This lunatic asylum on earth, he flew over and couldn't move.
Antlers, snake skin, skulls.
[McQueen] is a documentary about costume designer Alexander McQueen, but its beginning is like a horror film.
I remembered the first time I knew McQueen five or six years ago. It was a skull on a bad street. Under the celebrity effect, Taobao sold over 10,000 hot shoes and clothes every month.
People who wear it think they are cool.
But what they don't know is that skeletons are not cool. It is McQueen's thinking about death.
When he hanged himself at his home in London 8 years ago, he didn't want anyone to take over the brand he founded. Now McQueen is just a symbolization of his design work.
In fact, McQueen has been thinking about it all the time. His genius design from the bright to the dark is a lonely self-conversation.
Others do show, McQueen do show.
In his early years, he always liked to draw inspiration from movies and show his dialogue results.
Fashion conferences made by him are always full of drama.
McQueen was born in the East End of London, a place where Conan Doyle described smoky and frequent murders.
One of the most famous is "Jack the Ripper" , the children of the East District must have had horror fantasies about it. McQueen is no exception.
In July 1992, he graduated from the Saint Martin College of Art and Design, and launched his first independent clothing conference at the Kensington Olympic Exhibition Center in London.
Dark and horrifying, the press conference was filled with the breath of death on the streets of Whitechapel in the Eastern District in 1888. McQueen named this group of designs "Jack the Ripper stalking his victims" .
One of the well-known clothing designs is to press human hair into blood-colored silk satin to form a mottled texture. Blood and hair are like the prostitutes killed by the knife at that time.
He said:
Inspired by Victorian hair, when prostitutes would sell their hair in exchange for curling tools, and people would buy it and send it to their lover. I put my hair in the transparent plastic glue as my signature trademark. In my early works, I used my own hair.
McQueen has brought the perverted horror of the killer to the extreme, and his dark aesthetics are gradually being revealed.
In five fashion conferences from 1993 to 1996, he launched one of the masterpieces of his life, the "Guardian" series, among which the "Guardian Pants" is particularly famous.
Some people think he is grandstanding and insulting women. In fact, "Fart Pants" is another horror film directed by McQueen.
He wanted to create a visual effect with a particularly long upper body and a short lower body by changing the proportions of women's bodies, which would make people feel horrified.
McQueen said that he pays more attention to ugly things, because others usually ignore ugliness, and beauty comes from these places.
So he launched the "The Hunger" series in 1996 (spring and summer), inspired by Tony Scott's 1983 vampire movie [Millennium Blood After] (The Hunger).
Previously, McQueen’s designs were mostly derived from tracing historical events. Starting from this series, he began to get inspiration in movies.
The horrible atmosphere in [Thousand Years of Blood], thinking about death, loneliness and desire, he uses red bloodshots, wound-like torn fabrics, and large exposed exaggerated designs to express.
Those "vampires" wandering on the runway, under his instruction, raised their middle fingers, exposing foul language, and flipping clothes, subverting traditions and turning the entire fashion circle over.
Every piece is roaring, go to the fucking world.
In the film [Flying over the lunatic asylum] , McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson, enters a mental asylum to escape prison labor.
Under his leadership, the mental patient in the mud wall pasted window began to learn to look at life, and had a "self".
The chief raised the concrete pier, smashed the window, and ran to the virgin forest in the distance.
After the film was released in 1975, it won the 48th Oscar for Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay five awards.
Twenty-six years later, McQueen used it to reach the pinnacle of his own fashion show installation design, creating the great and classic "Voss" series of this century .
He is an extremely restless person. In addition to being known as the "Godfather of British Fashion", he is also known as the "Bad Boy McQueen".
Exciting, noisy, and passionate, he said that in his fashion show, he can get everything that he can get when he participates in a rock concert.
There was no runway at the "Voss" press conference in 2001 (Spring/Summer).
Two large glass boxes are located in the center of the venue. They symbolize the iron window ward in [Flying over the lunatic asylum]. They are made of special materials and the audience can see everything inside the box.
The models in the glass box can't see outside, facing the glass, they see themselves.
Every model in the show was pale, with bandages wrapped around his head, and wearing Chinese clothes designed by McQueen, showing their beauty with a professional side.
But after a period of time, they did not feel the presence of the audience, and began to show their true feelings about the costumes, showing the impatience of being restrained.
Finally, in the gloomy sound, the square glass box in the center of the box opened, and as the glass fell to pieces, large swaths of moths pounced out.
In the center of the broken box was a naked fat woman wearing a gray metal mask with a tube inserted.
This group of designs inspired by movies led McQueen to a pinnacle of his career.
Whether it is others or himself, it has its shadow in many costume designs in the later period.
At the same time, "Voss" is also McQueen's favorite fashion show. He said:
The theme of this series is to make people face themselves. I want people to think about whether their true self is really as beautiful as it appears on the outside.
Fashion is the phantom of human self-deception, and he always has the impulse to take us out of the cage like McMurphy.
If McQueen does not become a costume designer, perhaps he can also become a good director.
The 2004 (Spring/Summer) "Deliverance" and 2005 (Spring/Summer) "It's Only a Game" series showed his talent.
In the 1969 film [Desperately] , a couple during the Great Depression participated in a dance marathon in order to obtain bonuses and food.
All kinds of problems and contradictions in American society, and the human nature and psychology reflected by various characters can be glimpsed in this film.
McQueen adapted the story of the film into three paragraphs, turning the runway of the 2004 (Spring/Summer) "Deliverance" series conference into a dance floor.
In the 19th century Paris ballroom, models and professional dancers trained for two weeks performed clips from the film under the guidance of Scottish dancer Michael Clark.
From the opening stage dancing ballroom dancing in beautifully embroidered silk skirts, to printed "sportswear" walking around the stage, and finally to the plaid and sequined long skirts falling to the ground.
The whole press conference gave people a feeling that was not inferior to the original film, and it also caused the audience to reflect.
A year later, the 2005 (Spring/Summer) "It's Only a Game" series conference was even more dramatic.
The T stage at the scene was replaced with a chessboard. Models dressed in costumes representing cultural elements of different countries such as India, Central Europe, Africa, Turkey, etc., walked on the chessboard like chess pieces.
McQueen's explanation of this design is:
In this group of designs, the concept of chess means that we have opened up to six different aspects and opposites of women. I let the Americans stand against the Japanese and the redheads against the brown Latina.
Light yellow, light purple, light milky white, light green, light blue, light rose, the design of "It's Only a Game" shows the girlish feeling of Edwardian era.
It was in the 1975 youth suspense film [Picnic on the Cliff] , that group of female students who disappeared inexplicably, gave him such an inspiration.
On the chessboard, it was [Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone] Liberty, Ron, and Hermione, who suddenly came up with the idea when they played chess.
Compared with the dark wind when he first debuted, the two youthful and fantasy movies aroused McQueen's lively side, full of childishness and a sense of future.
The previous two years when McQueen was exhausted and his design works were slightly flat. It was the film that gave off his creativity again.
But after that, McQueen turned to nature and studied animals with great concentration. Perhaps he is already full of disappointment in human nature. Animals and nature calm him.
In 2010, while preparing for the "Angels and Demons" series conference, McQueen said that he wanted to commit suicide at the scene, but was persuaded by his friends.
No, before the press conference started, he hanged himself at his home in London. With a lonely body dangling in the air, it was no longer the fat McQueen full of aura in his early years.
"Fashion is his favorite person, the others are all passersby."
After dancing a marathon of dancing, this lunatic asylum on earth, he flew over and couldn't move.
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Author/Yaoyao Wine
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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