Alexander McQueen by Andrew Wilson

Author:Andrew Wilson [Wilson, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471131813
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Chapter Nine

‘He was the kind of daredevil that looks death and birth straight in the eye’

Björk

There was a moment, precisely seventeen minutes into Untitled, Lee’s Spring/Summer 1998 show for his own label, when McQueen secured his place as a contemporary artist of some note. The audience of 2,000 people, who had gathered on the evening of Sunday 28 September 1997 at the Gatliff Road bus depot in Victoria, were intrigued as the loud club music that had accompanied the first part of the show began to fade, and silence settled over the brutal interior of the industrial building. Then the sound of intermittent drops of rain was broadcast over the PA system, together with a soulful refrain from Ann Peebles’s ‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’, spliced together with the threatening deep bass notes of John Williams’s theme from Jaws. The catwalk, a long transparent Perspex box filled with water and lit underneath by ultraviolet light, started to darken with black ink, oozing from an invisible source. By the time the runway had turned black a yellow sleet of rain had started to fall from above and as the models, all wearing white, walked forwards their clothes became soaked with water and their make-up and mascara ran down their faces.

Simon Costin, who designed the set of Untitled with McQueen, regarded the show as a piece of installation art, and many others agreed. ‘It’s not just the clothes McQueen is good at, it’s everything . . . the environment, the theatricality,’ said the photographer Mario Testino, who was in the audience, along with Janet Jackson, Demi Moore, and Honor Fraser.1 ‘The man’s a creative genius,’ said Tommy Hilfiger, who watched with his wife and daughter.2

Of course, the clothes on display were extraordinary, ‘carved rather than cut from traditional tailoring fabrics, from pinstripe and Prince of Wales check, fused together to produce torso-skimming jackets’.3 There was a white muslin corset dress, its train dragging through the water, worn by Kate Moss. There were figure-hugging spiral dresses made from python skin, pinstripe jackets that revealed deep cowls at the back, finely tailored skirts and corsets worn by musclemen. And there was a suede bodice sliced into strips so as to reveal the breasts, worn by Stella Tennant. But there was something else at work, too. McQueen had commissioned a number of unsettling additions, pieces of body sculpture that redefined the concept of the accessory. Jeweller Sarah Harmarnee made a number of harnesses, fashioned from silver-plated metal, while McQueen’s friend Shaun Leane constructed a spine corset made from aluminium. When Shaun initially heard Lee’s idea he thought his friend had gone mad, but McQueen had been right – it could be done. ‘Sky’s the limit,’ he would say.4 But it was the accessories and the staging – particularly the juxtaposition of the Perspex tank filling with sinister ink and the nasty yellow rain that fell from the heavens – that lifted this event beyond the realms of a conventional fashion show.

In fact, in September 1997,

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