Alexander McQueen: post 1 of many

Only Alexander McQueen could be the subject of this first post. Because only Alexander McQueen anything. The man and the fashion house, the second his legacy. I imagine his ghost, freed on Halloween, trawling the archives of the last four years and nodding his head. (Not smiling. This man could convey emotion with a deadpan stare.)

This is my blogpost, so I won’t spend time on his background, influences blah blah. That is why Wikipedia exists, quite literally. What that site doesn’t tell you about is why I pin his dresses on to my Pinterest board ad nauseum.

Patrick Demarchelier | Vogue

It was love at first sight: women dressed in hundreds of golden butterfly wings, over variations of tight-fitting dresses – emphasised shoulders, ragged hems, excessive ruffles. Every dress is an in-joke: elegant and demure but self-conscious, constructed and confrontational.

When you pledge allegiance to the brand that is McQueen, you pledge all or nothing, bad with the good. Future lines use the bird feathers and butterfly wings, all dancing the dance of our in-joke. Full dresses of gold or silver and a suffocating chiffon veil, a bird’s wing stretching from the model’s throat, a fabric Mohawk. Soft scraps on tight leather bodices. Bad to the bone, not preacher bad.

The meaning of those first dresses hit me like a ton of bricks, to fling the hackneyed expression at you, like a Chagal painting once did. Like a song by Perfume Genius does or a James Meek novel or Hamlet. The meaning, to me? Devastation. The pretty face of everyday life with a nod to its true brutality. Horror laughing at us. No, forcing himself into our homes and sitting silent in our living rooms.

Except, in my home, he has a key and is annoyingly chatty.

My meaning, not his or yours, I get that. Still, part of me insists McQueen also lived with this sense of desolation in conflict with living and sewed it into every creation.

As evidence, perhaps, his suicide in 2010. He had tried overdosing twice before, but killing yourself is more difficult than most realise (more than 90% fail). Go big or go home. Don’t try, but do. He combined four methods: he overdosed, slit his wrists and hung himself. The fourth? There are rumours of asphyxiation. I’ll leave that to you to figure out.

Alexander McQueen in Vogue Italia

I get it. I see his suicide as an act of courage, not cowardice. In Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he says “conscience makes cowards of us all”. Our tragic hero is more of a coward than we thought. He is saying that killing yourself is scary: even though living is a series of traumatic moments, there isn’t any guarantee that death is better than life (frying pan, fire). (Remember this next time someone uses the first line as some motivational slogan.)

My own words now: there’s some fear in failing to kill yourself, too. Of having lived that moment when you make the decision and carry it out, and have to remember it. That moment is one of pure desperation. Distress. Despair. Pure darkness that briefly has a pinprick of respite. Remembering it is worse than having to live. I am a coward, too.

Discovering that someone else has thought the same reviled thoughts is a shot of relief. These thoughts can’t be faked: when Hamlet talks about “the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to…”, I hear him describe the daily traumas that are the return on investment of being alive. (Did you notice my euphemism? I am trying to avoid saying “being bloody meat”.)

The work of Alexander McQueen brings me out of myself. I recognise my awful secret in the world outside myself and see how beautiful the awful can be. A jolt of sublime pain. To step out of myself, my thoughts, my rabid emotions for a moment. To acknowledge that the world maybe might possibly exist. To take this into ridiculous depths now, to suggest that there is something that is just beautiful out there.

For me, clothes are one way of telling you how I feel and who I am, because I don’t have the language to tell you and because I have to censor what I can explain. My internal struggles become something I can wear and that others can appreciate, without necessarily knowing what those struggles are or staring at me slack-jawed. It is a way of saying the world is horrible and so am I without upsetting anyone. (Well, I just gave away the secret…)

McQueen is a constant reflection of the locust infestation that is my general interior. For example, their collections have a regular motif of a cowgirl-gone-Goth or a disillusioned former socialite. A woman who sees the awful but channels it into being strong. Someone who doesn’t let the awful define them and who can turn inwards themselves without breaking. Like Wonder Woman, but with more material.

Style is identity, not fashion. The creations of Alexander McQueen sum up the million avatars of who I have been, who I am and who I want to be.

People say the value of art is subjective, but I think art first talks to how I feel rather than what I think. And my feelings are fluttering all over the place, so pinning them down is a quest on its own. Alexander McQueen’s pieces went on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after his death. Every time I see one of his dresses, my breath catches. In them I see vulnerability and courage, because being vulnerable is more terrifying than it should be.

Metropolitan Museum of Art