How Alexander McQueen’s 2001 “Voss” Show Addressed Mental Illness
Ashley Conway Int Sem 2: Fashion: C11: Sp18 April 17, 2018
In the year 2000 in London, an audience sat around a massive mirrored cube. The audience was forced to wait almost an hour for the actual show with the sound of an intense heartbeat playing through the speakers and only themselves to look at through the mirrors in front of them. After waiting for an hour, the box lit up to reveal what one might see in a padded cell in a psychiatric ward. The floor was made up of white tile and the walls were lined with padding and two-sided mirrors that the models inside could not see out of. This was Alexander McQueen’s “Voss” Spring/Summer show1. The show depicted restraint and mental illness while also displaying McQueen’s beautiful garments. Alexander McQueen used his garments in this show to develop a performance piece to address mental illness and how others view those with mental illnesses as “mad.” Mental illness is seen regularly in literature, film, and art pieces. Although mental illness has been a recurring theme in art throughout time, it has not always been depicted in the same way. Edvard Munch’s The Scream2, is a depiction of the artist’s own uncertainty and anxiety. Edvard Munch is known to have suffered from depression, agoraphobia, and hallucinations. The painting itself is a dramatized depiction of his suffering. Viewers of this painting can feel the hauntings from his hallucinations and even find it scary to look at. Even though this painting is so well known and famous, it does not keep people from stigmatizing and alienating those who suffer from mental illness just like Edvard Munch. “Historically, many cases of demonic possession have masked major psychiatric disorders.” Before Edvard Munch there was The Madhouse3 by Francisco de Goya. Goya painted a piece that pictured the suffering and
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Alexander McQueen, Alexander McQueen | Women's Spring/Summer 2001 | Runway Show, 2012,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynzgm9i4LI 2 3
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1893, National Gallery and Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway Francisco de Goya, The Madhouse, 1812, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain
mistreatment of men in a mental hospital in the 1700s. Goya was trying to depict the incarceration and torment of the shackled mentally ill men. Perhaps this painting was one of the first forms of social activism against maltreatment in mental hospitals. McQueen depicts mental illness in a similar way to Munch and Goya. By creating a stale and uncomfortable setting as the stage, it allows the audience to look into a glass box of a world that imprisons people with haunted minds. The pale models walked out of a door with blank looks on their faces. Many of the models looked into the mirror, but what the audience saw was the models looking at themselves because they could not see the audience. The models slowly made their way across the stage, acting as if they were suffering mentally. Rather than depict mental illness and the hospitalization of mentally ill people the way Munch or Goya did, McQueen found a way to make this performance about asylums equally mysterious and dreamlike. He is showing that mental illness doesn’t have to be a horrific or shamed thing. His show presents how society has began to change how they view people with mental illness since the time of Goya or Munch or even in the 1960s. At the very opening of his show, McQueen forced people to stare at themselves in a mirror, awkwardly, for almost two whole hours. It forced a sense of vulnerability and introspection upon an audience that was filled with fashion elites and celebrities like Gweneth Paltrow. Alexander McQueen said, “Ha! I was really pleased about that. I was looking at it on the monitor, watching everyone trying not to look at themselves. It was a great thing to do in the fashion industry—turn it back on them!”4 Everything implied within the show was meant to
Alexander Fury, Alexander McQueen: The Catwalk Was A Stage For The Designers Astonishing and Troubling Vision, 2015, independent.co.uk 4
make you think deeper. Addressing mental and physical discomfort in his audience was another one of his ways of addressing mental illness. By normalizing it and highlighting it. The garments crafted by Alexander McQueen and the portrayal of mental illness performed by the models are what makes this show so important to how mental illness was de-stigmatized through this fashion theatre piece. All of the models wore a white fabric around their heads, masking their hair and making them look as if they were covered in bandages as if there was damage to the head. Every model was given a different persona and a different way to act on the runway by McQueen. Model Erin O’Connor wore a white dress made of sharp and ridged mussel shells. McQueen told O’Connor to “...Go mental. Have a nervous breakdown. Die. And then come back to life.”5 O’Connor ran her hands from the bottom of the dress to the top putting her hands up in the air as if she were stretching and didn’t care about the sharp materials her hands just grazed over. As she raised her hands, running them against the knifelike shells, pieces of the mussel shells came off of the dress. She was destroying the dress in a way that looked liberating and was an important element of her performance and use of the garment. Many other pieces in the show were worn and depicted in different ways. Every little detail of the garments were paid a great amount of attention to. Another model that closely resembled a wounded bird, wore a skirt made of ostrich feathers that had been dyed red and black. The top that went with the skirt was made from slides for a microscope that had been painted red to represent blood. Another birdlike model walked onto the floor, with taxidermied birds of prey floating around her head off of her shoulders. She resembles a character from the Albert Hitchcock film “The Birds”6 because she acts fearful of the birds as they are holding the SHOWStudio, Subjective: Erin O'Connor interviewed by Nick Knight about Alexander McQueen S/S 01, 2014, youtube.com 6 Albert Hitchcock, The Birds, 1963, Universal Pictures 5
fabric from the top of her dress as if they are trying to rip it away. Many of the other pieces in his show had feathers or flowers included. Feathers have been known to represent freedom and a connection to the afterlife. Whereas flowers symbolize purity, life, and romance. Through these two things that McQueen incorporates into his garments, he is showing the beauty of females being able to find freedom in this enclosed box. Perhaps the most interesting and shocking part of the show was the dramatic finale. The metal box within the middle of the stage fell open from every side and shattered glass violently. The box released what seemed like hundreds of moths. But within the box there was a naked woman. A woman had a mask with horn like figures on top covering her face. She laid slouched on her side looking at the floor. She had tubes coming from her mask which led to the ceiling. This was shocking to the audience. The nude woman on the couch was a plus sized model, Michelle Olley, a journalist and erotica author. Olley said, “My body’s going to be so at odds with the fashion sparrows and bony old crow-people in the audience...I am what most of them fear most – fat.”7 By using a body that people are not comfortable with, and that many do not find beautiful, McQueen dramatizes and amplifies how people view mentally ill people. As uncomfortable and not beautiful. What was so powerful about this finale was the vulnerability and gentleness of the woman in the middle. This final scene was inspired by Joel-Peter Witkin’s photograph called “Sanitarium”8 which looks very similar to what was shown by McQueen. Witkin, much like McQueen, delved deep into ideas that are uncomfortable to most of us. He used death, reference to art history, and eroticism in his photography. Many of his photographs show actual dead bodies, nudity, and 7 8
Michelle Olley, Diary Entries, 2000, blog.metmuseum.org Joel-Peter Witkin, Sanitarium, 1983, Feldschuh Gallery, New York
people with deformities. All of the things he chose to show are things that society as a whole have also stigmatized. His work is provoking of emotion and debates what is normal to our society vs. what is not normal. Alexander McQueen had spoken about his work before and said, “I don’t find it extreme. I know it looks extreme to other people... I find it poetic. it relates to my work.”9 The two artists have much in common. They both force strong emotions into their viewers by saying what they cannot say verbally and putting it into their work to have it speak for itself. The way fashion designs are presented are much different than the way a painting is presented. Alexander McQueen has always been an important voice for how women are treated and seen through the fashion industry. Models are usually displayed as moving mannequins or clothing racks with little to no depth to them. Alexander McQueen changed that in a very strong way. He said “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”10 In his show, he is doing more than just empowering women. He is empowering women who are depicted having a mental illness. By dressing them in beautifully hand crafted garments and having them act like they feel emancipated in this starile white box they cannot see out of, he is sending a message to the audience about something much deeper than just the beautiful garments being displayed. The death of Alexander McQueen made many realize that he understood mental illness and suffering much more than anyone had thought. Alexander McQueen was found dead in his apartment nine years after the successful asylum show about mental illness. McQueen followed in the footsteps of many brilliant and boundary pushing artists like himself. He killed himself.
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Emma Hope Allwood, If you like McQueen’s asylum, you’ll like Joel-Peter Witkin, 2015, Dazed Alexander McQueen, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, 2011, blog.metmuseum.org
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People like Kurt Cobain, L’Wrenn Scott, and Ernest Hemingway were all celebrated creative individuals who did not care enough about their success or the love people had for them to stay. This makes me wonder if everything leading up to his death was foreshadowing. By all means he fit the category of someone most likely to kill themselves: a single, middle-aged man under a large amount of stress and grieving the then recent loss of his mother. The suicide of Alexander McQueen makes the “Voss” show so much more impactful than it was in the year 2000. People look back at that show now and may think about how each garment was made to fit a piece of a part of him that was suffering mentally. By seeing someone, like Alexander McQueen, create something beautiful, meaningful, and personal we feel the need to sympathize with an issue that affects everyone globally, and that is mental illness and suicide. The 2001 show could be used as a way of unshaming mental illness and, because it was designed and created by Alexander McQueen, be used as a form of suicide prevention. Alexander McQueen was a designer that created not simply to create, but to make us change our perceptions of what is acceptable and what isn’t in our culture. By creating a show that pushed the idea of mental illness and mental hospitals into our heads, he made us realize that these things are normal and that the people who go through it are just like anyone else. He forces us to see the beauty he sees in what has been deemed as inferior and imperfect.
Bibliography Alwood, Emma Hope. If you like McQueen’s asylum, you’ll like Joel-Peter Witkin. Dazed. Dazeddigital.com Bolton, Andrew. Savage Beauty: Alexander McQueen. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. Fury, Alexander. Alexander McQueen: The Catwalk Was A Stage For The Designers Astonishing and Troubling Vision, 2015, independent.co.uk Goya, Francisco de. The Madhouse. 1812. 46 cm x 73 cm. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, Spain. Kaufman, James C. Creativity and Mental Illness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
McQueen, Alexander. “Alexander McQueen | Women's Spring/Summer 2001 | Runway Show.” Youtube Video. 11.42, March 21, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qynzgm9i4LI. Morehead, Allison. Edvard Munch: between the clock and the bed. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. Munch, Edvard. The Scream. 1893. 91 cm × 73.5 cm. The National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. Olley, Michelle. Diary Entries by Michelle Olley on Appearing in VOSS, spring/summer 2001. 2000. Blog.metmuseum.org O’Connor, Erin. Subjective: Erin O'Connor interviewed by Nick Knight about Alexander McQueen S/S 01. Youtube Video. 11.58, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOHsm0EawM4. Thomas, Dana. Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. London:Penguin Press, 2015 Witkin, Joel-Peter. Sanitarium. Photograph. 1983. Feldschuh Gallery, New York.