Alexander McQueen
Evening Dress from the VOSS Collection
circa 2001
(ostrich feathers (dyed) and painted microscope slides)
Perhaps this piece celebrates the glory of mortality. It is meant to signify blood, to enhance the beauty of what sustains life the most. To simply be alive relies on as little as the delivery of oxygen to the brain from one’s source of blood, whether or not one is entirely healthy. The troupe of feathers used in the skirt of this dress may serve as the underlying message behind the power of blood: that as easily as it may appear to give life, it may just as swiftly extinguish it. This is an idea that relates to the dynamics of flight; it is a motion that can lift incredible weights with apparently so little, and yet it can instantly fail without air. For something to function with such force while relying on a source that is only as limitless and strong as it is present is a likely thought that fuels the fear of death in many human minds. It is the inability, or the refusal, to grasp that all things in life are inevitably connected, and that no matter how independent or self-sustaining one thing may seem to be, it is still only a question of time before its weakness is revealed. Flight without air is, so far, impossible, just as life without blood is, so far, impossible. There is little else that is as universal and unifying as the colour of that which courses through all of our veins, and it is this that McQueen delivers through the form of clothing: that far from being afraid or weary of death, one should realise that is the mere form of its counterpart, life, that is immortally beautiful and many-faceted, and that it deserves a respect that we should all wear with pride.
