Alexander McQueen
Ensemble from The Girl Who Lived in the Tree (collection)
circa 2008
There is a line in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo that reads as this: ‘…the men had been prepared to discard caution and the women, custom: curiosity had pricked them with its irresistible spur and overcome all other feelings’. This McQueen ensemble, with its dress of silk tulle and its jacket of crisp velvet, gold embroidery and a touch of shearling, echoes these words; it is a contemporary statement of mysticism. Whether worn or not it is something that demands full attention of its audience. It strikes the eye like a curio, tickling the retina with a faint trace of the familiar, but also with that of slight unease.
The ensemble is, in a way, an emblem of the stealthy Dantès himself: queer but unquestionably distinguished in dress; perfectly in tune with not only the current times, but with those past and future; and unnervingly aware of something deeper than the superficial. Mixing the feminine and the masculine, it is an ensemble that shamelessly discards caution and custom - exactly like the impression, quoted above, that the masked Dantès instils in his guests when for the first time they visit his home in Auteuil. Just as they are pricked with an unnamed curiosity, we fall under a similar spell when looking at this ensemble: we recognise something peculiar in its design, in its structure of texture and colour and in its concentrated, ornate flashes of the Orient, of early twentieth century Russian dance and of gestural, expressionistic modern painting. It is a mix that subtly and slowly intends to shock, just as Monte Cristo does over his years of tenacious but patient planning of revenge. It is a body of accumulated detail and execution that extends its irresistible spur closer and closer to us, and instead of running from this foreign mélange of tissus and tastes, we stare and may even gawp at it. Like insects drawn to a lit lightbulb we behave just as Monte Cristo’s naïve prey do whenever they find themselves in his presence. Surrounded by a majority of false and fleetingly boring fashion pieces, many of us admit to being unaccustomed to such a fine work of fabrics as this. And for a moment we, too, may feel overcome by it, overwhelmed - as singular and impressively odd as it is.
