my first experience with alexander mcqueen was in college. i had just transferred to a small liberal arts college just outside of manhattan at the start of what would have been my senior year if i had stayed in philly. at the time, everything was upturned & there was that electricity abrew from the cusp of autumn, from the sea change. the above picture was in a september issue of something and really struck me. i had carefully cut it out and glued it into a journal. around that same time i also stumbled on another editorial featuring that same 'oyster' dress in a brightly hued rainbow ombre. the model was writhing on a shiny floor. her lips were a bright smear of blood red. she was fictionally insane. i was hooked.
from then on his clothing orbited my periphery. i'd always feel something abstract when i stumbled across it, but never really dug deep to find the pulse of it. i didn't worship fashion, never paid much attention to what was going on each season aside from my cousin's tales of working backstage as a model dresser (intriguing i promise.) i was in school for literature; i was tattooing a dead poet's initials onto my wrist & writing about disembodied organs. so sadly, by the time of his death, i knew little to nothing about alexander mcqueen aside from how his clothing made me feel when i happened to chance upon it in a magazine. i knew they were odd, straddling the line between grotesque and beautiful, but i still only held them at an inspirational distance.
i could say all this changed yesterday when i went to see 'savage beauty.' i went alone & stood in line for over an hour. a darkened room introduced the sombre yet edgy tone that wove throughout each room. their was a shrouded melancholy alive here, a ritual converging with a delicate mourning. it was palpable.
held in glass boxes like sacred relics, vaulted in a blackened cabinet of curiosity or balanced on antique mirrors darkened & fogged with age, the clothing felt alive on the lifeless/headless forms. you could sense the hands that sewed, that cut, that forced resin antlers through a piece of delicate lace. this made it all the more poignant, as if his death completed some strange circle. the presence of a ghost electrified every stitch, every curve of fabric.
people were clustered together, grouping their way around those darkened rooms, freckled with the sounds of howling wolves or the music box tinkering of bjork's 'frosti.' people drew in sketchbooks held tightly to their bodies. people snuck photographs. people couldn't explain. a mother whispered to her daughter, a little slip of a girl, about the silver thorns that wound around the throat of the mannequin.
we were disgusted or in awe or were bordering on having an experience akin to what i imagine religious devotes have, oscillating between life and death.
if you live anywhere near nyc, go.
held in glass boxes like sacred relics, vaulted in a blackened cabinet of curiosity or balanced on antique mirrors darkened & fogged with age, the clothing felt alive on the lifeless/headless forms. you could sense the hands that sewed, that cut, that forced resin antlers through a piece of delicate lace. this made it all the more poignant, as if his death completed some strange circle. the presence of a ghost electrified every stitch, every curve of fabric.
people were clustered together, grouping their way around those darkened rooms, freckled with the sounds of howling wolves or the music box tinkering of bjork's 'frosti.' people drew in sketchbooks held tightly to their bodies. people snuck photographs. people couldn't explain. a mother whispered to her daughter, a little slip of a girl, about the silver thorns that wound around the throat of the mannequin.
we were disgusted or in awe or were bordering on having an experience akin to what i imagine religious devotes have, oscillating between life and death.
if you live anywhere near nyc, go.
