Long live McQueen
We spoke on the phone just moments after the Daily Mail broke the sad news of Lee Alexander McQueen’s passing. The news came as a huge shock to the both of us. We’re both huge fans of his work and it was hard to describe what we were feeling. He was such an inspiration and it’s hard to believe that he is now gone.
For the past couple of days we’ve been reminiscing by digging through old scrapbooks, old magazines and looking at pictures from his past collections. In this blog post (which also happens to be the first one we’ve ever co-written) we would like to pay tribute to Lee by sharing some of our favourite Alexander McQueen moments.
One of our earliest memories of McQueen dates back to this iconic image of a young Devon Aoki photographed by Nick Knight for Visionaire in 1997.
Whether he was sending models down the catwalk with wolves on a liege or creating indoor snow storms, McQueen’s shows were always spectacular. In an interview with CNN, Lee stated that “the show comes first for me.” Who can forget the spring/summer 1999 show with Shalom Harlow wearing a white dress, being spray-painted by two robotic jets.
The concept was kind of Edwardian girls lost somewhere. It came about through Harry Potter, when he was doing a chess game in the film, and I thought we’d reinvent the chess game and distinguish the chess sets by changing the nationality of each row. The Japanese and the Americans faced each other. We had to get the girls off the runway, so what did we do? Have a chess match, with a robotic voice dictating the moves.
For his autumn/winter 2009/2010 menswear collection, he lined the catwalk with Victorian-style lamp posts. The whole mood and theme was dark and gothic and brought a certain Tim Burton movie staring Johnny Depp to mind.
Nowadays catwalk designs are widely copied by high-street retailers and sold before the original pieces are available in the shops, but his last spring/summer show (mentioned further up in this post) gathered so much technology and energy, that it seemed as if the show itself was telling the world, “all you just need to wait till I come out.” Plato’s Atlantis (McQueen’s spring/summer 2010 collection) seems invincible and will be a hard act to copy. It’s almost as if the show itself is again murmuring “yes, you lot can appreciate me, watch me and own me, but you can not copy me.”
And yes, this is the true Alexander McQueen spirit. Never one to follow others, always the one to lead.
R.I.P. and long live McQueen.
