Seán McGirr for Alexander McQueen: A Collection Missing Its Muse — Beauty News NYC — The First Online Beauty Magazine
“I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I am dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.” — Alexander McQueen
in September of 2023 — after decades of working alongside the namesake designer and replacing him as creative director — ushered in one of the most anticipated hirings in fashion. It was on par with the excitement and gossip ignited by the search for
The stunning announcement of Sarah Burton’s departure from the House of Alexander McQueenJohn Galliano’s successor at Givenchy after he jumped to Dior in 1996. To the shock of well-heeled editors worldwide, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault chose a misfit — a pudgy punk kid from London. The appointee wasn’t from the posh part, but from the projects. He didn’t at all resemble the stylish gay men who made fashion fashionable. That kid was Alexander McQueen, who in his tragically short life span transformed fashion … the rest is history…
…Until now. When Sarah Burton’s replacement, Seán McGirr, was announced, many who love and appreciate McQueen’s dramatic performance art-adjacent runway shows, his exquisite tailoring, and enigmatic vision of the female body as both fashion object and subject anxiously exhaled. The task of replacing one of the most brilliant masters of shears and fabrics, continuing his legacy of transforming fashion into art as seen in “Plato’s Atlantis” (2010), “Horn of Plenty” (2009), and “ Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” (1992) , seemed implausible.
McGirr’s first show in Paris on March 2nd validated the skepticism, squarely qualifying as a dry run for the birth of McQueen 2.0 in letter, if not in spirit. The collection leaned heavily into the punk insouciance, goth intensity, and refined urban armor the working-class Londoner was known for. By and large, the chunky, oversized knits, sex shop textiles, and comic book villain silhouettes were bereft of the many elements that catapulted McQueen’s edgy runway shows into tableaux vivants — the operatic storytelling, the self-referential plots, and the women on the catwalk and in his life. By highlighting the brutality and grotesque in McQueen’s designs, minus the yearning for liberation and romance equally emoted through them, McGirr channeled fanboy more than successor.
“I’ve always loved the idea of showing your innermost feelings through dressing, even though others wouldn’t recognize it.”
On Valentine’s Day, the house dropped an Instagram-ready teaser campaign designed to officially announce Seán McGirr as Sarah Burton’s replacement. It didn’t assuage the worries of hardcore McQueen fans like myself. It appropriately centered the most iconic of McQueen’s designs and central symbolism — the skull — typically seen on scarves and zippers for leather accessories.
Atop a moss-covered forest stripped of greenery, lithe young girls in suits, mirrored evening wear, and McQueen’s ancestral tartan roved and lounged, sporting McGirr’s reconfigured cranial design. With exaggerated, masculine proportions frozen in a menacing sneer, in stark contrast to the perfect symmetry of the faces underneath, the archetypal McQueen totem was transformed into the grotesque — a mask more reminiscent of the “Terminator” joining the “Purge” than the protean contours of the human face. The campaign suggested less blossoming Valkyries than influencers hopped up on homicidal ideation.
In his obsession with death, mostly his own, McQueen loved skulls, figuratively and literally. From the mounds of them he studied in the Parisian catacombs to unwind after “stitch-bitch” all-nighters, to the x-ray of his own which birthed the design, the skull is the most enigmatic anecdote of McQueen’s creative process. Like the blood and hair he wrapped in perspex and sewed into curve-exaggerating Victorian jackets of “ Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims,” his art was a realtime projection of his biography in mind, body, and soul — a literal refashioning of his mortality.
“Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.”
- Alexander McQueen
It’s why McQueen famously rejected the idea of a successor. After the suicide he knew was inevitable, McQueen wagered no one would have access to the materials and processes that he mined for his collections — himself, his memories, his pain, and his friendships with the women who epitomized his theories of beauty, propelled him through hardship, and inspired his exquisite garments.
Instrumental to the negotiations that led to LVMH’s selection of a recent Central Saint Martins graduate to replace Galliano was Issie Blow, the fashion arbiter who discovered him and helped propel his career to unfathomable heights…as hers spiraled downward, like her mental health. To McQueen, she was a friend, champion, and muse — though he hated the word — who too would pass away from suicide. Aside from his mother, the bond with Issie, one of the well-heeled editors, was the most central female dynamic in his life and work.
From their earliest meeting to their final goodbye, the pair pushed the archetypal feud in the fashion world — between muse and designer- to extremes insular, sartorial circles had never seen before. Drawn to each other in a tumultuous friendship by mutual suicidal ideation and love of corsetry — the platonic equivalent of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton — Lee and Issie endured a constant rollercoaster of breakups. Both wounded fledglings struggling to morph into birds of prey, they spent weekends on Issie’s estate studying falcons. Similar to Capote and his Swans, and in stark contrast to the saccharine pop-culture portrayal of gay men and their BFFs, the pair endured a constant cycle of recrimination, resentments and adoration over the course of their 15-year friendship.
McQueen’s official tribute to Issie a year after her final, successful suicide attempt, the falcon-inspired La Dame Blue Collection, was an affirmation, if not capitulation, to one of Issie’s most glowing characterizations of his work:
“ He’s a wild bird and I think he makes clothes fly.”
- Issie Blow
Of course, McQueen designed for other women, not just any women, but a specifically curated pantheon of beautiful, formidable female archetypes: The Madonna, Artemis, Lilith, Venus, Medusa, the Avenging Angel, and the Witch. In addition to Issie, the list of iconic women who embodied these mythic figures who came to represent, not just the McQueen look, but its ethos counted musicians and style icons Bjork, Lady Gaga, and Daphne Guinness most notably.
Lady Gaga easily transformed into an amphibian Valkyrie from the “ Plato’s Atlantis” — a collection so intertwined with her brand, style and music, that she streamed the collection from her website and offered millions the first glimpse of McQueen’s one-of-a-kind Armadillo shoe.
Bjork collaborated with McQueen in his early years to design the arresting cover for her career-defining “Homogenic” album and many red carpet looks. Socialite and multi-hyphenate Daphne Guinness saved Issie Blow’s McQueen-heavy fashion collection from being auctioned after her death to preserve the fruit of their designer-muse relationship for posterity.
“I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naïve… I want women to look stronger… I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.” — Alexander McQueen
As McQueen’s famous quotes about women, beauty, strength, suffering, and being an outsider made clear, his shows were as much about meticulously crafted garments as avenues to project his biography onto the silhouettes of womanhood, hewing always to side of perseverance, survival and unapologetic sex appeal. With every stitch, McQueen knew who he was designing for, as did we — for the women who inspired him and as much for himself. These are the questions Seán McGirr urgently needs to answer in his next collection for the brand: Who is he designing for? Who is the new muse for the house of Alexander McQueen?
STAFF WRITER & SENIOR EDITOR
Not bland at all. Gesha-Marie Bland is an essayist, Vanity Fair-published film and television writer, and unrepentant beauty junkie who jumpstarted her career at NYU’s Master’s Program in Cinema Studies. In homage to her beauty icons Jeanne Moreau, Dolly Parton, and Grace Jones, she is forever in search of the perfect cat-eye liner, a killer pair of heels, and unforgettable statement accessories. Currently NYC-based, this dual American-French citizen still wears all-black and has a soft spot for clean beauty, pharmaceutical-grade actives, and most ingredients sourced from vineyards in the south of France. She loves New Wave cinema, Mary Gaitskill’s fiction, Spain, and matcha double-shots. After selling “The Ripper,” her Alexander McQueen-Issie Blow biopic to the Cannes-winning production company Maven Pictures, she remains convinced fashion and couture are the next frontiers for edgy cinematic stories.
Originally published at https://www.beautynewsnyc.com on March 14, 2024.
