Fashion Brief
Savage Beauty, a show of work by the late Alexander McQueen, was first shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and attracted record attendance. It’s at the VA in London now, and I don’t think I’ve ever attended such a thought-provoking art exhibition.
Years ago, when I interviewed Bella Freud, she said she wanted to be a fashion designer because of “what it’s like to have all of these feelings about people and their bodies”. I found that comment striking, because it expressed so well the seemingly counterintuitive fact that fashion isn’t about clothes, any more than painting is about flat surfaces. Fashion takes clothes and makes them more fascinating and alluring, because creativity makes life more fascinating and alluring. Freud’s right. Fashion is about people and their bodies and their feelings and their minds. Clothes are just about protection.
Fashion is an art form that people find compelling and accessible, which is why its gurus sit at the acme of a gigantic industry offering the commercial distillations, reproductions and knock-offs that make it something even the most modestly affluent can take part in. Clothes are practical. Fashion is not. Couture, in general, is exuberantly impractical. What makes McQueen so special is that beyond the gorgeous opulence lurk sinister and troubling feelings about people and their bodies. I say “lurk”. But they aren’t lurking. They’re waving their arms and screaming.
Would that be so crashingly obvious, had McQueen not killed himself five years ago, aged 40? Maybe not. Fashion has its share of attention seekers, sensationalists, operators and shysters. Controversy attached to the McQueen name from the moment people started hearing it. If anything, more controversy would attach to a fashion show called Highland Rape today than it did in the mid-1990s. McQueen, whose father was a Scot, said it referred to the Highland Clearances, and critics gave him the benefit of the doubt. The fashion world was protective of McQueen even then, and passionate in its defence of him.
My friend, the fashion journalist Susannah Frankel, was close to McQueen from the start of his success as a designer. I was always struck by the two ways she talked about him. When she was discussing his art – and Frankel never had any doubt that that’s what it was – she’d talk about McQueen. That man was unassailable, unquestionably a genius, revered, indomitable. But sometimes she’d talk about Lee, this sensitive and vulnerable private man she adored.
Frankel was McQueen’s authorised biographer from early on. But that’s a book that remains unwritten. My feeling is that she could never quite face being the person who removed the McQueen armour, however gently and carefully, to reveal profound frailty, transluscent skin stretched over a tortured heart. And still can’t face it. Or maybe I’m just being fanciful.
But the McQueen armour is there for all to see at the VA – steel armour, gold armour, leather armour, armour made of mussel shells, armour made of stiff, unyielding fabric. If you think fashion is about clothes, you’ll dismiss these breastplates and carapaces as unwearable. But if you think fashion is about defying human vulnerability even as you defend yourself against it, then you’ll stand before those objects and see a magnificent and terrible expression of courage and fear.
Of course, the bodies that all this stuff is designed around are women’s bodies, not men’s. The show made me think about that a bit more, too. If fashion really is about celebrating vulnerability and making it glorious and beautiful, then it would be more attractive to people who are less inclined to want to hide vulnerability – people who are not macho, or who understand machismo as a disguise. It’s a hoary old observation, the one that notes the preponderance of gay men in fashion, choosing female muses, attracting female customers, and McQueen was one such man. Maybe his brilliance came from the enormity of his struggle to resist his own vulnerabilities, to put on a brave face? Or a mask.
Masks appear a lot in McQueen’s art. A red, shimmering evening dress clings to the curves of the body, neck and face, covering it entirely. It’s fascinating and horrible, glamorous and annihilating. We are well used to an argument that insists a woman with her face covered is less vulnerable, and to women insisting that it’s their right to cover their faces if they choose. To me, these women are deluded, like people who insist it’s a woman’s responsibility to ensure she isn’t raped, not a man’s responsibility to ensure he doesn’t rape. That clothing is a declaration that such an argument has been accepted. It’s hard to say whether it insults women more, or men. But McQueen’s masked outfits don’t hide the body and its sexuality. They treat face and body with an oddly unsettling, sexualised equality – creepy and attention-seeking, yet denying individual identity. Weird.
Fashion – lavishly or skilfully embellishing bodies, to be looked at – is the opposite of anonymous, de-sexing, religious weeds. So why was McQueen so keen to hide faces, shield identities? It’s easy to see those perfect bodies with their swaddled faces as objectified women, wrapped up like parcels or mummified corpses. But they are not on women; they’re on mannequins. McQueen’s couture sits so well in a gallery because it’s designed for stylised human forms, not for people. This is an eternal criticism directed at fashion, with its endless thirst for models whose bodies, far outside general experience, are freakish, breathtaking easels of flesh and bone. Which is perhaps a bit of a disgusting idea.
Is there disgust in this work, perhaps about this formidable talent’s inability to change the frailty in humans, but only to decorate or disguise it? Was McQueen’s fascination with fashion – which started at a very young age – a way of expressing and fetishising the human desire both to fit in and stand out, which is fashion’s eternally shape-shifting game?
In the end, one simply has to decide that whatever it was all about, it wasn’t enough for McQueen, enough to save him or to satisfy him. That body of work he left behind, though, can be seen as a strange and wonderful gift to human culture; a unique creative endeavour full of bravery and despair. Skulls appear in McQueen’s work a lot, too. He created for himself a staggeringly rich and complex memento mori. I’m sad for him, but hugely grateful, too.
