It’s easy to see where the notion of the designer as a tormented genius came from. Contributor Catherine Spooner writes: “Gothic provided with a distinctive idiom that he explored and refined over successive collections.” He also plays with the “aesthetics of disgust”, and makes references to haunting and undead elements, and presents “the past as Gothic trauma” by memorializing his own ancestor, executed as a witch at Salem in the autumn/winter 2007 show In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692. The designer’s ‘macabre iconoclasm’ is explored in the book that accompanies the exhibition, Alexander McQueen, edited by Claire Wilcox. In fact, McQueen’s entire autumn/winter 2002 collection, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, including a famous black parachute cape, was inspired by Burton. And it’s no surprise that McQueen felt a kinship with American film-maker Tim Burton, who is also known for his works of dark fantasy. “He loved the Victorian era and its attendant melancholia.” She singles out his graduate collection, in which he famously included human hair in the linings of jackets. “Many of McQueen’s designs were imbued with a strong Gothic sensibility,” says Bethune. He’s Dick Whittington, she’s Puss Without Her Boots.” There’s a pantomime-style playfulness about the idea, but the photos carry an undercurrent of horror that was the trademark of the Grimm stories. And of a fashion shoot for AnOther magazine directed by McQueen (and shot by Sam Taylor-Johnson), the designer said: “It’s very Grimm’s fairytale. “It included some of his most opulent designs crafted from sumptuous silk, embellished with Swarovski crystal.” In his autumn/winter 2002 collection, a model in a lilac cape with voluminous hood, leading two wolf-hybrid dogs, opened the runway show. “It was one of McQueen’s most lyrical and beautiful collections,” says Bethune. The catwalk show told the story of a feral girl who climbs down from the tree to meet a prince and become a queen. The Girl Who Lived in the Tree, his autumn/winter 2008 collection, is inspired by a 600-year-old elm tree in the garden of the designer’s country home. “His catwalk shows were integral to his creative vision as a designer and often involved elaborate narratives.” “McQueen was a masterful storyteller,” Kate Bethune, who is on the curatorial team for the V&A show, tells BBC Culture. The show highlights the designer’s fairy-tale narratives and themes of magical transformation. And now a major retrospective, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, comes to the Victoria & Albert Museum in the designer’s hometown of London, a new version of the sell-out exhibition that showed in 2010 at the Costume Institute in New York. McQueen’s meticulously crafted designs and theatrical catwalk shows pushed the boundaries of fashion into art, making him one of the most visionary designers of his generation. And fairytale Gothicism certainly infused the creative vision of this enfant terrible of fashion – just as the Gothic influenced the stories of the German Brothers Grimm, who together collected and published folk tales during the 19th Century, among them Cinderella, Rapunzel, the Frog Prince, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel. Like the best-known fairy stories, too, there was a dark, troubled side to his life, culminating in his tragic suicide in 2010. The British designer’s life was certainly a rags-to-riches story – from cockney cabbie’s son to globally acclaimed fashion star. “Life to me is a bit of a Brothers Grimm fairytale,” Lee Alexander McQueen once said.
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