CREATIVE GENIUS: Known for his outlandish designs, Alexander McQueen was tortured by personal demons a new book reveals.
OPINION: The first posthumous book on the life and work of designer Lee Alexander McQueen (known by his middle name to all but those closest to him) was published barely two months after his suicide in February last year.
By August Alexander McQueen, Genius of a Generation by Kristin Knox, was busted to the discount bins and brokenhearted fans who had rushed hungrily to buy this tribute to their idol, were posting mostly disappointment.
”A major let down …”, ”A disgrace…”, and ”Shame on the author and publisher …” were typical reviews on Amazon.com.
Knox’s audit of McQueen’s life and work was criticised as repetitive, uninformed, incomplete. For many, even the book’s cheap cover price (about $US30) didn’t absolve its faults. Reverence for the quixotic McQueen’s genius had spun into something akin to religious fervour while he was alive; anything less than a biblical tribute now he was gone was bound to be dismissed as sacrilegious.
It’s a phenomenal aspect of fashion that uninterested outsiders – those who see only the preposterousness of some inventions by maverick designers including McQueen – rarely grasp. They miss the beauty, or the profound, loaded ugliness, or the artful layers of psychosocial meaning that can be found in those catwalk stunts and which can incite such ardent devotion among fashion followers.
Into that yearning breach left by McQueen’s death and the unsatisfactory book delivered to his flock of followers, has dropped curator Andrew Bolton’s definitive Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. It’s a solid, 240 matte-paged bible launched in tandem and tribute to New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of the designer’s work, also curated by Bolton.
The book’s cover shows a single, holographic image of McQueen’s face that dissolves, at a tilt, into a sinister, moulten metal skull. It’s a poignant trick, a reminder that McQueen’s personal demons tempered his aesthetic as much as his anti-establishment politics and wild imagination.
Like many of fashion’s most celebrated designers, McQueen took arrogant control of the space around, above and beneath the body. It’s this remarkable, intensely detailed art of sculpting and cladding with a variety of materials, from feathers and sea shells to hair, leather, soldered metal and timber slats is mesmerising in Solve Sundsbo’s static, mannequin photographs for Savage Beauty.
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