hommage
L’Enfant Terrible waves goodbye
who in the fifties presented the New Look. After the austerity in France of World War II, Christian Dior created a popular dress silhouette with a narrow waist and a full skirt featuring yards of fabric which spoke to prosperity and abundance: The New Look. *Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow’s exclamation after Dior’s first fashion collection launch in 1947.
Late on the 11th of February, Alexander McQueen, a fourtime winner of the British Designer of the Year Award, was found dead at his home in London, aged 40, after an apparent suicide. McQueen was the creative director of his own label, which was bought out by Gucci, and was one of Britain’s most lauded fashion designers. His death came just over a week after his mother, Joyce died, and almost three years since his close friend and style guru, Isabella Blow, also committed suicide. Blow, a magazine editor and muse to milliner Philip Treacy, drank weed killer after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. A British Vogue profile says McQueen’s most recent collection, spring/summer 2010, was critically acclaimed as his best ever. “Who knows?” couture king Karl Lagerfeld said. “Perhaps after flirting with death too often, death attracts you. There was always some attraction to death, his designs were sometimes de-humanised. I found his work very interesting, never banal.” Alexandra Shulman, editor of British Vogue, said: “He influenced a whole generation of designers. His brilliant imagination knew no bounds as he conjured up collection after collection of extraordinary designs. His death is the hugest loss to anyone who knew him and for very many who didn’t.” McQueen cut his teeth as a tailor in Savile Row, where legend has it that he left his distinctive mark in the form of hand-written obscenities, in the lining of a jacket for Prince Charles, heir to the throne. He designed the famous “bumster” trousers displaying the cleavage between models’ buttocks in a parody of low-slung trousers worn by workers, and survived general condemnation over a collection of ripped clothing entitled “Highland Rape”, the first time anyone had chosen to send supposed rape victims down the catwalk. McQueen viewed Yves Saint Laurent as a genius and a source of inspiration. When the French designer died in 2008, McQueen said Saint Laurent was “the reason why I am in fashion”. “To me fashion should predict the time we live in. He did this is the 60s and 70s,” McQueen said at the time. “Pure genius and a man that I always revered and tried to emulate.”
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