From The Birds to The Shining, horror classics have guided McQueen’s spooky, subversive design sensibilities.
Andrew Bolton, curator and author behind Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, remembers Lee Alexander McQueen once saying, “I don't want to do a cocktail party. I'd rather people left my shows and vomited.”
McQueen was aware of the vomit critics sometimes spewed on the page and the creaking of seats as uncomfortable guests shifted around during their first McQueen show. But the “pink sheep” of his family never really cared. Andrew Groves, designer and former boyfriend of McQueen, once said that whatever Lee was doing, “he could not help but subvert it. He always wanted to undermine the idea of authority and the establishment.”
What most found ugly or strange inspired McQueen, and this was no exception when it came to the perception of women. Since his 1992 graduate collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, McQueen sought to embody female beauty through the darkest of qualities and circumstances. Female victimhood was subverted into power, the confines of patriarchy into tight skirts and sleek tailoring.
“When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there's a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful," he said. "It kind of fends people off. You have to have a lot of balls to talk to a woman wearing my clothes."
In 1999, amputee Paralympian Aimee Mullins opened McQueen’s Spring/Summer show: No. 13 in a pair of custom-carved solid wooden boots. The place where the boots and Mullin’s legs met was covered by a flowy raffia skirt and many in the audience asked when they could purchase them, having no idea they were prosthetics.
"I want to be seen as beautiful because of my disability, not in spite of it," Mullins said of her modeling pursuit. Luckily for her, McQueen’s philosophy fell right in line. "I suppose the idea is to show that beauty comes from within, he said. “I wouldn’t swap these people I’ve been working with for a supermodel… I think they’re all really beautiful, I just wanted them to be treated like everyone else."
McQueen’s clothes were never about covering up or disgracing women, rather, they were about enhancing and emphasizing them by perverting the customs of beauty. Whether it was women's trauma, physicality, emotions, or her natural desires, McQueen always found the dark side and pushed it into the light. He knew that savagery was just as much a part of feminine beauty as anything else. To McQueen, there was very little he found ugly.
In her academic article, “The Fantasy of Ugliness In Alexander McQueen Collections,” Mélissa Diaby Savané said that ugliness “can be defined as the things we reject, the things we most fear; it is not objective, but a projection from the spectator.” It’s likely that most of those who find McQueen’s fashion horrid fear not the macabre or danger or death, but the possibility that they themselves could look like a McQueen woman, failing to take the duality of femininity into account. As Savané wrote, “McQueen’s femme fatale is as deathly as she is desirable: she is both violent and hyper feminine.”
Citing 1954’s deeply perverse sadomasochist novel by Anne Desclos, McQueen asserted that “there is a hidden agenda in the fragility of romance. It's like a Story of O.” There is too much to be said here about the relationship between sadomasochism and female empowerment, but what can be said, in short, is that there is certainly power in women finding pleasure and agency in perversion. When a woman honestly expresses an affection for pain, violence ceases to be a tool to hurt her because it is, now, a known source of satisfaction.
“I am not big on women looking naive,” McQueen went on. “There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it's melancholy or sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it's good to use a little of it and sometimes a lot of it, like a masquerade.”
This same conversation on the femininity spectrum can be seen clearly in the ever-evolving discourse surrounding horror films — and the rise of the Final Girl. Coined by Carol J. Clover in her seminal article, “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” the Final Girl is the character archetype of the last woman (and often person) left alive in a slasher film. The concept, Clover believes, rose to prominence around 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas, as well as John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween.
The latter came just two years after Alfred Hitchcock’s final film and two years before his death, which ended his legacy of horror films based on the torture of women. “The idea of a female who outsmarts, much less outfights — or outgazes — her assailant is unthinkable in the films of [Brian] De Palma and Hitchcock.” She continued, “Although the slasher film’s victims may be sexual teases, they are not in addition simple-minded, scheming, physically incompetent, and morally deficient in the manner of these filmmakers’ female victims.”
Looking at the history of Western cinema, Clover mapped out the basics of victimhood prior to the slasher. “Those who save themselves are male, and those who are saved by others are female,” she wrote. Development is split into two phases: 1. Victim (always male) suffers at the hands of an adversary; and 2. Victim defeats or destroys said adversary to save himself and others. But then came along the Final Girl, who subverts this tradition by enduring tribulation and saves herself. It’s Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Sidney in Scream, Karla in I [Still] Know What You Did Last Summer, Jody in Cherry Falls, and Maxine in the X trilogy.
As the last ones standing, these Girls are seemingly their own saviors, the heroes of the film — but Clover argues that they are not actually feminist icons. The only reason we root for them and celebrate their triumph is because of her torture in phase one; a Final Guy would not garner equal sympathy from the audience, as Clover believes the audience’s gaze is defaultly male. On the whole, Clover believes the Final Girl is simply “a vehicle for [the male viewer’s own sadomasochistic fantasies.” In some ways, she is correct: Laurie in Halloween is saved by her virginal tendencies, and even though she fends off Michael Myers, is saved in the end by a man. In other ways, Clover’s theory falls through: Gale Weathers in Scream is vilified throughout most of the film, but is still regarded as a true Final Girl by the end.
Whether or not Clover’s theory is in fact applicable to all slasher or horror films, it’s this need to box in female victimhood as good or bad that is so similar to the critiques of McQueen’s work and the quickness to write off his violence as misogyny.
As part of the Met’s Savage Beauty exhibition, Mullins spoke about her collaboration with McQueen and their shared journey of envisioning the “unique body” in fashion. “He loved the complexity of a strong woman,” she said. “That a strong woman knows that her vulnerability is necessary and she's not victimized by it and he did, he had these fantastic women around him.”
At his eponymous label, McQueen used horror films in his earlier collections as embodiments of female suffering, sexual desires, sources of beauty, and a place to yet again subvert the norms of victor and victim. As he once said, films “can bring alive an idea like nothing else.”
Of all his horror film-inspired collections, The Birds, The Hunger, and The Overlook mark three critical periods in McQueen’s early career, each bringing a significant change to the way he and critics viewed his work.
On the making of The Birds — Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 horror film about fleets of birds wreaking havoc on a California town — the director is said to have cited the philosophy of playwright Vincent Sardou as inspiration: “He said: ‘Torture the women!’ … The trouble today is that we don’t torture women enough.”
He wasn’t exaggerating, actually. Hitchcock tortured lead actress Tippi Hedren both on and off the set of The Birds, where live birds were sicced on and tied to Hedren over five days of filming. Her skin was pecked at and her eye was nearly poked out, an experience she called "brutal and ugly and relentless." Hedren believed this was punishment for her dismissal of Hitchcock's aggressive, nonconsensual sexual advances.
In the film, Hedren’s character Melanie is outfitted in fitted pencil skirts and sophisticated 1950s womenswear. “Tippi is made vulnerable through the hobbling effect of her clothes in the movie,” said McQueen’s longtime friend and collaborator Simon Ungless. “This beautiful, sexy woman placed into a different environment and put at extreme risk but winning in the end. All very McQueen.”
The collection heavily features form-fitting midi-skirts and plastic wrap garments. The latter was inspired by a previous sexual encounter Groves had divulged to McQueen: by way of a personal ad, Groves ended up in a bit of a tight situation. He arrived at the house of an American man who answered the door dressed as a cop who then led Groves into the attic where he proceeded to bondage him in pallet wrap. McQueen was inspired to use plastic pallet wrap to embody the suffocation of Melanie’s clothes, the birds, and the film’s famous phone booth scene.
McQueen incorporated black silhouette prints of bird flocks into the collection as much as he did exposed breasts. Tire tracks ran across shoulder-padded jackets and the skin of the models themselves. The notable “Bumsters” trousers made numerous appearances, most notably paired with an open-back tailored jacket that revealed the model’s spine from neck to tailbone.
Simon Costin, jewelry and set designer on The Birds, designed the show’s set, which, for cost reasons, ended up being a pretty plain remake of an asphalt road. Costin also designed a black feather collar for one of the looks. All the models wore cream contact lenses that whited out their eyes and most had blown-out hair with puffed-out ends. They all appeared battered and run down (literally) but, thanks mostly to form-fitting silhouettes, maintained a polished, attractive look.
“I loved the combination of the highly sexy undertone and this surreal violence,” said model Tiina Laakkonen, who walked in the show. “But it was never at the expense of women, like: ‘I’m trying to belittle women.’ I never felt that Alexander made women seem like victims. I never got that vibe from him in his work.”
From a legacy standpoint, The Birds is said by critics and friends to have solidified McQueen’s place as fashion’s new l’enfant terrible. “It is strange to see so talented a designer committed to the unwearable," said the New York Times of the collection, before adding that McQueen was “easily the most talked-about designer to be showing this year.” The Evening Standard called his tailoring “sharp enough to draw blood,” adding this violent “homage to Helmut Lang” gave “fashion victim a whole new meaning.”
In early 1996, hairdresser and friend Mira Chai Hyde played McQueen the soundtrack of Tony Scott’s The Hunger, a risqué horror vampire flick starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve, and Susan Sarandon. McQueen loved the gothic score so much, so he watched the film and decided to name his upcoming collection The Hunger.
It was the first time that McQueen included menswear on the runway and the last time, he said, that his label would be so “reckless” (though debatable). Designing on an über-tight budget, McQueen crafted another sharply tailored collection with minimal flounce and maximal fear. Regarded as a sleepy but sensual vampire movie with just a handful of murders, the film amusingly pales in comparison to the vulgarity of McQueen’s collection.
Cutouts in the shape of knife slashes were a prominent motif and Bumsters and bare breasts reigned supreme. Clean-tailored button-downs were stamped with bloody hand prints, and latex or leather cropped up virtually everywhere. Most notably, McQueen rode the clear craze wave and made a transparent bodice filled with live worms that wiggled across the torso of its wearer. The collection showcased McQueen’s affinity for the natural world with visions of leopards, feathers, and tree branches. The color palette was predominantly black, red, and white with touches of blues, pinks, and yellows.
Before the show, he said, “The audience is going to see a side of McQueen they've never seen before: wearable clothes.” For business reasons, McQueen wanted the collection to be approachable, using sleek, sexy tailoring as reinforcement. Though it’s hard to imagine in what world a shirt that read “Fist to Hole” helped commercial business.
The models’ hair defied gravity, either gelled into a dyed Mohawk style or simply piled upward. Almost all of them were styled with long, pointed eyebrows and colored eye shadow. It was, as far as beauty standards are concerned, ugly, and yet the anger and violence that pierced McQueen’s designs brought a kind of feral power to the wearer that was sensual and intriguing.
At the end of the show, Lee popped onto the runway and showed his ass (really) to the audience. “I showed my bum to the press because I thought I was getting a very raw deal,” McQueen later said. “I was on my own, I didn’t have a backer and I couldn’t do as much as the British Fashion Council wanted me to do.”
When McQueen returned backstage, he began “sobbing his heart out,” according to friend and critic Suzy Menkes. “He was tremendously overwrought,” she said. “At that time, he always cared so much. He really put his heart and soul into everything.”
The collection was ill-received by critics who lauded him for his risk-taking but chalked the collection up to an “ill-thought-out mess.” Still, some critics could articulate the aesthetics of McQueen’s designs, like the New York Times who wrote that McQueen “offers the kinkiest, most fetishistic clothes on any runway.”
What was most evident was that McQueen wasn’t designing only for women, not just here, but in all his collections. The addition of menswear echoed the figurative injection of McQueen’s personal frustrations over his lack of support. It was becoming increasingly clear that these were not just displays of female power, but exhibitions of internal struggle. As McQueen later said, “I would go to the end of my dark side and pull these horrors out of my soul and put them on the catwalk.”
On the invitation to McQueen’s 1999 Fall/Winter show was the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed over 40 times, just as it was in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 psychological horror film The Shining. McQueen’s collection, titled The Overlook, took overt references from the Stephen King reimagining.
The show itself was one of McQueen’s most inventive and theatrical at the time. Models walked on ice inside a lucite box that resembled a snow globe and guests shivered in overcoats. Ice skaters performed on icy runway. Snow fell, wolves howled, and wind whistled. McQueen wanted to evoke a sense of romance through isolation and obscurity. “It's still the softer side of McQueen,” he said before the show, “but with the sinister edge being Jack Nicholson.”
The Shining is, like The Birds, a case study of a tortured woman and isolation. Though rumors have long swirled that Shelley Duval was psychologically abused on set by Kubrick, she always maintained up until her death that this was not the case. But for her character Wendy Torrance, it certainly was. Wendy isn’t technically the Final Girl, she is the only girl: a mother who endures her husband's slow descent into insanity until he goes after her and their son Danny with an axe. She becomes paranoid and frantic but always maintains a level of submissiveness.
McQueen made garments that personified everything else, from red-headed twins walking down the runway hand in hand to an ice crystal bustier to a long, fitted leather coat with a pattern resembling the Overlook’s carpet. Models showed minimal skin which brought a martial quality to the looks. Rather than force women to fight the cold, McQueen suited them up for battle in the same way Wendy suited up to brave the storm as she and Danny escaped.
Jeweler Shaun Leane's "Coiled Corset" is a beautiful representation of this. The corset was crafted out of 97 aluminum coils stacked from hip to neck and down to the biceps. “It looks quite like armor,” said Leane. “But then it’s very flattering to the female form, and it’s a really beautiful silhouette of the female form.”
Model Frankie Rayder remembers how special this collection felt before she even saw it. When it came to walking McQueen, “You would kind of have to put your ego aside,” she said, and accept that “you weren’t going to look gorgeous. But everyone was willing to do that.” While that might have been true of other collections, The Overlook feels like one of McQueen’s most enchanting of the 20th century, and maybe, despite loopy braids and cyborg makeup, the most beautiful.
Anna Wintour was in the audience that night for what was her first-ever McQueen show. Through shivers, she said, "I adored it.” 🌀
Sophia Scorziello is a freelance writer from Connecticut who misses living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter for unsolicited takes and Spotify links.