The fashion legend’s boundary-smashing designs and troubled life receives elegant, mournful treatment<\/b>
\nIt\u2019s 1999, and model Shalom Harlow spins slowly on a turntable wearing a white, belted, oversize blank canvas of a dress. She\u2019s flanked by two robots that spring to life and begin to rotate themselves. The machines jerk and jolt menacingly, then take aim at that dress, blasting it with black and gold spray paint. Harlow reacts first with faux shock and dismay that eventually gives way to a very messy ecstasy.
This is the grand finale of a fashion show but plays like a dreamy message from the future, and audience members sitting too close to that fantastical interaction probably went home happily paint-spattered themselves. It would become a memorable pop culture moment in a career full of them for designer Alexander McQueen, who died in 2010 at age 40, a man whose sense of the theatrical defined his work.
Ian Bonh\u00f4te and Peter Ettedgui\u2019s elegant, mournful documentary \u201cMcQueen\u201d doesn\u2019t try to rewrite the man\u2019s life. Instead it allows traditional doc elements \u2014 interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, mixed with archival footage, all edited with great care \u2014 to tell the troubled designer\u2019s story.
Also Read: Kate Spade Is 3rd Top Fashion Designer to Die From Apparent Suicide by Hanging
You\u2019d be challenged to come up with a less likely couturier. Lee Alexander McQueen was born in London\u2019s East End, and was raised alongside five siblings in very modest surroundings by a taxi-driver father and teacher mother. He looked like a gay football hooligan with a shaved head, but he apprenticed to master tailors on Savile Row.
In 1992, his brash student collection caught the attention of fashion editor Isabella Blow, and a brilliant career initially marked with press outrages and the frequently shocked disapproval of the fashion establishment followed. When he moved in to the houses of Givenchy, and later Gucci and his own eponymous line, that same establishment embraced him.
His 1995 runway show, \u201cThe Highland Rape,\u201d became emblematic of his artistic practice. Addressing the historical subjugation of Scotland by England, models were sent down the runway in torn tartan, breasts exposed, staggering and stumbling, wearing contacts that blacked out their eyes. Accused of misogyny by an uncomprehending press, he was in fact creating theater with models who would, in most other designer\u2019s shows, otherwise be instructed to remain expressionless. But McQueen pushed the boundaries of business as usual with intelligent, aggressive work that was intended to provoke.
Also Read: Why Mr. Rogers Is the Perfect Movie Superhero for Our Times (Guest Blog)
Along with fellow iconoclasts like Rei Kawakubo at Comme des Gar\u00e7ons, McQueen turned the avant-garde into head-spinning daywear that told a story. Later runway collections would feature similar themes of simmering personal and historical violence. Hot-ticket runway shows would include insects, wild animals, cyborgs, critiques of consumerism, plastic mannequins, \u201cEyes of Laura Mars\u201d-style car fires, prosthetic makeup, wind tunnels, and a Kate Moss hologram.
But since this is a posthumously told story, fashion fame isn\u2019t the only narrative. Unresolved childhood trauma stemming from sexual abuse informed McQueen\u2019s dark perspective both personally and professionally. Financial success, the public branding of an artist, and the grueling work involved in keeping a fashion empire running aggravated his ongoing anxiety and depression.
Self-medicating with drugs only served to bloom the darkness inside the artist who faced ever-increasing pressure to produce more than a dozen collections annually. In 2010, already rocked by the suicide of Isabella Blow three years earlier, and grieving the death of his own mother, McQueen took his own life.
Also Read: ‚Ocean’s 8‘: Here Are All 23 Cameos, From Anna Wintour to Dakota Fanning (Photos)
\u201cMcQueen\u201d is formally traditional, and guided by a respectful approach to a complicated man. It\u2019s lovingly told, even as it refuses to gloss over ugliness. And while it was made outside the official involvement of McQueen figures like his closest colleague, designer Sarah Burton, statements like the one Burton gave in a 2017 \u201cVogue\u201d interview, describing McQueen\u2019s clothes as an \u201cavatar of his personal journey,\u201d seem to affirm the film\u2019s reason to exist.
There\u2019s emotionally resonant archival footage of McQueen\u2019s mother Joyce; revelatory interviews with sister Janet, whose husband abused the young McQueen; videotapes of cramped apartments teeming with young people making fashion history; the ache of broken romantic relationships with boyfriends and the sting of betrayal when McQueen estranged himself from Blow; and first-hand stories from friends and colleagues, all of whom lay bare their love and grief for the designer, and who seem to be missing an essential part of themselves now that he\u2019s gone.
Doubling down with traditional documentary methods and employing a chronological framework also allows Bonh\u00f4te and Ettedgui to dig deeply into its subject\u2019s highly personal approach to his work. Late in the film, showcasing McQueen\u2019s \u201cHorn of Plenty\u201d collection, we see that the contents of that horn are pieces of scrap garbage, blackened and piled mountainously high in the middle of the runway, a jarring accompaniment to models encased in extremely structured garments, leading one observer to quote that it appeared that McQueen had \u201cgone mad.\u201d His final show, \u201cPlato\u2019s Atlantis,\u201d with its deep blue atmosphere and dresses that evoked underwater creatures, pulled back from the bleak moment of \u201cHorn\u201d only to plunge his designs into a drowned world.
This orderly reveal of collection and runway highlights brings home the dazzling, and ultimately the despairing point of \u201cMcQueen,\u201d very specifically demonstrating them to be as autobiographical as any memoir. They projected his fears, obsessions, unresolved rage, family and cultural history onto women\u2019s clothes. He was a master tailor with vision who became and remained a storyteller, even to that story\u2019s sadly chosen end.<\/p>\n

\n

Similarity rank: 1.1<\/div>\n

Sentiment rank: -0.9<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n