The showman has put down his hat. Will the show go on?
An old interview in The Guardian reads
'Joyce McQueen: What is your most terrifying fear?
Alexander McQueen: Dying before you.'
It would seem that Death granted him his wish after all. McQueen's mother Joyce passed away a week before him. Had he been alive, McQueen would now be arranging for his mother's funeral tomorrow.
We often get to see two kinds of geniuses in the world; the kind that works in ways that are totally beyond your comprehension and the kind that works in ways that make you wonder why you did not think it yourself in the first place. And then, there is a third kind, the kind that works in ways comprehensible and simple enough, but seeing whose work you realize that you would not have done it yourself in a million years. Alexander McQueen belonged to the third kind.
In fashion there are many ways you sell a product. Some designers sell their personality, some sell their sexuality, some sell their impeccable taste and a few, their designs.Alexander McQueen sold to the fashion world something they had been offered sparingly before, his intellect. He trampled down the conventional boundaries of fashion. Art in its most wondrous forms transcended the confines of his brains to take on a physical meaning on his runways. Fashion, which down the centuries had often been deemed frivolous and fickle turned brilliant,other worldly and supremely intellectual in his hands. His 'hounds-tooth morphing into a flock of birds' dress remains the single most intelligent piece of work I have ever seen on a runway.
McQueen was the 'L'Enfant Terrible' of the fashion world; the quintessential bad boy that exists in all of us, but is often too shy and restrained to come out. Growing up, he was the one I wanted to become and knew deep down, that I'll never ever be. I'll never be fully comfortable with who I am. I will forever be measured and controlled. I would never be comfortable walking down the runway in a pair of baggy jeans and a T-shirt. He was himself, and that I think is what set him apart. For the few years that he lived, Alexander McQueen was utterly and unabashedly himself. Everything he did had a resonating presence of himself. We saw not only the incredible clothes but the genius behind each and every one of them.
Some would say irreverence and disdain were the norms of his House. But those of us who have waited for his shows with bated breath, know that what the world saw were fleeting glimpses of the genius that strained against the constraints of a prohibitive society. And every time it managed to break free, it gave us a huge middle finger, a resounding fuck-you; and we loved it, every single time. McQueen was essentially an intangible quantity that you tried to comprehend each time you watched one of his shows.
I don't know why he did what he did. I can't imagine McQueen down on his knees,struggling to cope with what he had to. I don't want to think that he chose the easy way out. I choose to believe that he did what he did because he alone could. It might have been his way of flashing his middle finger to the world, one last time.
In the new issue of LOVE magazine, McQueen said cryptically, “When I’m dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship.” Karl Lagerfeld said: "There was always some attraction to death, his designs were sometimes dehumanized.Who knows, perhaps after flirting with death too often, death attracts you."
Alexander McQueen is dead. His Wikipedia page now reads '..Alexander McQueen was an English fashion designer..'. Everything about him will read in the past tense from now on; there is a dead finality about everything surrounding him now. Where McQueen was, there is an all consuming black hole now. Until and unless another man with brains the size of Kent happens to appear among us, we are going to be staring at that gaping nothingness that he has left us with. The world would indeed have a tough time filling out his fantastical shoes.
I hope that death has managed to perfect what little imperfections he found too unbearable to live with.
P.S. Love you loads.
