Fashion Opinion
Remembering McQueen
Charlotte Wu pays tribute to Alexander McQueen, one of fashion’s greats.
McQueen takes his final bow at his Spring/Summer 2009 show.
The Thursday before last, I came out of an hour and a half class in my college and subconciously gravitated into Sainsbury’s (occupational hazard of being a Sidney student). As I checked my phone in the checkout, queuing to buy things that I didn’t particularly want or need, I saw the BBM icon deceptively smiling at me, beguilingly turning out to be the harbinger of this news: “Char McQueen’s dead”.
Not realising that ‘Char’ was in fact my fellow editor Argyro’s abbreviation for my own name, however, it wasn’t until I’d moved on to the rest of my texts that it sunk in (forcefully, by way of six separate people’s messages): the great Alexander McQueen was gone.
In the following media-storm (if you’re reading this article, this shouldn’t be too strong a word. Obviously if you are Male Housemate, whose sensitive response to this news was “who?”, then you’ve probably sailed obliviously through its eye), his life and Twitter-page were combed sordidly through for evidence of “a troubled state of mind”, which saddened me in a different and probably deeper way from looking back over his creations. No person’s life can, or should, be summed up in a 140-character tweet – such as singer Estelle’s heartfelt contribution: “rip. alexander mcqueen. creative genius. super dope. wow”- and the newspaper-rumours seemed, in light of the utter elation and virtuoso abandon his collections continually demonstrated (most of all in the extravagant vitality of his shows, which took place on flooded runways and chessboards, in wind tunnels and giant carousels) to reduce him horribly to another depressed celebrity, or another tortured genius; at any rate, another story for another day. It’s one of the most distressing symptoms of the time that a person’s posthumous reputation can be built around a spare-worded obituary sent from a stranger’s mobile phone.
Now that the morbid enthusiasm has somewhat laid itself to rest, however, it’s easier to contemplate the weight of the loss. I won’t write a panegyric to his achievements; it’s been done, and done to death. But actually, the genuinely heartening thing is that it has been done. (And especially well done here, if you are interested in finding out more about his work, rather than his personal life). The Internet may be dehumanising in many ways, but what it also has to offer is a reassuring register of immortality in our world of incessant flux. Alexandra Shulmann, the editor of British Vogue, said that, “Time passes quickly and never more so than in the fashion industry, which chases after itself so determinedly that before one set of clothes is on the customers’ backs, we are heralding the next season.” Archives like Style.com go some way to relieve this monotonous concept of fashion as a pursuit of the next must-have, so soon disposable and irrelevant. After a season’s ephemeral moment expires, it is now available not only to those who can afford to ‘collect’ classics, and hang them in their wardrobe-museums like a Rembrandt languishing in a country-house drawing room or a gallery storeroom. Past collections can be perused with ease: the capturing of zeitgeist retrospectively appreciated, the timeless beauty of classic admired, and the impact of previous innovations recognised. The importance of this deep intimacy with tradition will be apparent to anyone who’s listened to someone improvising the blues, who’s only listened to Eric Clapton, or read a piece of free verse by someone who’s only ever familiarised themselves with T.S.Eliot, and not considered that to innovate must be to evolve. Originality comes from paying due respect to your remotest origins. The internet allows the popular understanding of fashion to proliferate, and by contextualising it more within its influences, its canon of classics and its genres, demonstrates its nature as an artistic movement: an organic growth rather than a consumerist, self-consuming mechanism.
Alexander ‘Lee’ McQueen’s death, meanwhile, will not mean the end of Alexander McQueen. His inimitable vision and emotional heritage will survive him. Much has been made of his humble start as a taxi-driver’s son; yet the orphaned ex-milliner Mme Chanel’s name lives on in Karl Lagerfeld’s immaculate-gloved hands, while Louis Vuitton, one of the oldest names in the fashion business, got his start as a luggage-packer, and his initials are stamped on the most luxurious of baggage by the house’s designer Marc Jacobs today. The CEO of the Gucci Group, Robert Polet, promised this morning to “protect, grow, and celebrate” the legacy of Alexander McQueen, whom he called “a pure genius, and a poet who was imaginative and original”. McQueen is dead, long live McQueen, indeed.
Topics: Celebrities, Fashion
