The savagery of Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen was many things to many people: a genius; a puerile provocateur; a young upstart who became Givenchy's head designer when he was just 27 years old; 'masochistic and insecure and unhappy and [with] very low self-esteem'; a man with a 'wicked sense of humour' who cared deeply for his family; a self-confessed 'big-mouthed east London yob'. Curiously for Adam Curtis, he was also an astute observer of the ways in which Britain had been corrupted by the turn of the 21st century.
Shifty, Curtis's latest series for the BBC, is a hallucinatory study of Britain's backwaters over the last 40 years. In his signature style, seemingly disparate archival footage is woven together to narrate with devastating lucidity the story of how one of democracy's tenets – a shared sense of reality – was dismantled by Margaret Thatcher's free-market ideology and neoliberalism's emphasis on individualism. In Curtis's telling, democracy didn't so much collapse as dissolve into paranoia and political distrust – something that, he believes, was understood by McQueen.
In one scene, Curtis unexpectedly invokes McQueen's iconic 2001 Spring/Summer show 'Voss', calling it a dramatisation of the 'modern illusion of freedom that [McQueen] had helped to create'. He means this not as condemnation. Rather, McQueen is cast as a kind of cultural diagnostician, a man who knew that beneath the sleek surface of late-Nineties Britain was something feral and broken. 'Voss' – known colloquially as the asylum show – featured a mirrored glass cube that, when lit from within, resembled a psychiatric ward. Before the show started, the audience sat, forced to look at themselves, for an hour. The models then emerged, stumbling around the box, their faces obscured by bandages. The audience could look in, but the models could not look out. 'It's interaction,' McQueen said, 'but also suffocation.'
It's tempting, and perhaps not entirely wrong, to see McQueen as fashion's darkest fabulist. But fashion was, for him, a conduit for self-enquiry. 'My work is autobiographical,' he said in 2003. Born Lee Alexander McQueen in Lewisham in 1969, he always knew he wanted to be a designer. As a young boy he would dress his older sisters. After dropping out of school aged 16, he went to work as a tailor on Savile Row. From there he unsuccessfully applied for a lecturing job at Central Saint Martins, but was offered a place on the coveted MA course instead. He graduated in 1992, the same year his eponymous line was founded. By 2001 he was churning out up to ten collections a year for both Givenchy and his own label. It's no wonder the distinction between real and other became blurred.
Violence was never hypothetical for McQueen. His sister, Janet, was beaten so horrifically by her first husband that she miscarried twice. McQueen, from the age of nine, was sexually assaulted by the same man. Savagery, then, wasn't metaphor, it was memory. And so his fashion became testimony – not to provoke, but to process. His clothes – metal armour, ripped shirts exposing breasts – were both a means of providing protection from the world and evidence one had already endured its cruelty. He knew that the world can be a harsh place for unprotected women. 'I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,' he said. Janet became his blueprint: vulnerable but strong. And from her, he built an army.
But McQueen's vision was not nihilistic. His shows were not about crude violence producing low-grade shock value. It was curious; romantic, even. He drew his inspiration from nature – bestial, gorgeous, grotesque: '[It's] a fabric itself.' It was never mere background; it was language, and one that he could mimic. A keen ornithologist, the kestrels he spotted around the block of flats opposite his family home in east London were not just birds – they were emblematic of flight, vantage, predation, and grace. His models wore exquisite outfits made of razor clams, hats of taxidermied birds and corsets made from 97 aluminium coils.
McQueen understood the cruelty of nature. In Shifty, Curtis uses a clip of McQueen building a dramatic blazer, made from calf hair. A striking silhouette, it has emphasised shoulders contrasted against a cinched-in waist made; it became a piece in his 1997 collection, 'It's a Jungle Out There'. Evoking the Thomson's gazelle, McQueen elucidated in his adenoidal voice: 'The gazelle is a poor little critter. But it's the food chain of Africa. As soon as it's born, it's dead. And that's how I see human life.'
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
While fragility made half the story, survival made the other. McQueen said about the same blazer, 'You could class this as costume. But it's costume with a deadly meaning.' That's not to say he didn't find a place for hope. In his 2009 show 'Plato's Atlantis', models walked in the now-legendary Armadillo shoe – towering, ten-inch heels. Their heads were adorned in braids, some a foot high, and their bodies bore garments that had used 3D printing to mimic marine features like scales and gills. They emerged onto the catwalk, some nearly eight feet tall, having transformed into something otherworldly. (It's easy to see how one of his favourite painters, Hieronymus Bosch, informed McQueen's fantastical sets.) Under McQueen's gaze, femininity wasn't merely performative. It was adaptive. Time and again he ensured his women were disquietingly chimeric: part-human, part-beast, mythic. They were not dressing up; they were becoming. Even 'Plato's Atlantis' – the designer's last collection, unveiled a few months before his death by suicide in February 2010 – often read as apocalyptic, ends in rebirth.
The theatricality of McQueen's shows was steeped in cinema. He understood voyeurism's duality: the pleasure of watching, and the terror of being seen. As Richard Brett, a PR who dated McQueen, once said: 'He wanted partners he could control, but he was attracted to people who were resistant to that.' One of McQueen's favourite films was Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' ode to estrangement and the erotic pull of memory; a film concerned with how the ghosts of our pasts haunt our present. In it, Nastassja Kinski's character, Jane, is viewed across the partition of a one-way mirror, by a man who watches silently, and who does not speak until it's safe. For McQueen, this was not just fiction, it was life itself. The woman in the box. The watcher and the watched. The parallels to Voss are difficult to deny.
In this way, the brutality on display in McQueen's work was not celebratory – it was diagnostic. It exposed how deeply violence is threaded into the performance of femininity. And through fashion, he rewrote the narrative. His women were not killed, they returned. They were not the romanticised victims seen in Alfred Hitchcock films (another influence on McQueen), but something stranger: survivors, ghosts, predators.
In a world where fashion sells fantasy, McQueen sold a disturbing reality. His work was not cold – it was infused with romantic idealism. Granted, this was something of a complicated and messy concept to McQueen. Speaking about relationships, he said, 'You do things like put up your defences just to test how much that other person loves you.' For all the strength and power stitched into his brocade, he left space for vulnerability. He made a cuirass – a breast and back plate fused together, like a medieval knight's armour, or bulletproof vest – out of glass. His bumster trousers, with their waistband 5cm below those of the Seventies low-rise, were provocative, but they left one of the most vulnerable and erotic parts of his models' bodies – the bottom of the spine – exposed. His clothes were beautiful, but they were also fragile, and ultimately self-defeating: they left a sliver of a crack for light to break through.
McQueen was, by all accounts, generous, funny, childlike. He loved his dogs. He adored his mum, Joyce. His suicide, which came just nine days after her death, was not just the loss of a great designer – it was the collapse of a unique world-view. It's easy to romanticise such an ending, to fold it neatly into the narrative of a tortured genius. But McQueen wasn't interested in being tragic. He wanted truth, even when it hurt. In the world of fashion, life can be constructed around fantasy, but he made the audience look at – and reckon with – pain.
Adam Curtis frames McQueen as a man who understood the sickness in Britain's soul. He certainly understood how beauty could become confinement; how spectacle could be an effective camouflage for pain. By the 2000s, market ideology had reordered the British economy, and New Labour's spin culture had decoupled politics from reality. The grainy archive film coalesces to form one picture: behind the allure of financial freedom came inequality; beneath superficial beauty lies something murkier. Or, as McQueen put it, 'There's blood beneath every layer of skin.'
But the designer also knew that transformation was possible. 'It wasn't really about fashion with Lee,' said Sarah Burton, who, having joined the Alexander McQueen label as an intern in 1996, succeeded him as head designer. 'It was so much more than that. It was about everything that was to do with being alive. All the difficult parts, and the beautiful.' Because while Alexander McQueen's signature was theatricality, his subject was truth: feral, biographical, unhealed.
[See also: How Britain fell into the K-hole]
Related

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

BBC News

an hour ago

• BBC News

BBC statement about Gaza: Doctors Under Attack

BBC News is determined to report all aspects of the conflict in the Middle East impartially and fairly. Over a year ago we commissioned Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, a documentary about the plight of medics in Gaza, from an independent production company, Basement Films. We paused production of this film in April, having made a decision that we could not broadcast the film while a review into a separate Gaza documentary was ongoing. With both films coming from independent production companies, and both about Gaza, it was right to wait for any relevant findings – and put them into action – before broadcasting the film. However, we wanted the doctors' voices to be heard. Our aim was to find a way to air some of the material in our news programmes, in line with our impartiality standards, before the review was published. For some weeks, the BBC has been working with Basement Films to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms. Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world's most trusted broadcaster. Therefore, we are transferring ownership of the film material to Basement Films. Contrary to some reports, since we paused production of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack in April, it has not undergone the BBC's final pre-broadcast sign-off processes. Any film broadcast will not be a BBC film. The BBC has produced powerful coverage of this conflict. Alongside breaking news and ongoing analysis, we have produced award winning documentaries such as Life and Death in Gaza, and Gaza 101. We have also investigated allegations of abuse of Palestinian prisoners and Israel's attacks on Gaza's hospitals. Just today we are running a powerful piece of longform journalism that captures the final two weeks inside a Gaza hospital before it was forced to close. We want to thank the doctors and contributors and we are sorry we could not tell their stories. The BBC will continue to cover events in Gaza impartially.

The Guardian

an hour ago

• The Guardian

BBC shelves Gaza medics documentary over impartiality concerns

The BBC has scrapped plans to show a documentary about medics in Gaza after concluding it 'risked creating a perception of partiality' over the corporation's coverage of the conflict. In the latest controversy over the BBC's coverage of the war, it announced that discussions over how to broadcast the film, or incorporate some of its footage into its news coverage, had 'reached the end of the road'. It said it was now transferring ownership of the project to the independent production company who produced it. Anger and frustration had been building for months over the status of Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, with some involved in the film believing it was originally due to be broadcast at the start of the year. There have been concerns that some of those featured in the programme could withdraw their support over the delays. The BBC formally paused its broadcast after an investigation was launched into the making of another documentary, Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone. That programme was pulled from iPlayer earlier this year after it emerged that its 13-year-old narrator was the son of a Hamas official. The review into its production continues. However, the BBC said that after attempting to find other ways of using parts of the medics programme, produced by the independent Basement Films, it had now concluded there were impartiality concerns and it would no longer be shown by the broadcaster. 'We wanted the doctors' voices to be heard,' the BBC said in a statement. 'Our aim was to find a way to air some of the material in our news programmes, in line with our impartiality standards, before the review was published. For some weeks, the BBC has been working with Basement Films to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms.' It added: 'Yesterday it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC. Impartiality is a core principle of BBC News. It is one of the reasons that we are the world's most trusted broadcaster.' It also challenged claims the film had ever undergone the BBC's final pre-broadcast signoff processes. 'Any film broadcast will not be a BBC film,' it said. The decision comes after the founder of Basement Films, Ben de Pear, took aim at the BBC during a documentary festival this week, saying BBC journalists were being 'stymied and silenced'. He directly criticised the BBC director general, Tim Davie, whom he described as 'a PR person'. 'All the decisions about our film were not taken by journalists; they were taken by Tim Davie,' he said. 'Tim Davie is taking editorial decisions which, frankly, he is not capable of making. 'The BBC's primary purpose is TV news and current affairs, and if it's failing on that, it doesn't matter what drama it makes or sports it covers. It is failing as an institution. And if it's failing on that, then it needs new management.' The decision also follows an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Today programme by one of the journalists involved in the documentary, Ramita Navai, in which she described Israel as 'a rogue state that's committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and mass-murdering Palestinians'. Challenged about her statement by the presenter Amol Rajan, who said that it was her opinion, she said it 'isn't my opinion' and that she had collected evidence during her work on the documentary. The BBC said it had produced 'powerful coverage' of the Gaza war, including documentaries. 'We have also investigated allegations of abuse of Palestinian prisoners and Israel's attacks on Gaza's hospitals,' it said. 'We want to thank the doctors and contributors and we are sorry we could not tell their stories. The BBC will continue to cover events in Gaza impartially.'

Daily Mail​

an hour ago

• Daily Mail​

EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy shuts down 'disgusting' false cancer hoax after fan concern: 'It is completely made up and a terrible story'

EastEnders star Natalie Cassidy has shut down the 'disgusting' false rumour that she has breast cancer. The actress, 42, took to Instagram Stories on Friday to debunk the cruel hoax, which had been shared in an EastEnders Facebook fan group. According to the story, the star had broken down in tears when she was given the diagnosis. Its headline read: 'Natalie Cassidy Breaks Down as She Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis: "I Didn't Want Anyone to Know…"' Slamming the fake story, Natalie wrote: 'THIS IS DISGUSTING AND DISGRACEFUL. So many people are going through this and I have had messages asking if I'm ok. 'It is completely made up and a terrible story. Take this down whoever you are.' The cruel rumour follows the actress leaving her long-running role as Sonia Fowler on the BBC soap opera in April. Before her exit she had been involved in an emotional storyline that saw her wrongfully accused of murder. It then emerged that her on-screen partner Reiss Colwell (Jonny Freeman) had actually carried out the terrible crime. She made her dramatic exit on a speedboat with sister Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer), daughters Bex (Jasmine Armfield) and baby Julia after locking her estranged father Terry Cant (Glen Davies) in a garage. Since leaving EastEnders, the actress has been busy with a host of other projects including a BBC documentary that follows her journey training to be a carer. She is also the host of the Channel 4 consumer show Britain's Best Buys. Natalie was a longtime feature of EastEnders, first stepping into Sonia's shoes way back in 1993 when she was just 10 years old. She is not the only soap star to recently be the subject of online rumours and Emmerdale's Lisa Riley has also been a victim. Lisa - AKA Mandy Dingle - was recently forced to issue a warning to fans about AI impersonators. Riley, 48, said in a video: 'If something is not on my page – and my page is blue-ticked – then it is not real. 'It is AI pretending to be me, and there is nothing I can do about it. 'It's a hoax, it's a scam and it's a lie. 'So please, I'm begging you, don't click on it, don't believe it, don't read it, don't give it any attention. 'It's not true.'