alexander mcqueen

Clothing is a hidden hegemon. Cloaked in the rhetoric of comfort and practicality, we've come to squeeze our fat heads through our little collars and believe it's the only way things could ever be. A shirt ends at a waist and so too must pants. But we invented those boundaries; we even invented waists -- and sheepish hips and enthusiastic breasts. We have a very particular and very arbitrary conception of our bodies.

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is dedicated to undoing all of that, about outraging the dogmatic silhouettes of the modern world. There are dresses that poof forward that make women look like they're staggering backward and discreetly boxy tartan dresses, effacing curves into "classical," powerful flatness. There are dresses with hips like boxing gloves. My favorite are the pants and skirts that sit below the nook of one's butt. They're called bumsters -- they show off your butt crack. But it's an erotic rediscovery; it's flesh as flesh as flesh! 

McQueen has a spectacularly irreverent eye for the body and at times it's almost disrespectful. There was a piece centered on a metal box attached to the model's lower thighs and wrists such that she had to step, ever bent, with an eery, crab-like synchrony between her arms and legs; her whole stature was restructured around the implant. But then he also gives, imagining us a more fantastical species. He designed a silvery corset that grasps like ribs and vertebrae that then extends into a tail. McQueen's announcement of his own version of the human spine has unrestraint of childhood and the elegance and expertise of having fit that version around real bones. It's beautiful.

I wish he'd made prosthetics. It would have been unbelievably unethical to set this man on the handicapped, but one can dream. He reinvented the silhouette, the balance and shape of a human being. He gave us grotesque, fabulous and new -- new! -- ways of looking at the world.