![]() Shalom Harlow, Audrey Marnay, Erin O’Connor, Hannelore Knuts, Bridget Hall, and the not-yet-famous Gisele Bündchen all walked for £100 each. That was no deterrent to all the biggest models who wanted to fly in to be part of his show. It was completely spontaneous.”Īt 30 years old, McQueen was still a young independent London designer with scarcely any budget to his name. She didn’t flinch when they came near her face. She knew how to keep her center on the turntable because she was a dancer. “She did exactly what she wanted to do,” says Sam Gainsbury, who produced the show with her partner Anna Whiting. Harlow was a ballet dancer you see it in her. Around and around, woman against machine. No matter how many times you play it on video, the rawness and shock of it never diminishes: Harlow standing on a wooden turntable, flailing her beautiful arms above her head, protecting herself as the programmed machinery goes in, gunning at her with black and neon yellow paint. It’s a McQueen performance, a coup de théâtre that has made ever-living history, surely up there among the top 10 fashion show thrills of all time. Little did we guess that we had 10 minutes to go until we’d be jolted half out of our skins by the sight of Harlow-on again, in a white paper multi-layered dress-under sudden violent attack from a pair of car paint–spraying robots. She’s wearing one of McQueen’s modernized cutaway frock coats-nothing underneath-and a pair of his signature bumsters, which barely graze her lower hips. ![]() There am I, sitting next to Hamish Bowles (in a Jasper Conran teal green Donegal tweed jacket, he tells me), as we calmly appreciate Shalom Harlow before us. Truthfully, I’ve no memory of what I was wearing that day-though Helmut Lang was my late ’90s uniform-but the evidence is there in the background of an archive photograph on Vogue Runway. Teamed with a badass boot and a handful or two of McQueen’s tough and tender jewelry, they made for looks in which to seize the present by the scruff of its neck and make unapologetic hay.On September 28, 1998, I put on my black Helmut Lang trouser suit and emerald green suede New Balance trainers, ready to fight my way into a warehouse used for storing street cleaning trucks: It was the non-fragrant venue where Alexander McQueen was having his Spring 1999 show. These wonderful pieces included sweetheart neckline, puff-sleeved, and mega-skirted dresses in scarlet and ultramarine dresses that paired sculptured scuba-material bodices with more expansively gathered skirting and open-backed V-neck dresses in pink or red. These forced unions of adjacent but distinct cultural traditions in clothing worked well enough, yet this collection flew highest when focusing on pieces whose raison d’être was less about telegraphing meaning and more about being wonderful to wear and watch. Unlike the many other hybridists out there-gathered most densely in Japan-this McQueen team always counters the apparent anarchy of its garment clashes with a rigidly enforced symmetry akin to the protocols that still adhere in Savile Row. Examples included a high-waist peak lapel tailored coat in wool conjoined with a poly-faille parka peplum shirting and shirt-dresses in crisp white cotton poplin countered by poly-something sections of sporty rib at the cuff and waist and a camel coat spliced against MA-1 bomber arms. This season saw Sarah Burton and her team observe its go-to McQueen dichotomy in a plethora of hybrid garments that countered formal against informal and frothy against severe. Looking at this collection, however, all that hoo-ha flew out the window as serenely as the (Matisse-y) doves that featured on satchels, shirting, and hand-crocheted knits. So reviewing any collection made in his name right now creates a tempting peg upon which to contemplate the ironies inherent in the post-Brexit, Union-busting schism that may well lie ahead. One of Alexander McQueen’s many dichotomies was to be simultaneously staunchly English and fiercely proud of his Scottish roots.
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