Alexander McQueen: as New York Fashion Week kicks off, designers legacy ambition live on - Telegraph
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Alexander McQueen: as New York Fashion Week kicks off, designer's legacy will live on
As New York Fashion Week kicks off, flowers and candles outside the designer's store jot a tribute to a fashion maverick.
BY Hilary Alexander |12 February 2010
Last night, in New York , presently afterward 10 o'clock, a spectral diagram trod out of the shadows on West 14th Street, and knelt within the glowing candles and flowers outdoor the Alexander McQueen cache.
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She was dressed fully in black: black leather McQueen tailleur, black platform boots, a black altitude cap, black mittens. The air whipped by the yards and yards of black tulle which veiled her from brain apt foot. Her diamonds and her tears glistened in the night.
The woman was Daphne Guinness, friend, consumer and confidante of the designer who was found dead at his home in London, early yesterday.
Ms Guinness was one of many painted to the tragic memorial on that icy avenue last night; one of thousands trying to come to terms with the sudden and ghastly detriment of a man whose magical, often scary and mind-blowing visions transformed the world of mainstream.
Among the roses and daisies and gerberas,
Rodarte's Target_3130, private notes had been laid, many nameless. "You were the best designer of my generation," read one. "We will miss you, Lee," and "RIP Lee McQueen" said others, written with biro and felt-tip on envelopes and scraps of brown paper.
The blinds were drawn tight on the windowed shopfront. But a colossal photographic blow-up of a blonde prototype among a lair of writhing, multicoloured serpents, was a reminder of McQueen's potent legacy.
I have many fond and fabulous memories of McQueen. His shows transcended mere catwalk. They were statements of deep enthusiasm and secret, constantly disturbing, always thespian.
I remember wolves howling in la Conciergerie in Paris - where Marie-Antoinette was retarded before being guillotined; and ironically, where his autumn/winter 2010/2011 show would have been staged on March 9th during the Paris catwalk season - and a model, dressed like Little Red Riding Hood, leading two large grey wolves across the flagstones.
I memorize pivoting dervishes "flying" across the dome, upon a pond of inky black water strewn with black daggers, which stuck out of the water like sharks' fins, in a storehouse downtown aboard the Hudson.
I remember clambering over ventilation conditioning ducts in a fruit and vegetable market in the Borough in London, where a broke car was on bombard, and Jodie Kidd pranced in a huge-shouldered jacket, her eyes wild, her face streaked with ash.
I remember Shalom Harlow twirling in a full, pearly dress which became green, yellow and black,
Calvin Klein Python Oxford Date Bag_157, as two automaton "fired" jets of coloured paint at her.
So many shows, so many minds, so many concepts - perhaps also vast, too many for one mind to continue to include.
McQueen's last show ,
Juicy Couture Brainy Handbag_262, at the Palais Omnisport, at Bercy, on the outskirts of Paris, was one extraordinary mixture of digital technology and dazzling design, simultaneously 'streamed' live around the world.
His inspirations came from Darwin's "On The Origin of Species" and his methodology of mutation, drew some references from the biblical Flood, posited the notion of person creatures returning to the moist depths whence all people life sprung.
The colours and computerised prints were as vivid as the shoals of fish McQueen had discerned on a recent scuba-diving vacation in The Maldives. The shoes were jewelled, barnacle-encrusted "hooves" which could have get cracking a sea-monster. The models' faces were distorted with prosthetic "fins" and "gills".
Backstage, ahead the show, McQueen seemed calm and confident. He was quite merry with the collection; he thought it was one of his best. It was likewise his last.
Alexander McQueen- for New York Fashion Week kick
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