mcqueen

Alexander McQueen S/S 1999

- Alexander McQueen

As the audience sat down, they were confronted by a large mirrored box, so that the audience made up of fashion editors would look directly at their reflections in the glass. As the collection commenced, the lights went down in the audience, and the lights went on in the box. The collection ended with the box, which had been there the entire time, and you only saw fluttering sort of things in the actual box, but as the walls of the box came crashing down, it revealed the fetish writer Michelle Olley, staged in a pose that was inspired by the Joel-Peter Witkin photograph Sanitarium. The collection itself was really a statement of the politics of appearance. McQueen was well known for upending conventional standards of beauty, and in this particular case, he was celebrating the idea of difference. For fashion editors to confront an image of a woman who’s not conventionally considered attractive was something that was particularly resonant in this collection.

Raquel Zimmermann by Mario Sorrenti

Alexander McQueen S/S 2010

-Andrew Bolton

A previously unseen fragment from Alexander McQueen’s final collection - the last he touched as a designer - photographed by Richard Learoyd for Dazed & Confused

Alexander McQueen Dress No. 13, spring/summer 1999

Luca Gadjus shot by Steven Klein for Numéro

featured in V #48, August 2007