14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, British designer Alexander McQueen was found dead in his London apartment. Police would only confirm the sad news and not offer more details, but speculation says he hanged himself, as he was suffering from depression and could not cope with his mother’s death. The fashion industry is mourning the loss of its only enfant terrible, its genius, but the reality of it all is that, at the end of the day, McQueen was far from women-friendly, as Liz Jones of the Daily Mail underlines.
As Karl Lagerfeld was also saying just the other day, it was often that McQueen would tackle themes and issues our society would normally frown upon and then get praises for it, flirt with death to the point of obscene. Still, that did not change the fact that all his designs, save a few cases, were not for every woman out there, as a regular Jane Doe would never even dream of going out in the world dressed like that. McQueen was as brilliant as he was exclusive, elitist, which made it so that, while embraced by the fashion industry, he never managed to go fully mainstream.
“We remember about McQueen is the spectacle, not the clothes. Yes, he was a brilliant tailor, but the designs seemed secondary to the theatrics. […] I have never once bought a McQueen garment: he just wasn’t commercial in the way a Tom Ford at Gucci was, say, or a Miuccia Prada. He never made an unmissable It bag, for example; maybe he felt that to do so was beneath him. It was dirty, tacky and grungy, a money-maker that somehow detracted from his brand rather than democratizing it. Sadly, McQueen never quite cut it when it came to haute couture, either,” Jones argues.
“In 1996, he stepped into John Galliano’s shoes at the Paris house of Givenchy, but he never quite filled them, leaving in 2001 after garnering less-than-positive reviews. […] We will all miss the opportunity to gasp, to marvel at his sheer ingenuity. For McQueen, being wearable was not the point. He was not interested in that. His clothes were truly works of art. He will be sorely missed. He was a sweet, self-doubting misfit in a world populated by hard-nosed, calculating copycats with not an original bone in their bodies,” the Mail piece goes on to say.
Alexander McQueen was a paradox: praised for his Audacity and originality, yet shunned for the same reasons, as few stars and almost no regular woman wanted (or could afford, in the case of the latter) avant garde; they all wanted to be made to look beautiful and not grotesquely sublime, Jones believes.
