Alexander McQueen: Imagination as the Queer Authority
How the late fashion icon created an inherently queer visual palette for our darkest fascinations.
Ever walked into a public space and known instantly that everyone there was on your wavelength?
It’s not a sensation I feel often. You have to understand that I practically vibrated earlier this month when I walked into the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. I’d driven 4 hours from Atlanta—a trip that started with good vibes and a Pride Month playlist and was nearly derailed by a sudden air bubble in my tire that warranted being towed off the side of the highway for a replacement—to make it to an exhibition I had a bone-deep need to see: Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray: Rendez-Vous.
The late Alexander McQueen was and is one of my favorite creative forces. I knew my fellow onlookers at the Frist felt the same way: we consider him the madly imaginative style-scientist behind the most evocative, jarring, and beautiful pieces in recent history. Known for his wicked humor and high-contrast themes, his clothes and runway shows occupy a distinctly queer space between the fetishistic and the sublime. His ideas landed even harder thanks to his technical prowess. It’s rare to cut and fit a piece of clothing by sight alone—his precision produced the sharp tailoring and wild silhouettes the world still associates with the McQueen aesthetic years after his passing in 2010.
French photographer Ann Ray is one of the few fellow artists he allowed to capture his work from a behind-the-scenes angle. Ray’s approach to shooting the fashion world often centers the models over the garments—a fantastic way to elevate work that’s already laden with emotional and historical contexts. Where some photographers capture “time and place,” she is undoubtedly a student of “look and feel.” Having taken over 32,000 photographs of her time with McQueen, she’s well-suited as a visual narrator to match the frenetic romanticism of his collections.
And then there’s me: a 35-year-old bisexual pop culture writer who had queer tastes—fantasy, horror, genre- and gender-fuckery, anti-establishment themes—even before she’d come out at age 19. I was predisposed to love McQueen’s work. I’m attracted to artists who willingly take the darker parts of the self, slide them under a microscope, and reinterpret them to confront and illuminate our collective mindset.
It definitely explains why younger-me latched on to performers like Nine Inch Nails and Lady Gaga. Imagine my cackle when I realized that not only did Gaga wear McQueen in the video for “Bad Romance,” but McQueen’s 1996 Autumn/Winter collection Dante was directly inspired by NIN’s “Closer” video. Incidentally, they’re two differently-flavored songs about using sex to unhealthily obliterate your own ego.
At the Frist, I chatted with several people cut from a similar cloth. A pair of queer punks I had a moment with over McQueen’s sour, scathing satire of consumer culture, The Horn of Plenty. An older couple of men who were awestruck over the collar of a black and gold coat from the Banshee collection. Most importantly, a mom named Sheila—her teenage daughter was ping-ponging around the gallery in a witch’s hat and sheer bliss.
I rhapsodized for a bit with her daughter—tearfully, because I love it when younger people fall in love with art made before their time—and then I moved on. A few rooms later, Sheila took me aside and asked how I’d gotten into Alexander McQueen’s work. She was beyond impressed that her kid knew who the man was but admitted to having no idea about the impact, the subtext, the culture, any of it. She wanted to understand how and why her kid was connecting to it so heavily.
Sheila, if you’re reading this, you’re a fantastic mom. It’s such a safe feeling when your parents are interested in what makes you happy and why, and I was stoked to share my own insights about why McQueen landed like a meteor for those of us who live outside of any existing box. The list of reasons is long: his affinity for understanding horror and turning it into beauty anyway, his knack for reanimating historical references in a punchy manner, the way he could make a simple blazer look mid-motion by swooping the neckline sideways.
It’s Pride Month, though, so let’s stay on topic... Lee McQueen may have set out to remake the fashion world through sheer force of talent and imagination, but his success was singular for other reasons. His identity and experiences as a queer man made for a highly personal lens that defined all of his collections.
His shows were another cornerstone of his reputation as a creator; oscillating wildly between danger, romance, sex, technology, tradition, limerence, and tension, they encompassed the extreme highs and lows that come with discovering your own queer identity while trying to operate in a heteronormative society.
Wanna talk specifics? Here are a couple of intrinsically queer ideas that I keep coming back to in McQueen’s garments.
The Gleeful Subversion of Norms
Serving the public per their existing appetites was never McQueen’s aim. Instead, he showed them mutated versions of their own expectations—with a confrontational twist on class dynamics, cultural features, or self-expression.
Would you expect immaculate tailoring in an outfit made of cling wrap, resin, spray paint, and string? That’s exactly what McQueen sent down the runway in early collections like Highland Rape and The Birds. Using his unemployment benefits to buy what few materials he could, McQueen learned early on that skill could turn the cheapest of items into wearable shapes.
I love his complete disregard for pre-conceived notions of “common” or “disposable” style. (Think of early ’90s club culture—one-and-done outfits that were often trashed on the way home.) In letting his imagination call the shots, he edged the mundane into fantasy.
McQueen also made a point of fishing out people’s sociopolitical misgivings and force-feeding them the truth. You know how certain kinds of Westerners see Eastern styles as costumes (or worse, jokes) instead of legitimate garments? In culture-spanning collections like Eshu and It’s Only a Game, McQueen pulled references from African and Japanese histories and reframed them in foolproof visual contexts. “Primitive” glass beads were multiplied and draped in elegant, cowl-neck shapes. The stately obi sash of a traditional kimono was put onto a playfully embroidered bodysuit alongside a fiberglass helmet and shoulder pads.
There’s always an element of alchemy in McQueen’s pieces. As he said to Numéro magazine in 2007, “With me, metamorphosis is a bit like plastic surgery, but less drastic. I try to have the same effect with my clothes. But ultimately I do this to transform mentalities more than the body.”
The Transmutation of Sexuality & Gender
While most male designers create women’s clothing they think is an expression of the female identity, McQueen created women’s clothing he felt was an expression of his own identity.
Deconstructing gender was a favorite tool of McQueen’s. Not just because gendered ideas have such long roots in every other area—social & familial roles, education, classism, power dynamics, religion, and sex—but because clothing is such a perfectly malleable material to manifest what so badly needs saying.
In some collections, he exaggerated traditional shapes so much that the ideas of masculine and feminine became obsolete. On the other hand, he also loved making clothes that made women look fearsome—otherworldly, even. I’ve lost count of how many McQueen dresses I’ve seen featuring some mesmerizing mix of delicate fabrics anchored by aggressive embellishments like metal, shells, crystals, and leather.
His designs directly challenged notions of gender identity, sometimes by suggesting their fluid nature. One of his most radical moments as as designer came in his Spring/Summer 1994 collection Nihilism, where he debuted what’s now known as Bumster pants: a pair of trousers meticulously tailored to dip well below the tailbone, exposing the sacral area above the butt as well as the mons pubis around the front. Not only did the tailoring defy gravity, but the overall effect was that the models’ torsos were elongated, rendering waistlines and hips a bit useless.
Another McQueen hallmark was weaving hints of alternative sexuality into his clothes. Elements of kink and BDSM were usually present, always exploring our dynamics with power, restriction, expression, and voyeurism. I’m thinking of the coiled aluminum corset in his Autumn/Winter 1999 collection The Overlook (inspired by The Shining). Jewelry designer Shaun Leane had worked with McQueen for years to accessorize his collections, eventually crafting full-on body sculptures. The corset molds perfectly to the torso, and while the shape is impressive and has flair, it’s also undeniably sadomasochistic.
That sort of balance reflects McQueen’s own unconventional viewpoints on sex and romance. As he said to Purple magazine in 2007, “I think there has to be an underlying sexuality. There has to be a perverseness to the clothes. There is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance.” In other words, McQueen’s designs channel the fact that even the most socially “normal” romantic relationship is usually a conduit for people’s more innate fantasies and curiosities.
Subverting norms and transmuting ideas of sex & gender are pretty apt descriptions of why Pride Month exists at all. It’s a response to the spectacle of marginalization, and how to reconcile the intrinsic ugliness of that bigotry with confidence in your own queerness, whatever that looks and feels like for you.
That endeavor—unlearning what you were taught about an identity you never actually had—is exactly why it’s crucial for queer artists like Lee Alexander McQueen to be visible. Sometimes you make no progress until you suddenly recognize yourself elsewhere, all because someone like you demonstrated what it looks like to be honest with themselves.
Clockwise from top-left: McQueen tartan blouse, Highland Rape A/W 1995 (Myrthe Coens on Flickr)
Dresses of gold-painted duck feathers & white embroidered silk from Angels and Demons, F/W 2010. (Isabell Schulz on Flickr)
Synthetic dress with corset of black leather & silver metal from The Horn of Plenty, A/W 2009. (Isabell Schulz on Flickr)
Dresses of dyed feathers & ivory silk tulle from The Girl Who Lived in the Tree, Fall/Winter 2008. (Isabell Schulz on Flickr)
All photos: CC BY-SA 2.0
For further reading into the life and art of McQueen, I’m emphatically pointing you all towards the following:
MoMA’s Savage Beauty Exhibit. In 2011, Andrew Bolton put together a landmark exhibition of McQueen’s work that broke brains and attendance records. (Check the Selected Objects gallery for photography.)
McQueen, a 2018 documentary that smartly anchors itself around 5 of his most renown and stunning collections.
A few of my favorite McQueen collections on video:
Joan (F/W 1998), inspired by Joan of Arc and related medieval themes of martyrdom and persecution.
Voss (S/S 2001), which turned viewers into voyeurs observing patients at an insane asylum. Stay for the surprise ending.
The Girl Who Lived in a Tree (F/W 2008), based upon a British fable and featuring a tense (but stunning) evolution of Indian clothing during British rule.