472-75) [virtualuffizi.com/uffizi1/Uffizi_Pictures.asp?Contatore=126]; in look 13,
they whispered like the presence of angels [see tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-domini-the-annunciation-n01210 ]; in looks 5 and 16, the forms themselves embraced
the body like seraphim wings, conjuring up the dark music of the second
feathered cellist who serenades the Virgin in the Nativity of Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16) [see musee-unterlinden.com/assets/images/_nouvel_accueil/nativite-detail-slider.jpg].
Perhaps the most striking garment in the
collection was the red and gold coat [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#6] derived from
the Coronation regalia of the Holy Roman emperor (see kaiserliche-schatzkammer.at/en/visit/collections/secular-treasury/selected-masterpieces/). Here, as with
all of the garments presented, the model’s head was minimized under a tight
wrap. These tiny heads were not bald, but enclosed, reduced and extended in some
cases with crests of feathers, recalling the helms of romantic medieval knights
[see metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/475487?rpp=20&pg=1&ft=tower+of+love+ivory&pos=3]. Her head was like the finial on an architectural
tower while thigh-high boots acted like piloti supporting this wedge of a coat.
Finally, gloved fingertips peeked out from the flare of an arced sleeve that intersected
the garment’s hem.
That
Mantle of Roger II, made in Palermo in 1131 − with its lions and camels − was
not copied in McQueen’s version, rather it was echoed as the faces of the lions framed the bodice; the bold red
and gold striped body and clawed feet strode − minus the subjugated camels −
across the model’s hips; the flanks of the lions reached across her forearms to
intersect the hips while attenuated, swirling lion tails caressed her upper
arms. It was the Mantle of Roger II
deconstructed and restructured within the vocabulary of McQueen. The hemline pattern restated not that of the original
Mantle but the swirling embroidery of the slippers of the Coronation regalia of
the Holy Roman emperor.
The
same appropriated lion, again striding without the camel, reappeared in a black
and gold coat, complete with shoulder cape, like a cardinal’s capa or Sherlock Holmes’
shoulder cape, modified [see style.com/fashionshows/complete/slideshow/F2010RTW-AMCQUEEN/#8]. The hemline
of the longer cape appeared to be inspired by lions that flank the Tree of Life
in Palermo mosaics or sculpted facades at Mshatta, Jordan.
McQueen
reconsidered and redefined the medieval throughout this last collection. In addition to the strongly-colored,
weighty-fabric coats there were delicate white dresses with floor-length
skirts, some with attenuated trains.
They evoked the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Annunciation (1849-50) [see
tate.org.uk/art/artworks/rossetti-ecce-ancilla-domini-the-annunciation-n01210] where
Mary’s response is profoundly courageous and reverent: her desperation
expresses a fine fragility, a terror, and intimacy. The same is true in these
more subtle works by McQueen. He seems to have been inspired by visual elements
of medieval ensembles, but in his use of those elements he stepped reverentially
back, with no more expression than the women in Holbein’s portraits. Taken
together, this final collection was ethereal, as immaterial and unknowable as
angelic spirits, spectacular as the mosaics at Palermo and the regalia of the
emperor.
It
is in contrast with related McQueen work that his engagement with the medieval
can be perceived. As with all of his
creations, these concluding designs expressed preoccupations in the artist’s
own life. McQueen acknowledged the
connection between his life and work saying, “My collections have always been
autobiographical ... They were about
to do with my childhood, the way I think about life and the way I was brought
up to think about life.”[3] His encounter with the hope and faith inherent in passionate
medieval designs during the final period of his mother’s and his own lives
found fresh expression in the complexities of the textiles he created here. McQueen’s last collection can be characterized
as reaching for the state that Abbot Suger described in defense of his
twelfth-century reconstruction of the Abbey church at Saint-Denis: “... transporting
me from material to immaterial things ... I seem to see myself existing on some
level, as it were, beyond our earthly one, neither completely in the slime of
earth nor completely in the purity of heaven.”[4]
This
is the same dichotomy found across McQueen’s oeuvre and celebrated in the very title,
Savage Beauty, of the stunning
retrospective exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011. For many, he will be remembered for the
earthy, S&M-inspired designs like the PVC underpants and spine sweater of
the Banshee collection (Autumn/Winter 1994-95) or the burgundy leather armor
for his modern-day Joan of Arc (Autumn/Winter 1998-99). These last sixteen designs differ profoundly
even from his more ethereal, heaven-oriented work, such as his Wedding
Collections, where there is dramatic depth, volume and sumptuous flavor. They differ too from the recent designs
carried on by his atelier, as in the fall 2013 McQueen collection, where references
to the medieval continue to be found. The heart-breaking delicacy is gone now,
replaced by a frank self-confidence, an internal completeness and secure
finality in each ensemble. In the final collection, this openly
autobiographical designer made use of the medieval to bare his soul and leave us
with the rich legacy of the essential medieval, the essential McQueen.
Kristina Olson
Janet Snyder
West Virginia UniversityJanet Snyder
___________________________
[1]
From an interview in GQ Magazine from
2004 quoted in Judith Watt, Alexander
McQueen: The Life and the Legacy
(New York: Harper Design, 2012), 19.
[2]
Ibid., 23.
[3]
From an interview in British Vogue
from October 2002, quoted in Andrew Bolton, Alexander
McQueen: Savage Beauty (New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 16.
[4]
David Burr, trans., “Abbot Suger: ON
WHAT WAS DONE IN HIS ADMINISTRATION,” Internet Medieval Sourcebook (January 1996), http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/sugar.html.
