Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
Biography: Zeewan Lee is a senior at Duke University double majoring in English and political science.
Much concerned and interested in art, she plans to combine her interest in aesthetics/design, politics,
and writing by pursuing a career in urban design and planning.
The Grotesque is Beautiful: Alexander McQueen’s World of Fashion
“Elegance is refusal.”
- Coco Chanel
Some may say that the day of Alexander McQueen’s death — or rather, suicide — means a
great loss to the world, a complete stoppage of influx of the genius McQueen wholly encased in
his designs. However, as distorted as the words may sound, I view his death as one of
McQueen’s greatest accomplishments. In his works of art, McQueen had often played with the
notion of death and the deadly; he had done so by incorporating in his designs ideas and
themes that could be best described as nonexistent and nonliving and hellish, indicative of
death: war, rape, violence, fear, destruction, distortion, etc. For McQueen, who had constantly
thrust himself and his work of art closer to the notion of death than any other artists of his time,
the day of his suicide was almost climactic in that he went not only close to but also past the
threshold of death.
Lee Alexander McQueen is my favorite designer whom I consider to be one of the greatest
artists of all time. He was a British fashion designer and a couturier also known as L’Enfant
Terrible, a title he got out of his notorious 1995 collection called the Highland Rape. If asked to
define McQueen’s work, I would describe it is a harmony of the irreconcilable, an intermingling
of opposite extremes. Even before McQueen created
his own clothing line, McQueen’s designs had always
been both feeble and fierce. His genuine talent
enabled him to treat morbidity with such elegance
and life that his work was less about making
wearable clothing and more about delivering via
fashion the initially incompatible concepts — beauty
and ugliness, tranquility and chaos, etc., — in a
perfect harmony in order to provoke, to shock.
I believe the overarching theme as well as the
ultimate objective of McQueen’s works was the
grotesque. The grotesque was an end in itself to
which McQueen aspired, and it was also a means by
which he hoped to achieve the end. Now, in art,
unlike in literature, the term grotesque is not
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
equivalent to ugly. What differentiates the term from the purely and wholly ugly is the duality
inherent in grotesque. In other words, for something to be grotesque, it has to be strange and
familiar, fantastical and real, beautiful and yet disgusting. The term ought to invoke in viewers
both a feeling of bizarreness and empathy. Upon sensing the complexity of feelings the
grotesque — more specifically, the gorgeousness within the grotesque — arouses from its
viewers, one will find oneself infatuated with the grotesque. Grotesque is mesmerizing because
it is a rare kind of a beauty far from the standard. The concept of grotesque sticks in one’s mind
in part because one can neither forgive nor understand oneself for sensing both beauty and
repulsion in one thing. Then, one cannot help but wonder if what he or she sees and feels is
what is truly there. McQueen shared a similar
kind of obsession with the grotesque and was
fascinated with the idea in that he “found
beauty in the grotesque.1”
Nevertheless, in some of his — mostly earlier
— collections McQueen fell short of fully
depicting the grotesque and its duality, and captured mostly its pure ugliness: frightening,
uncomfortable, and almost offensive. For instance, in one of his earliest collections called
Highland Rape, McQueen featured tattered and tampon-strewn dresses and played with the
notion of sexual violence and genocide. In another controversial collection, the stage was made
of a garbage heap of scrap metals, and McQueen’s models with their oversized, sex-doll lips
(above, left), painfully theatrical costumes (below, left), and hats made out of trashcan lids
(above, right) seemed far from beautiful in any sense. These infamous collections irked enough
people so that some fashion critiques even accused McQueen of being a misogynist, guilty of
distorting the beauty of human existence, especially that of females.
1
http://www.fashioncraz.com/alexander-mcqueen-in-his-own-words/
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
In their outright ugliness, McQueen’s early works were
reminiscent of paintings of a mid-18th century Spanish
painter Francisco Goya. Themes prevalent in Goya’s
paintings as well as his aesthetic renditions of the
themes were often obscene and grotesque. As in the
early works of McQueen, the demonic dimension of
the grotesque in Goya’s works — for example, a
devilish-looking man with a gargoyle face and
bloodshot eyes (below, left), or an anthropophagus
with a crazed, almost excited look on his face and
blood on his lips (below, right), both in pitch black
backgrounds — was not hard to notice, because the
artist shoved it right in the viewers’ face, wanting
them to be shocked and repulsed.
As time elapsed, however, the demonic dimensions of the grotesque were gradually
attenuated in McQueen’s designs. McQueen began to associate with grotesque not only the
ugly but also a kind of beauty. The grotesque in McQueen’s later works was more complete in
its duality as McQueen incorporated both repulsive and more serene and sublime qualities to
his designs. The ugliness once so visible in his designs that it outshined everything else became
subtler and more nuanced. McQueen’s grotesque in its evolved form emulated less the horrific
grotesque of Goya and more the fantastic grotesque of Kris Kuksi, an American sculptor and an
artist. Kuksi’s art spoke of a timelessness-potentiality and motion attempting to reach on
forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep 2. This
2
http://kuksi.com/
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
beautiful and accurate definition of Kuksi’s work (below) depicts exactly what McQueen’s later
designs encapsulated. Just as in Kuksi’s arts, the notion of the grotesque was less apparent in
themes and issues McQueen addressed in his designs. Instead, what made viewers
uncomfortable were the outrageous combinations of colors (the first two pictures shown below)
and incomprehensible, out-of-place shapes (all four below).
<Four pictures above, going clockwise from the upper left corner: Kuksi, McQueen, McQueen, Kuksi>
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
Towards the end of his career, McQueen magnified the
sense of sublime beauty within the grotesque to the extent
that his work became similar to that of Amedeo Modigliani,
an early 20th century Italian artist. While unsettling due to
the curious eeriness in the exaggerations of the forms,
elongations of human body parts, and dead gazes (left),
figures in Modigliani’s works of art represented yet
another version of the grotesque: a sublime type.
Modigliani’s works are excellent examples that show even
a sense of serenity can serve as a vehicle for the grotesque.
McQueen in his latest designs successfully captured the
same queer serenity and lightness of being present in
Modigliani’s paintings.
<Above, from left to right: McQueen, Modigliani, McQueen>
Comparing the more nuanced and serene grotesque to the more outright, I believe the
former is more powerful because its nuance enables it to encapsulate raw energy within itself
as opposed to holding out the energy for it to evaporate almost immediately. Somehow I find
the subtlety of McQueen’s later grotesque render his designs to be more aesthetic.
One may wonder why McQueen’s designs are compared to paintings and drawings instead
of other couture designs in this essay. I believe that such comparisons between McQueen’s
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
works and paintings do the designer justice, because while worked with fabrics, McQueen’s
designs were something to see instead of wear around. In this manner, the designer’s works of
art are more similar to paintings than to fashionable Balmain jackets or Chanel trousers.
McQueen in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection was at his best3, both in terms of artistry
and achieving the perfect duality within its grotesque. Titled Plato’s Atlantis, it was McQueen’s
last women’s collection before his death. In the show, McQueen cast an apocalyptic forecast of
the future ecological meltdown: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea,
a nod to the idea that we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap
dissolves4. The entire show was a reversal of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution in that McQueen
made it that we human beings came from the land and would eventually go back into the sea.
While McQueen got the idea for this collection from H. R. Giger5 (below), a Swiss surrealist
painter whose main theme for his work of art is the rampant proliferation of the most demonic
grotesque, McQueen’s designs in the collection surpassed the bounds of the horrific grotesque.
Instead, McQueen here exhibited a complete mastery of finding and capturing elegance in the
macabre. Before this collection, McQueen’s grotesque had a hint of elegance, but the quality
3
Here is a link to the 2010 S/S collection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0I
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.html
5
http://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htm
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
did not have a strong impact on the viewers because the focus was definitely on the ugliness of
the grotesque, which McQueen depicted with the intention of “taking something of the world
people in [his fashion] world don’t want to see and bring it to them6… and force them to watch
it7.” Because the impact of the outright hideousness and bizarreness — expressed in themes of
war, religion, sex, etc., — was too strong in McQueen’s previous collections, many failed to
appreciate the utmost tranquility, elegance, and grace inherent in the idea of grotesque.
<From left to right: Giger, McQueen in 2010 S/S, Giger>
Nevertheless, in the 2010 Spring/Summer
collection — I daresay for the first time in his
career — McQueen made it crystal clear that
elegance existed within his grotesque.
McQueen’s models on the runway with alienlike facial protrusions, reptilian digital prints,
and extreme anteater shoes made the
viewers wince and sigh with awe at the same
time. With their gangly legs sucked in the
gigantic, monstrously high heels whose shape
reminds of the round exoskeleton of a beetle
(left), the models looked like they were
floating in an airless space, their feet used
6
7
McQueen, in an interview with the BBC.
McQueen 2002
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
not to walk but to paddle aimlessly in the vacuum; their shoes served as flippers. These
creatures on the catwalk imbued a sense of otherworldliness: they were at a cross-section of
butterflies and humans and fishes. Regardless of what they really were, however, it was not
hard for people to see the beauty McQueen had encased in their strange ugliness and soon
people discovered the encasement separating the beauty and the ugly tearing away. And the
revelation came— the grotesque was beautiful.
Some features of McQueen’s presentation in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection were the
same and just as good as his previous collections. His designs in this collection, like before, gave
the feeling that they lay outside time as they featured both tradition and postmodernity; there
were hints of tradition in that there existed in this collection an emphasis on shoulders with
padded and jeweled shoulder rolls and slashed upper sleeves that reminded of fashion in the
Elizabethan era; in the meantime, the collection also imbued a sense of postmodernity, a sense
of an ontological emptiness that is a characteristic of postmodernity, that was intent upon the
destruction (deconstruction) of great truths modernity had once created. The same powerful
energy that had mesmerized viewers in his previous shows was manifest in the 2010
Spring/Summer collection through the ghost-like mannerisms of McQueen’s stoic, haunting
cast of models. These models in McQueen’s shows were forms of duality: the estrangement of
the living and the personification of the dead.
I miss Alexander McQueen’s painstakingly aggressive aesthetic. I miss his bizarre celebration
of the immaterial and his mastery of compressing life and death, the grotesque and ornament,
and the feeble and the fierce. I, along with millions of others, will remember McQueen’s bold
acknowledgment of socially imposed otherism and celebration of the ignored and the ugly by
making them the essence of his shows. Fashion will never be quite as interesting again.
*** For your reference, I have included links to the full show of McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2010
Collection below:
(Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embedded
(Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=related
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Zeewan Lee
Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708
Cell: 919-208-9958
Email: [email protected]
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alexandra McKnight, Grace Kohut, Margrette Kuhrt, and Andrew Brown for their
insights and feedback. Without their willing attempts to read through and to make sense of the
nonsense I had put in my earlier drafts, I would not have gotten to where I am now with this piece. This
piece is not a work solely of mine, but of my entire writing group. Thank you so much. My next thanks
must go to Professor Joseph Harris for his invaluable guidance. My discussing my paper with him made
me understand the piece better, and gave me ideas as to how to go about improving the piece.
Lastly, thank you, Alexander McQueen, for prompting me to write this piece. You and your genius will be
forever missed by your fans, including myself and — as Margrette has noted — Lady Gaga.
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