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New Statesman
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
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
Vogue
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Central Saint Martins B.A. Fall 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection
Anyone with a passing interest in fashion knows that Central Saint Martins is the conduit through which generations of talent from around the world have passed on their way to becoming some of the most influential designers in the world. In particular, the head-spinning list of alumni from the M.A. course is a who's who of era-defining stars; but just as remarkable about this London institution are the hundreds of graduates each year from across every fashion-related pathway who go on to work behind the scenes in the industry, whether as senior talent in the ateliers of major Paris fashion houses, or across the numerous other, less-remarked-upon facets that make up the industry, from media to event production. And many of those up-and-comers come from the B.A. course, which is better known as a forum where young designers are yet to worry about the pressures of commercial constraints, and can instead let their freak flags fly. The latest showcase of that spirit, held in the cavernous central hall of the former granary building in King's Cross that is now the university's hub, didn't disappoint on the wackiness front: Andy Pomarico's eye-popping carnival floats festooned with flotsam and jetsam found on dumpster dives, with a witchy model in green body paint swinging through a doorway in the center, certainly saw to that; as did Linus Stueben's Y2K-on-acid extravaganza that featured fabric patches resembling toilet rolls stuck to the heels of furry boots, track pants that were pulled down to the calves and then stitched to stay there, and a model walking a robot dog on a leash—complete with a kitschy pink collar, naturally. (A special mention, too, for Matthew David Andrews's kaleidoscopic, wind-blown ladies caught in inclement weather, whose hats turned out to be hiding mini water sprinklers; what could have felt gimmicky ended up having an eerily post-apocalyptic air.) Yet many of the most interesting collections threaded the needle between high visual impact and more subtle messaging. Just take Timisola Shasanya's fascinating eye for proportion, warping scale and shape—shirts piled up around the neck like a kind of shrug, or a top that was artfully draped to rise up behind the model on a six-foot long rod like a kind of ship's sail—to create pieces that spoke to a childhood spent between Lagos and London, as well as to wider conversations around migration, all achieved in supremely elegant style. Or the refined playfulness of Marie Schulze's grown-up outerwear crafted from wide strips of raw silk, streams of fabric bursting from handbags or through the toes of shoes to the sound of a manic orchestral soundtrack.
Fashion Network
04-06-2025
- Business
- Fashion Network
Sander Lak to launch namesake label during Paris Fashion Week
Sander Lak, the founder and creative director of the former cult-favourite label , is making a return to the fashion industry with the debut of his namesake brand, Sanderlak. With a vision shaped by Lak's global upbringing and his ongoing exploration of identity and place, Sanderlak aims to introduce a fresh perspective to the world of luxury fashion. Each year, the brand will draw inspiration from a specific location, serving as a conceptual anchor for its collections. These chosen places will influence the themes, palette, textures, and mood of the designs. Though grounded in menswear, the collections are designed to transcend gender, offering an inclusive approach to luxury clothing. For Lak, this new chapter builds on a career that began with studies at ArtEZ in Arnhem and a Master's degree in menswear from Central Saint Martins in London. His professional journey has included roles at 3.1 Phillip Lim in New York, Balmain in Paris, and a five-year tenure at Dries Van Noten in Antwerp. In 2016, Lak launched Sies Marjan in New York, a label named after his parents. The brand earned Lak the CFDA Emerging Designer of the Year award in 2018, along with multiple industry nominations, before closing its doors in 2020 due to the economic impact of Covid-19. His debut namesake collection will be unveiled in Paris through private appointments.
Hypebeast
03-06-2025
- Business
- Hypebeast
Former Sies Marjan Designer Sander Lak Is Launching a Namesake Menswear Brand
Sander Lak, the brain behind the beloved and now-closed New York labelSies Marjan, is returning to the fashion circle with the launch of his own namesake brand. Stylized as Sanderlak, the imprint is set to debut during Paris Fashion Week Men's later this month. Lak, who boasts a Master's degree in menswear from Central Saint Martins, spent five formative years designing both men's and womenswear at Dries Van Noten, before launching Sies Marjan in 2016. Despite backing from billionaire husband and wife Nancy and Howard Marks, a CFDA Emerging Designer of the Year trophy, and prime placement on the likes of Barneys New York's shelves, the label was forced toclose its doorsin 2020 due to the financial impact of the COVID crisis. Sanderlak, funded in part by angel investors, will see Lak design menswear-inspired collections shaped by his own global upbringing (he grew up between Malaysia, Gabon, Scotland, and the Netherlands) and his 'ongoing exploration of identity and place.' Each collection will center around a specific location, which will inform the line's themes, colors, fabrics, and demeanor. Sanderlak will release two main collections each year. The brand will debut its first line in Paris through private appointments next month.
Fashion Network
29-05-2025
- Business
- Fashion Network
H&M/Central Saint Martins reveal Sustainable Fashion & Journalism Award winners
Central Saint Martins /University of the Arts London has announced the names of four of its students who've won the H&M Sustainable Fashion and Journalism award, that supports emerging designers and journalists. The quartet will share a £16,000 grant to support them in finalising their graduate collections and projects. The SFJ award winners are: Lucas Lidy - BA Fashion Design, Menswear; Ella Davies - BA Fashion Design, Womenswear; Mia Brimilcombe-Cowie - BA Fashion Design, Womenswear; and Dominique McDonnell-Palomares - BA Fashion Communication. The winners, selected from 45 applicants, were judged on their alignment with H&M's own values and ongoing Inclusion & Diversity work and Central Saint Martins' own policies. Factors such as academic merit, financial need and demonstrable commitment to sustainability and sustainable practices were considered, ensuring that the winners are committed to working towards making the fashion industry more inclusive and accessible for emerging talent, with a focus on creating a more circular industry. In addition to the prize, support including mentorship and networking opportunities to be provided by H&M's head office team. 'The selected students -- across both design and communication -- demonstrated a shared commitment to fashion innovation and environmental responsibility, an essential combination for shaping the future of the industry. Their creativity not only pushed the boundaries of style and storytelling but also embraced durability and sustainability at its core. These emerging talents are leading the way toward a more conscious, inclusive, and enduring fashion industry,' said Ann-Sofie Johansson, H&M Head of Design.
