The Grand Finale of Lee Alexander McQueen

Today the images were released from yesterday's memorial show for Alexander McQueen's final collection.  The collection was not open to the press and was shown in a small old fashioned couture style with each outfit being announced.  Even as I write this I feel corny and perhaps that I come off as disingenuous, but then again maybe this post is just for me so I will remember how I felt.  I didn't know him, I never met him, I was not his friend, I have no connection to him--but I feel a loss over the last weeks that hits me at odd moments.  He was my, our, Beatles, our Picasso, our Da Vinci, our Twain, our Fitzgerald, our artist.  The loss that I feel is personal because to me Mcqueen exemplified all that is right with fashion.

As I look over this collection I can't help but think in some way as Mcqueen put pencil to paper he knew he must put his heart, his soul, and all his artistic ability into these works.  The exemplification of his aesthetic and his abilities is so abundantly apparent.  I try to take in these beautiful works of art and I just can't.  I simply have to feel the love and care Mcqueen put into each piece he created. To him nothing was impossible.  Take a look back through his archives and you will see the evolution of an artistic mind that never ever told himself no, it just cannot be.  Never did details come off as contrived or messy.  Despite the fact that he only showed a RTW collection under his eponymous label, the collections far surpassed even the most advanced classic couture shows.  Perhaps it was his years spent with Givenchy surrounded by couture hands ready to make the dreams of an fashion prodigy become reality.

The above look is shows all that was the McQueen aesthetic.  He has always been called "gothic" but to me (though far from an experience critic) he was simply a culmination of a thousand years of British fashion.  The above outfit is so obviously inspired by styles and techniques of hundreds of years of British Monarchs, yet it is far from costumey or period with thigh high leather waders and a short hemline, the look is distinctly fresh and current.

So that's that.  Maybe I've said these things before or I'm rambling but I know if I don't write down how this all has made me feel, right now, I will be letting pass a moment in my life that deeply affected me and the world I care so much about.

Alexander McQueen 1969-2010

McQueen and Isabella Blow 1997

I don't quite think there is there is there is anything to say.  I won't talk about how much he will be missed or about his short but spectacular history from Isabella to Givenchy to the McQueen decade.  Instead I will just say what McQueen meant to me.

As a young person trying to absorb live breath and justify the art of fashion McQueen has always felt like a true artisan of this generation.  Yes others have become stars and darlings but I always felt McQueen exemplified why I wanted and always will want to live fashion.  Looking at McQueen for Givenchy I remember being awed at the world he had the ability to create.  Many designers shock you with their textures and their designs but McQueen drew you in to a world that he created in his mind on paper and then right in the photographs of his runways.  Designers usually have a point of design, an idea, a theme but McQueen did not need to tell us his theme.  When dark debonaire men walked down the runway a year ago dapper and masculine in 1800s suits and fur we all felt the dark streets of London stalking Jack the Ripper.  Fashion is aspirational, it is a mantra I live by.  I am always aspiring to taste and live the artistic minds of fashion, and to this little gay boy from a small mountain town in California McQueen will always be the aspirational point to which I reach for.  Thirty years from now when another hot young designer has taken the helm of the House of McQueen and revived it I will tell the fresh faced interns of McQueen's Victorian collection,  alien shoes, and where I was and how the breath left my chest the moment I found out we'd lost him forever.

So my tribute to McQueen is to continue to live by my mantra and reach and aspire to lift and uphold the creativity that he and so many before him bore.

-Sam Kraus