‘I’d rather people left my shows and vomited. I want extreme reactions. I want heart attacks. I want ambulances’ – Alexander McQueen.
In all his unrepentant, bullet-scalped glory, killer fashion-god Alexander McQueen perfectly embodied a peculiarly English urban gay perplexity.
Specifically, with regard to archaic notions of class and social standing; what, if anything, should a modern gay man aspire to?
Should one ape the patronising, old-money, fist of unrepentant fury against poverty, ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron? Or worse, Harriet Harmon, the constant-climb-down-fits-all, spine-free face of Labour?
No thanks. Quite gorgeously, Alexander McQueen – a zero prospects poster kid from birth – spat on both alternatives, and viciously skull-f***ed any flimsy, fifty shades of gay between.
Always his own man – at any cost – McQueen utterly confounded armies of snobs and Ian Duncan Smith clones incapable of seeing talent beyond their own expenses scams. But wielding inexplicable finesse more expected from some chisel-cheeked Lord Byron, McQueen matched the mercurial talent of that other, low-born, London scumbag; David Bowie.
Even so, why did McQueen draw such public and private venom throughout his career, despite massed accolades? The answer’s simple, and very British; an entrenched, schizophrenic sexual snobbery.
Peek back to the very earliest written memoirs of English homosexuality, from Jack Saul’s Sins Of The Cities Of The Plains to Oscar Wilde’s letters, and there’s an objectionable common thread, the illicit thrill of sex with the ‘lower orders’.
It’s a subject more compassionately explored by E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, but frankly, even Dear Saint Oscar privately viewed his ‘feasting with panthers’ – being f***ed by rent-boys – as disposable dog-poo on the immaculately-polished shine of his shoes.
Possibly, one can almost sympathise, if buying in to Victorian thinking that homosexuality was ‘infectious madness’ and therefore contagious, and Wilde did recant magnificently at his trial, but, overall, polite society still saw gay sex as symptomatic of, and bred from, poverty.
That disgusting attitude still lingers, if often unconsciously, in the 21st Century. And in many ways, it’s not surprising – homosexuality only became legalised in the UK on July 27th, 1967, and was routinely viewed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973.
Horrifically, even geniuses like the now-pardoned (for what crime?) Alan Turing suffered forced, chemical castration and electroshock, tortures more Guantanomo Bay than get-thee-gone, gay Satan.
It’s tempting – and frighteningly accurate – to blame the barely-sane mindset of the English ruling classes for such draconian legislation. Fuelled by an irrational, Freudian fear of the uncontrollable strength of ‘deviant’ sexual impulses, which were also seen as sinful, supernaturally subversive agents of revolutionary change, Parliament demonised homosexuality unmercifully.
It wasn’t enough. By 1967, even with electro-shock exorcisms at their disposal, all of Parliament’s frantic bigots and closet-cases couldn’t keep their worst nightmares – proudly out plebeian MPs – becoming reality.
This laissez-faire libertarianism, however, did precisely nothing to ease the path of maverick, socially disadvantaged artists like McQueen. Tough – this bitch bit back.
Kicking any lingering suspicion for homosexuality as a low-income, socially-deprived mental illness squarely in the face, he unexpectedly excelled as a wholly inexperienced, entry-level Saville Row apprentice.
The result? Mastering his trade – and stellar, inborn talent – with lethal aplomb. Step two was entering – and exiting – St. Martin’s as the fiercest new talent in decades, immediately followed by a jaw-dropping, shock ‘n’ awe fashion debut in 1993.
Forget Gulf War gas attacks – McQueen dispensed vicious, Turf War Terrorism and pissed-off Post Code rucks as gang-rape rites of passage reconfigured as fashion.
It was hooligan chic par excellence, haute couture projectile puke as an acceptance speech, as McQueen’s floaty, fake-blood smeared gowns and arse-cupping, signature ‘Bumster’ pants sexually assaulted the catwalk.
Épater La bourgeoisie – the French Decadent, rallying cry to shock the middle classes – indeed. Like Leigh Bowery art-rock band Minty showering their fans with fake urine, McQueen poetically pissed on his uptight onlookers – and they loved it.
But was McQueen’s furious embrace – or unconscious denial, perhaps, of his homosexuality? – crucial to his art and self-esteem?
There’s no easy answer, and current psychobabble clichés defining mood-swings as ‘Bi-polar’ are so vague they’re meaningless.
Sure, McQueen – a quintessential, punk-rock Nero – flaunted his talent, contempt and excess at an envious establishment eager to back-stab him, but who wouldn’t? It’s the perennial Elvis/Kurt Cobain syndrome fancy-dressed for high fashion, with the exact same sex, drugs and family abuse boxes ticked for a Fatal Express boarding pass.
So what? What self-righteous scumbags are truly without ‘sin’ to cast the first stone, in a nation that once, allegedly, had a Parliament crawling with abusive paedophiles? By that standard, McQueen’s fearless sexual honesty made him a saint, and spot-lit his need to be affirmed and validated by any means at any cost.
Predictably, the right-wing press – always preferring the simpering, suck-butt reportage of Royal correspondent sycophants for their daily bread – frequently played their mock-shock morality card.
Long, toffee-noses sniffed at everything from McQueen’s home decor – huge photo blow-ups including his butt and a decapitated female car-crash victim – to an infamous dress made from cheap, street-market lace and flown on its’ own, Concorde seat for a Manhattan photo-shoot.
Now that – along with dressing black models in faux-chain-gang jewellery and silk-screening starvation victims on king’s-ransom cost couture – is killer sartorial satire, the politics of pretension hung high and dry and precisely quartered.
It was hooligan chic par excellence, haute couture projectile puke as an acceptance speech, as McQueen’s floaty, fake-blood smeared gowns and arse-cupping, signature ‘Bumster’ pants sexually assaulted the catwalk.
Épater La bourgeoisie – the French Decadent, rallying cry to shock the middle classes – indeed. Like Leigh Bowery art-rock band Minty showering their fans with fake urine, McQueen poetically pissed on his uptight onlookers – and they loved it.
But was McQueen’s furious embrace – or unconscious denial, perhaps, of his homosexuality? – crucial to his art and self-esteem?
There’s no easy answer, and current psychobabble clichés defining mood-swings as ‘Bi-polar’ are so vague they’re meaningless.
Sure, McQueen – a quintessential, punk-rock Nero – flaunted his talent, contempt and excess at an envious establishment eager to back-stab him, but who wouldn’t? It’s the perennial Elvis/Kurt Cobain syndrome fancy-dressed for high fashion, with the exact same sex, drugs and family abuse boxes ticked for a Fatal Express boarding pass.
So what? What self-righteous scumbags are truly without ‘sin’ to cast the first stone, in a nation that once, allegedly, had a Parliament crawling with abusive paedophiles? By that standard, McQueen’s fearless sexual honesty made him a saint, and spot-lit his need to be affirmed and validated by any means at any cost.
Predictably, the right-wing press – always preferring the simpering, suck-butt reportage of Royal correspondent sycophants for their daily bread – frequently played their mock-shock morality card.
Long, toffee-noses sniffed at everything from McQueen’s home decor – huge photo blow-ups including his butt and a decapitated female car-crash victim – to an infamous dress made from cheap, street-market lace and flown on its’ own, Concorde seat for a Manhattan photo-shoot.
Now that – along with dressing black models in faux-chain-gang jewellery and silk-screening starvation victims on king’s-ransom cost couture – is killer sartorial satire, the politics of pretension hung high and dry and precisely quartered.
So no wonder McQueen hung himself on February 11th, 2010; he was painfully conscious of the screaming emptiness of the Emperor’s New Clothes circus. With his life unintentionally locked into a 24-7, escape-proof cell, he became, perhaps, the ultimate, ironic prisoner of his own genius.
But that genius was no indictment whatsoever of McQueen’s hugely evident joy in his sexuality. In fact, it’s obvious his sexuality gave his talent a pure rocket-fuel ride to acclaim, like similarly disadvantaged gay icons Noel Coward, Ossie Clark and David Hockney.
Yes, privately, the premiere French fashion house of Givenchy – where McQueen became creative director in 1997 – may have dismissed him as ‘trés football thug’, but that’s simply laughable; McQueen’s true public monument is the unstoppable, tsunami success of his posthumous Savage Beauty exhibition, still drawing record crowds at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Frankly, it’s the finest riposte, the finest f*ck you imaginable to the voices urging a current, economic massacre of the old, jobless and disabled; a riotous jewel-box of brilliant, utterly impractical artistry, a decisive dump on pedantic jobsworths.
From his signature ‘Highland Rape’ collection to the sinister, zip-masked anonymity of his leather fetishist gowns and a barely-wearable, razor clam-shell skirt, this is fashion made manifest as wearable architecture, argument and pure caprice, multi-purposed and sublime.
Overnight, McQueen’s creation of frivolous frocks became a scalding cri de coeur of gay pride. No lame apologies for, or trivialising one’s ‘deviant’ desires; this queer was indisputably here, completely subverting Oscar Wilde’s dictum that ‘all art is essentially useless’. Originally, Wilde meant of no concrete, practical use, but he’s been misinterpreted to justify an avalanche of vapid, hugely-overpriced art.
That, of course, is the exact opposite of Savage Beauty. Beg or borrow tickets, and be stunned by McQueen’s artistry, a master-class in shocking elegance for the ages. And better yet, McQueen’s continuing influence is gorgeously immune to suicide.
There’s no finer testament than that.
Savage Beauty runs until August 2nd at the V&A Museum.
by Fraulein Sasha Selavie
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