McQueen bows out
The British designer comes alive through his final collection, shown at Paris Fashion Week four weeks after his death
For fifteen minutes on Tuesday, in a grand Paris drawing room with soaring white ceilings gloriously flounced with gilt, Alexander McQueen came back to life.
When the first model walked into the room, there was an audible intake of breath. Four weeks after the designer's death, the collection he had been working was finally unveiled. And his spirit was right there — in the skullcap of bandages dissected by a mohican of lacquered feathers, in the fierce black boots with gold angels sculpted into the heels, in the muscular power of the tight crimson bodice and the way the pleated and ruffled skirt appeared to have come not from the past or the future but from some other dimension where the two meet.
Of the outfits, 16 were 80% finished — they were completed by his team. The collection was truly spectacular; the mood, in the face of the evidence of what fashion has lost, was bleak.
His unfinished last collection looked to Byzantine art, to eternity and to angels. In folds of double duchesse satin, in a short dress tightly waisted and extravagantly swagged at the hip, could be glimpsed the infant Jesus from Jean Fouquet's 1450 painting of the Virgin and Child, digitally captured and engineered to fit the piece. A pale silk chiffon gown, curves as sculpted as a Greek marble goddess yet so gossamer light it swept the floor in silence, bore the faces of angels and the wings of doves; on the back was the outline of angel wings. In the work of master carver Grinling Gibbons, McQueen found details which he translated into crocodile shoes with gilded wooden heels hand-carved into elaborate columns of twisted ivy festooned with acorns.
There is no doubt McQueen's final collection was a triumph. But there seems little to rejoice in, when there is no one to congratulate.
