A lot has been said this year about the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen: there have been a few books that partially focused on his figure such as Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas and Champagne Supernovas by Maureen Callahan; a play – McQueen – ran in London's West End, while the Savage Beauty exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London turned into a blockbuster event, entering the history of the most visited exhibits at the British institution. If you're a fan of the late designer and you're trying to build your own personal collection of books about him, there is another title you may want to add to your library – Andrew Wilson's Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin (Scribner/Simon & Schuster).
The book – with a title taken from a quote that McQueen himself gave about going beneath the surface of beauty – covers ground familiar to most of the designer's fans, yet, rather than just reading books and reviews about his collections or interviews with him, Wilson also spoke to his family, close friends and ex-partners, to provide his readers with exclusive memories, details and stories that other volumes may not feature.
The son of an East London taxi driver, McQueen was a shy child. Wilson follows him from his early years at school, his apprenticeship at Savile Row and experience at Romeo Gigli in Milan. The author also recounts his years at Central Saint Martin, marked by a difficult relation with Professor Louise Wilson.
Little by little, and thanks to the support of Isabella Blow, McQueen rose to fame: picked by French luxury conglomerate LVMH, he became the Creative Director at Givenchy, while his rival John Galliano went at Christian Dior. Though the designer managed to build his own fashion label as well, the pressures of the collections eventually intensified (McQueen stayed with Givenchy until 2001, but in December 2000 he entered a partnership with Gucci that acquired 51% of his label), driving McQueen to take refuge in drugs and in an intensely extreme life.
Wilson portrays McQueen as a witty and clever man (Tom Ford described him as "adorable, charming and kind") with a cruel and dark side to him (his friends claimed there were different personalities trapped inside him), obsessed with perfection and with many passions such as art, music, film, and nature (he loved birds and dogs), and a strong sense of theatricalisation. Leigh Bowery, one of McQueen's inspirations, theatricalised the self, McQueen reinvented the catwalk show, turning it into art events in which his favourite books such as de Sade's The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom and Patrick Süskind's Perfume, mixed and combined with images taken from his favourite artists like American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, German Hans Bellmer and British sculptor Richard Wilson. It is also true that McQueen's darkest fears, neuroses and obsessions would often prevail over any other kind of inspiration.
One trauma in particular remained with him throughout his life: as a child McQueen was abused by his brother-in-law who would also beat his wife, McQueen's sister Janet. Considered as physical representations of his misogynist mind by the fashion media (who later on quickly jumped on the bandwagon calling him a genius…), McQueen's bruised and battered models walking down his runways represented abused victims, but also hinted at the possibility of surviving and haunting or persecuting your oppressor. McQueen's visions of hybrid mutant creatures, women who were part human, part birds of prey, revengeful animals or representations of a new alien species, were indeed a reaction to the more ordinary visions of women promoted by the fashion industry, fragile and delicate and therefore prone to be destroyed by stronger powers.
At times Wilson looks in his book at McQueen's collections, explaining inspirations or ideas behind some of his most famous garments: McQueen's infamous "bumsters" were for example an attempt at blending different inspirations, mixing 16th century menswear tailoring with modern builders' pants, while creating a fresh area of erotic interest.
The most interesting parts in the books are the ones that look at the close bond McQueen shared with his his sister Janet, who turned into his muse, and with his mother, Joyce (who died nine days before McQueen), and the pages that examine the passion he had for his mother's historical researches into her family's genealogy (a theme that often developed into strong inspirations for the designer's fashion collections).
Wilson has been criticised for including in the book personal details that regarded McQueen's sex life and partners, and the designer being HIV positive but carrying on having unprotected sex; others have highlighted how Wilson seems to blame the fashion industry for what happened to McQueen. Yet some details from his personal life help readers going "beneath the surface" and understanding McQueen's mind a bit better; for what regards the industry, the designer himself showed in several interviews and on his runways a profound disgust towards it. After the collection "It's a Jungle Out There", McQueen stated indeed: "You know, we can all be discarded quite easily. Nothing depicts it more than animals. I was also trying to say the fragility of the designer's time in the press. You're there, you're gone (…) Fashion is a jungle full of nasty, bitchy hyenas." Such words and his attacks at the fashion establishment (in 1997 McQueen stated: "I hate the circles I mix in now (…) the wankers you meet; the insular people you meet. I'm a great believer in honesty and I don't think you get that in fashion") resonate even more after the recent news about Raf Simons stepping down as Creative Director at Dior and Alber Elbaz leaving Lanvin.
There is one major mistake that Wilson commits and that's not analysing in depth the damages done by fashion groups and conglomerates to the imagination of many young designers in the name of money and profit; Wilson also doesn't seem to be too keen on criticising the British fashion scene (in 1993 the British Fashion Council sponsored six new talents: McQueen, Sonnentag & Mulligan, Lisa Johnson, Paul Frith, Abe Hamilton and Copperwheat Blundell, but most of them went out of business in more recent years, almost proving the uselessness of seasonal sponsorships and fashion awards when designers do not have solid investors and real and constant financial support backing them…).
There are also bits and pieces about McQueen's collections that may have been expanded, but Wilson is not a fashion insider and does not have the fashion language needed to describe in detail McQueen's work. That said, the author manages to make a few interesting points: while providing women with aggressive silhouettes and power oozing uniforms, McQueen hoped to create a blend of Savile Row and ready-to-wear via his collections, but he also yearned to move away from fashion (he once stated in an interview he would have liked to become a journalist, even though in 2002 McQueen also claimed he wanted to take fashion into the future and experiment with technology, maybe constructing clothes on the computer, typing in the measurements and then seeing the garment being woven on the wearer…who knows what he may have come up with if he were still alive).
Though all the books written about McQueen can be considered as definitive volumes as they end with the designer's suicide, in our collective imagination McQueen is still alive and still destined to be many things like Eshu, the spirit that, representing both fortune and misfortune, inspired the designer's Autumn/Winter 2000 collection. McQueen was indeed a man and an artist who, crossing the limits of an extreme existence, brought chaos, turmoil and anarchism on the runway and in many people's lives.
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