candy-colored goth

highlikefashion:

Tattooed on Alexander McQueen’s upper right arm were the words ‘Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,’ a quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Spoken by the lovesick Helena, who has been abandoned by her beloved Demetrius because he loves the more beautiful Hermia, the soliloquy considers the erratic and irrational nature of love. In her contemplations, Helena believes that love has the power to transform something ugly into something beautiful because love is propelled by subjective perceptions of the individual, not by objective assessments of appearance. This belief was not only shared by McQueen but also critical to his creativity. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the themes of love and beauty were central to his vision of fashion, which reflected upon the politics of appearance by revealing both the prejudices and the limitations of our aesthetic judgments.