Alexander McQueen

[chris_daka]

I got this piece from the F/W collection the detailing on the back is especially unique!

 

[Whitelinen]

I'm not sure if this thread is for McQueen in general, as the topic title would suggest, but delete if this doesn't belong here...

I was wondering, as there are many members in this forum who like McQueen, what are your favourite pieces of his work? Pictures please

 

[Faith Akiyama]

Harper's Bazaar US April 2007
Alexander McQueen, Daphne Guinness, Katy England, and Phillipa Horan
"The Real McQueen"
Ph. Solve Sundsbo
Written by Susannah Frankel

Scanned by me

 

[gretaconstantine]

Givenchy

does anyone have pictures of Alexander McQueens first collection for GIVENCHY? the white and gold collection....

 

[JuiceMajor]

Hail The (Mc)Queen

 

[helmut.newton]

Are there any more articles on him? He seems like such an incredibly interesting person. I'd like to read more on him!

 

[LetThemEatCake]

Anyone know what season/collection it was that he had models flipping off the cameras and swilling and chugging beer while on the runway? I think the soundtrack had a lot of old Hole too, which I'd love to see the total package...swoooon.

 

[Spike413]

^ That was a McQueen show? I know Gaultier did a show like that in 01, but I don't know about McQueen.

Any idea what the clothes looked like?

 

[LetThemEatCake]

Cant remember the clothes so much, it was a video clip I saw of the show. Lots of tight lingerie slips...it was very Courtney Love, hence her music and the middle fingers.

If you remember a Gaultier show like that, any images or better yet video you can direct me to?

 

[dior_couture1245]

^^I think RTW SS 01 is the Gaultier show Spike is talking about.

(style)

 

[LetThemEatCake]

Thanks for the comment and photos, Spike413. Now if there was a video surfaced....I need to know the soundtrack. B)

 

[ultramarine]

does anyone have pictures of Alexander McQueens first collection for GIVENCHY? the white and gold collection....

i think that was a couture collection ... and I remember it on firstview .. I distinctly remember Stella Tennant rockin it on the runway

 

[MissMagAddict]

Source | US Elle September 2008 | Typed by MMA

ELLE FASHION INSIDER | DESIGNER GENIUS
THE REAL MCQUEEN
With his bad-girl McQ collection, Alexander McQueen puts the tough back in chic.

Other than yourself, who are your favorite designers?
Rei Kawakubo for Comme des Garçons.

If you could come back as a dress, which one would it be?
My kimono dress from Fall '03.

If you could come back as a model, who would it be?
Karen Elson.

What's your favorite color?
Lilac.

What's your favorite junk food?
Pie, mash & liquor.

If you could have another body, what would it be?
A dolphin's.

Who are your fantasy dinner party guests?
Sarah Silverman, Mary J. Blige, Frida Kahlo, Mike Leigh, Shane Meadows, and David Bowie.

Where's your favorite place to have a drink?
The beach.

Last book you read?
Norwegian wood by Haruki Murakami.

Pets?
Three dogs: Minter, Juice, and Callum.

Breakfast?
Tea and toast.

At age seven, you wanted to be?
A synchronized swimmer.

What's the one thing you find easiest to forgive?
Vulnerability.

What's the one thing you find impossible to forgive?
Dictatorship.

What's your biggest self-indulgence?
Ice cream.

Favorite place to shop?
Columbia Road Flower Market in London.

What wallet would you like to steal?
No one's.

What diary would you most like to read?
The one Benazir Bhutto never got to write.

If you were an inventor, what would you invent?
A machine that vacuum-packs humans to get their fit measurments.

What's your nickname?
Lee.

When and where are you happiest?
Hastings, looking at the sea.

Who is your best friend?
My work.

Who is your worst enemy?
Myself.

What piece of art would you most like to own?
A John Currin.

What's your favorite vacation spot?
India.

What's your most treasured possession?
Time.

What's your favorite band?
Beth Ditto and the Gossip.

If you weren't a designer, what would you be?
Bored.

What's your biggest fashion regret?
This interview!

Always...
Forgive.

Never...
Resent.

 

[lizardlove]

Where can I find the Alexander McQueen white vest with a big skull on the front that is made up of flowers?

 

[Chanelcouture09]

General Lee
LEADING A CHARGE INTO MEN’S WEAR, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN WON THE BATTLE FOR FALL. CATHY HORYN ON THE COCKNEY REBEL.

Alexnder McQueen sleeps under a portrait of himself in a rented flat in Mayfair, the London neighborhood that is also home to such fashion luminaries as Valentino and Tom Ford. It’s easy to see why McQueen favors this particular portrait, to a self-reflecting degree, and chose to frame it as elaborately as a religious icon and place it on the same wall as photos of his beloved dogs — Minter, Juice and Callum — as though all four beings are inseparable.
As a well-off man of 40, with a newly purchased home down the block under renovation and a country house in Sussex, McQueen doesn’t lack for serious art. His friendship with artists like Sam Taylor-Wood and Jake and Dinos Chapman go back years, and examples of their work are displayed in the two-level flat. Yet the portrait captures a moment of truth that feels savored. Taken by David Bailey in 1996, it shows a fleshy and tentative McQueen staring into the camera. ‘‘I’d been up all night partying,’’ he recalls. More to the point, he had just been hired by Givenchy, the French couture house owned by LVMH Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, whose chairman, Bernard Arnault, was prepared to pay huge sums for raw British talent. Openly gay, with a Cockney swagger that seemed to embolden him even as it made his insecurities transparent (the stylist Isabella Blow once remarked that his teeth ‘‘looked like Stonehenge’’), McQueen had already left a mark with his bumster trousers, a style that set off a decade-long fashion for low-rise jeans. McQueen was then 27, living in his studio in Hoxton Square, in the East End, and wondering where his next quid was coming from. On the morning that a LVMH executive called with the Givenchy offer, he was in bed with his boyfriend, and, as he said later, he went to the toilet ‘‘to have a think.’’ When he emerged, he got on the phone and accepted, but it was without enthusiasm. The arrival of Champagne and caviar from Paris didn’t soften him. He was, and remains, not so much an enfant terrible as an enfant sauvage, guarding against the loss of his own innocence.

portrait shows — the watchfulness lurking in the haze of a London all-nighter.
Although McQueen would probably resist the idea that he has mellowed, there are signs recently of greater self-acceptance, not least in the move to establishment Mayfair. ‘‘Ten years ago I would have never thought of moving to this area of London,’’ he says. We have left his flat and walked around the corner to Scott’s, the Mount Street fish restaurant that now serves as his local canteen. At lunchtime the place feels very jolly. Steve Martin enters, scans the room and heads to the back. McQueen, who is almost universally known as Lee, is given a large booth near the door. He orders dressed crab and smoked haddock, and then continues, ‘‘It was all about Lee the Cockney oink and Hoxton Square. But now it’s about a company and peace of mind. I can still rock ’n’ roll, but I can do it here and I can do it safely.’’
Some people might find this choirboy confession hard to take or, anyway, hard to believe. McQueen, whom I first met in 1997, is famous for winding people up. He is wily. He knows how to clock someone else’s needs and adjust his responses accordingly, and not in a manner that feels slick or insincere, but certainly there’s a large amount of obfuscation involved. Yet now when we speak he is forthright on a number of topics, including his close friendship with Blow, who committed suicide in May 2007, about which he had said

little publicly. At the same time, collections like the 2008 ‘‘Girl Who Lived in the Tree’’ and this fall’s men’s show, a well-crafted ode to men’s sexual nature (forget the Sherlock gloom; focus on the attenuated cut of the trousers, the oiliness of the butchers’ aprons), are among his best. McQueen, who comes up with the concepts for all of his shows and still cuts most of the patterns himself, describes these 15-minute performances as ‘‘the culmination of everything that goes around in my mind.’’ And though one might not think to place him in the same category as Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, whom he admires, his clothes, like hers, have the power to open us up. In their hands, fashion is not meaningless. But as for opening himself up for understanding, McQueen would probably say, with a grunt, ‘‘I can’t be bothered.’’
There is no doubt, however, that the sense of control in his shows is reflected in his personal life. Two years ago, following Blow’s death, McQueen ended a long relationship. ‘‘I had been in India for a month, and when I got off the plane I went straight to my partner’s work and I said, ‘We’re over,’ ’’ he recalled. ‘‘I finished with him, and I started cleaning up my business. And I’ve never been happier. I work much harder.’’ Later, when I repeated the conversation to Jonathan Akeroyd, McQueen’s chief executive for the past five years, he said, ‘‘I think Lee sells himself short, to be honest. He’s not one of these guys who brings

his emotional issues to work.’’ Recently McQueen began seeing a p*rn star, whom he met online. ‘‘It’s great!’’ he cackles. He told me the man’s name but asked that I identify him only by his p*rn nom de famille, Mr. Stag.
More slowly, McQueen has come to terms with the tragedy of Blow, one of the great English eccentrics and — despite a genuine funniness — a woman with paralyzing insecurities. It was Blow, a stylist and editor, and a member of the Delves Broughton family, who gave an early boost to McQueen’s career by wearing his clothes and talking him up. Two portraits of her hanging in McQueen’s living room — a gift from the photographer Steven Meisel — capture her beaky, Sitwellian beauty.
‘‘It was the most valuable thing I learned in fashion, her death,’’ McQueen says. He acknowledges that some people think he did not do enough to help Blow — ‘‘You’ve got to let someone like that be herself’’ — and he says there are things that he and others did that he will never discuss. He calls Detmar Blow, her husband, ‘‘the bane of her life,’’ adding, ‘‘Isabella was so strong in her public image but couldn’t stand her ground in her personal life. I know the other side. She would say that fashion killed her, but she also allowed that to happen in a lot of ways. She got herself some good jobs and she let some of them go. You could sit Isabella down and tell her what she should do with her

life. But she would never understand that all it came down to, ‘You just are, Isabella. And that is your commodity.’ ’’

ON THE MORNING THAT I MEET McQueen in his office, a modern building on Clerkenwell Road, he is in his top-floor studio with Sarah Burton, his design assistant for the past 13 years, and the stylist Camilla Nickerson. Sunlight pours through the glass roof. The spring 2010 men’s show, which featured paint-splattered trousers and which he did, like all his men’s collections, with the assistance of Daniel Kearns (‘‘He’s Irish, straight, a gentle soul’’), was behind him, and work had begun on the women’s spring line. McQueen was experimenting with making soft fabrics look hard and blurring the line therein. Two years ago, the company, which has been part of Gucci Group since 2000, became profitable, with a sizable proportion of sales coming from accessories, the McQ sportswear label and men’s wear, begun five years ago. According to Akeroyd, men’s accounts for 20 percent of total sales — a robust share given that McQueen is mainly known for his women’s designs. That picture is likely to change in a year or two when the company opens a shop on Savile Row.
Gucci executives have never interfered in McQueen’s shows — ‘‘that’s all I’ve ever asked’’ — but the demand for profitability has surely given purpose to his creativity. Both collections are more

absorbing, more speculative about the future of dress since the company began making money. The fall men’s show, a high point in Milan, was a hard-core view of sexuality presented in a romantic envelope of Victorian darkness. McQueen, who has never shied away from expressing his sexual tastes — almost vulgarly so — says the show was based on the subculture of rent boys that brought together Oscar Wilde and the son of the Marquess of Queensberry: ‘‘The cut is really all about, and accentuates, what I personally find attractive and sexy.’’ Yet, for all that, the clothes are not limiting.
I ask McQueen what he’s learned from doing men’s wear. He answers quickly: ‘‘Forget about the impact of the conceptual and think about the bigger picture.’’ McQueen started as a 16-year-old apprentice on Savile Row. It remains the locus of his designs: all things lead back to the ideal of fractional changes in cut. And in his view, most designers don’t pay enough attention to men over 30. ‘‘Somehow, you have to fit yourself into a bracket that doesn’t require a waif body but doesn’t look like a bag of spuds.’’ He laughs. ‘‘I’m 40 now, and I know what I’m capable of wearing.’’
It could be said that McQueen is an incurable romantic. His clothes, after all, frequently make reference to the 18th and 19th centuries. When he tries to do something futuristic — clothes with winged shoulders, say, or the illusion of morphing — journalists slap him

down. I remind him that he had once told me he wanted to be as revolutionary as his hero Kawakubo. He wanted to be known as a 21st-century designer. He nods. ‘‘Five years ago, designers like myself would look at Rei and pay homage,’’ he says. ‘‘Today we’re thinking faster than Rei. You have no choice.’’
The truth is McQueen tends to think in three dimensions. That’s partly because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he actually knows how to cut fabric. But it’s also because he wants to push the physical limits of fashion. This desire was never more evident than with a 2006 show that ended with a hologram of his friend Kate Moss. Filmed with four cameras and shown within a huge pyramid, the images of Moss looked amazingly lifelike. McQueen says he was intrigued by the thought of people being able to view an entire show within a little pyramid mounted on their desks. ‘‘And I’d just send it to you over the Net,’’ he says with a giggle. ‘‘I’m talking fantasy, but I don’t think it’s that far from reality. Five years.’’
His latest obsession is to do a live stream of a show over the Web, while offering a handful of commercial looks for immediate sale. In his view, digital technology allows designers to move away from the narrative form and, inevitably, the runway itself. Or, as he puts it, ‘‘you can’t keep rehashing the same concepts of the good, the bad and the ugly.’’

McQueen may just be winding me up. At one point, discussing the 15 minutes of transcendent joy that a show gives, he says, ‘‘God, I sound like I’m contradicting myself, but that’s me all over.’’ Still, he knows that for farsighted designers like himself — Nicolas Ghesquière and Raf Simons, to name two — the real hurdle to progress isn’t money or balky corporate honchos. It is creating a fabric that can produce a new, 21st-century silhouette.
Before us are some prototypes that very nearly, magically, appear to do just that: swirls of fabric suddenly blurring into a carapace. McQueen, though, isn’t satisfied: "Yeah, but what’s in my head isn’t feasible at this time. I’m trying to weave a fabric that goes from a structure into a chiffon, but the loom doesn’t exist. We’re all thinking about it.”
McQueen is now in midlife. He has achieved conventional success — the brand, the Mayfair address — but the inherent need to guard against his innocence is still there. Fifteen years ago it was all about rawness summed up by the bumsters. Today it’s all about technology, and McQueen has turned his passion there.

NYTIMES.COM

 

[Chanelcouture09]

i find him one of the most amazing and inspiring men around
his designs are revolutionary and chic (in the deepest and dearest forms)
i found the use of the word 'innocent' in the article rather stupid
but i still think he is AMA-ZING
someone like thames and hudson need to get someone to write a book about him
that would be a worth while purchase - '10 years of McQueen' or whatever they choose

 

[Chanelcouture09]

i like the image of him with his foot on the desk because he looks so relaxed and enjoying himself , alot of the time he seems shy
the bottom image he is with isabella

source : getty images

 

[runner]

firstview

 

[BerlinRocks]

i've heard on radio that McQueen did costumes for dance ballet Eonnagata ....
with Russel Maliphante, Robert Lepage, and Sylvie Guillem ...

does someone know if he did costumes for other show ?

 

[runner]

in case anyone forgot about this

www.showstudio.com/projects/ddlmcqueen/download.html


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