"The Ghosts That Haunt Us" by Matthew Callahan

Despite the superficial veneer of the modern contemporary fashion industry, designer Alexander McQueen stands out as an avant-garde tailor of a strong social consciousness. Given McQueen’s autobiographical vocabulary and perennial love for nostalgia, he has consistently used memory and the phenomenon of haunting in his shows as bases for revealing the historic context of ethnic-cultural identity construction as well as the formation of different social locations. As most notably seen in his autumn-winter
2000-01 presentation entitled Eshu, by giving the experiences that have and still do shape social and ethnic identity of the Yoruba a physical manifestation, McQueen has not only provoked attention to issues such as ethnic-cultural identity formation but has contextualized them through his own aesthetic form of resistance.

With a blue-collar upbringing in the East End of London, Alexander McQueen
never thought that he would be catapulted to the forefront of the international fashion scene with multiple contracts and financial backing under management blockbuster Gucci Group. After graduating Central St. Martin’s school of design, completing multiple internships with the tailors of Saville Row, and working under the creative direction of Romeo Gigli, McQueen went on to become the notorious l’enfant terrible of British fashion, consistently delivering ready-to-wear collections and haute couture lines that shocked and challenged even the most opened minded of consumers. His painstakingly aggressive aesthetic coupled with a strong contempt for the international fashion press and commercialism was outweighed by the overall messages, moods, and historical contexts of his presentations. His bizarre celebration of the immaterial and acknowledgment of issues such as societally imposed otherism and cultural appropriation have proven to be confrontational and relevant.

His first ready to wear collection in the fall of 1995 entitled "Highland Rape" was a self-referential retrospective to the experiences that have shaped his own ethnic-cultural location and identity. For the actual showroom, McQueen transformed a loft-like industrial space into a brooding battleground of mayhem to symbolize 1746's Battle of Culloden in which his actual ancestors, the Jacobite Highland-Scots, were defeated and then subsequently ousted by the British troops under the Duke of Cumberland, “the Butcher.”

The energy of the presentation was manifest through the ghost-like mannerisms of his stoic, haunting cast of models who maneuvered the show space wearing torn regiment tartans, bloodied, and bruised. The angst of the collection pointed to McQueen’s dealings with unresolved past events which according to McQueen are self-defining given the overarching autobiographical context of the majority of his presentations. By depicting the brutality the British regiments inflicted upon his captured ancestors after the battle, McQueen sought to preserve the cultural identity of the Highland clan system given the fact the British victors under “the Butcher” put an end to its functional practice. The point of Highland Rape was to curtail any propositions about modernity and act as a conscientious objection against Cumberland’s 1746 Dress Act clause in the Act of Proscription which made it illegal to wear Highland-Scot articles of clothing, namely the plaid kilt and Highland military shoulder belt. With their jurisdictions seized, the Highlanders recognized the Dress Act as influential to their national representation and used it as a means of further consolidation and national
identity formation. Disheveled hair, fake battle wounds, battered makeup effects, and ripped kilts all reflected the psychological processing and haunting of McQueen’s own ancestral past. Highland Rape furthermore acted as a way for McQueen to mimic and therefore expose structural inequality through a form of aesthetic resistance.

McQueen’s proclivity for spirits and the macabre is often the metaphor by which he creates his designs. In the fall of 1998, McQueen presented a collection called "Joan" within the confines of an abandoned industrial trash depot. Green warehouse lanterns began to sway ominously over an army of chain-mail clad, head shaven models with blood red eyes. The clothes, assuming a reality of Marilyn Manson proportions, operated within a strict
color palette of black, ashen grey, and a menacing scarlet red. Metallic black patent leather waistcoats paired with sadomasochistic red lace voyeur masks suggested a humorously sobering hardcore aesthetic not geared toward the faint of heart. The somber crackling of burning wood chips over the speakers was quickly offset by a red backdrop that tore open like a gothic portal to reveal a model navigating the asphalt slab runway. The finale of the show was marked by a blaze of fire that encircled a bondage-clad representation of Joan of Arc’s ghost in order to celebrate the power of femininity against the institutionalized machismo of both French military leadership and modern dayreligious institution. While the set reflected the ecclesiastical cell of Joan of Arc and the clothes themselves were given a medieval context, it was apparent that McQueen is contained and operates in a suspended past space as a way to process structural inequalities on the social and economic level. What resonated highly with the critics of the presentation was the assertion of femininity and reminder of past repression of women within the political arena, a notion that would be revisited two years later when McQueen relocated to Paris.

The exploration of apparitions, energy, and spirits came to a head in McQueen’s career with the mother of all fashion shows, The Overlook. Based on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the collection explored the psychological manifestations of haunting set in a simulated tundra. With an actual snowstorm taking place, McQueen’s eerie mannequins maneuvered an arctic plane while Kubrick’s twins, who were murdered by their father in the film adaptation, stared wrathfully at the crowd of onlookers.

In the fall season of 2000, McQueen moved his operation from London to Paris with a collection entitled Eshu, dedicated to the religious philosophy and iconography of the pre-colonial Yoruba people of West Africa. Despite rumors of a bomb threat, PETA activist demonstrations, and a
pending international fashion press conference, McQueen delivered an on-point, cohesive show. Set within an abandoned, industrial warehouse whose frame was gutted and deconstructed from within by renowned architect and
director of photography Daniel Landin, the show space was sandwiched by two walled units of parabolic aluminized reflector lights. The catwalk itself, a two hundred foot floor covered in smashed slate and granite shards, was flanked by a set of Olympic-sized metallic bleachers. Models descended
from the ceiling’s metal walkway to the beats of traditional Dùndún drumming.

The raw aesthetic of the show space’s organic silhouette was yet another mechanism used by McQueen to preserve the pre-colonial cultural identity and actualize it to the West. The beautiful depiction of the Orisa-Ifa tradition of the West African Yoruba was free from any cultural appropriation of identity. Despite the confrontational vocabulary of his showmanship, the non-stereotypical celebration of the deity Eshu was an optimistic reflection of West African mythology while at the same time physically reflecting the economic sources of agriculture and craft directly in the clothing as a way to depict the Yoruba as they may have been prior to Christian conversion. The bodily decorations consisted of heavy steel and wooden bangles, pierced septa and lips, pubic aprons, and traditional Yoruba tattoo scarring called Kolo, all representing the body modification aesthetic of the Yoruba belief that scarification is pure and natural. Powder glass beads the color of the concrete rendering cascaded mud-spattered, transparent tunic dresses while the trickster Eshu deity was depicted in the form of carved horsehair headpieces. McQueen’s precision and objective execution of the Yoruba
tradition acted as a point of clarification of history as the Yoruba are rarely noted as the largest ethnic group in Africa whose religious tradition calls for a certain degree of absorption.

McQueen represented a multicultural approach with his spring 2000 show called Eye, to satirize the perceived closed mindedness of male domination and subsequent female oppression in Islamic society. Zodiac iconography embroidered over tunics and titanium-bound corsets made by jeweller Shaun Leane effectively conveyed his message about a politcal oppression of the feminine body. McQueen’s forms of aesthetic resistance have demonstrated how we come about understanding and processing the formations of cultural identity given the relations of our many social locations. In this case, McQueen yet again sought not to preserve but to mimic and therefore expose the structural inequality through a form of aesthetic resistance.