“McQueen’s future vision does not, however, reside in his cut and construction – brilliant though those are – so much as in the images and ideas he magics out of the air, which contiously clash with the status quo.”
By CAROLINE EVANS

The New York Times journalist Cathy Horyn recently described Alexander McQueen’s latest collection as vision of the future – “not the future of tomorrow but the future of 30 years out.” She glimpsed it for only a split second, “In McQueen’s circular cutting, which yields alien new volumes, in the magical light of tweed shot with metallic threads, in the frosted Perspex heels of seamless shoes that glowed with each footfall. That McQueen lacks the imagination to fully visualize the future is not a fault. What matters is that he took the first real step of a designer of his generation to conceive a new line for clothes.”

McQueen’s future visions do not, however, reside in his cut and construction – brilliant though those are – so much as in the images and ideas he magics out of the air, which continuously clash with the status quo. In 1998 the British forecaster Deidre Crowley argued that new London designers, photographers, stylists, and retail outlets were creating a kind of science fiction in their work, “a narrative not of the now but of the future.”  She said, “you should think of their garments as one-line concepts, their collections as telegrams from the future; telegrams that refer to things other than fashions and trends.” A retrospective look into the past to re-evaluate McQueen’s “telegrams from the future” from the mid- to late 1990s is just about due.

Victimization

Alexander McQueen graduated from the MA Fashion Design course at Central Saint Martins in London in February 1992. His first collections were Victorian in inspiration, drawing on the dark side of the 19^th century, rather than its picturesque representations. His graduation collection was based on Jack the Ripper and Victorian prostitutes who sold their hair to be made into locks which were bought by people to give to their lovers: he stitched locks of human hair under blood-red linings. Here, as in so much of McQueen’s subsequent work, the themes of sex, death, and commerce intertwined. For the show he encased locks of his own hair in Perspex, creating an object which was both souvenir and memento mori; he had the idea of giving himself to the collection.

Through the mid-1990s McQueen explored and developed this aesthetic in a series of spectacular fashion shows. His first show after his graduate collection took place in March 1993 and was inspired by the film Taxi Driver. The models were inadequately wrapped in cling-film and were styled to look bruised and battered. His second show, “Nihilism,” was staged in October 1993. It featured Edwardian jackets in corroded gilt, over-tops apparently splattered with blood or dirt to create the impression of bloody, post-operative breasts under the sheer muslin. The Independent fashion report of his second collection was entitled “McQueen’s Theatre of Cruelty.” It read: “Alexander McQueen’s debut was a horror show … McQueen, who is 24 and from London’s East End, has a view that speaks of battered women, of violent lives, of grinding daily existences offset by wild, drug-enhanced nocturnal dives into clubs where the dress code is semi-naked.¹

The review spoke of violence and abuse, but not of the historical eclecticism which also permeated the show. This collection set the tone for those to follow over the next few years. Their mood was doomy and lost, savage and melancholic, yet also darkly romantic. In them McQueen developed an aesthetic of cruelty culled from disparate sources: the work of 16^th-  and 17^th-century anatomists, in particular that of Andreas Vesalius; the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin from the 1980s and ’90s; and the films of Pasolini, Kubrick, Buñuel, and Hitchcock.

The second collection attracted shocked, if not universally hostile, press coverage² which McQueen continued to garner in subsequent collections. The aesthetic shock tactic continued in the fourth, “The Birds,” featuring very hard tailoring which was based around the idea of road kill.³ The models at the show were bound in Sellotape and streaked with oily tire marks; these tire marks were also printed on some of the jackets to look as if the model had been driven over. However it was the styling and presentation of McQueen’s fifth collection, “Highland Rape,” shown in March 1995 and his first show to be staged under the aegis of the British Fashion Council in its official tent during London Fashion Week, which attracted the greatest criticism. The collection mixed military jackets with tartan and moss wool, contrasting tailored jackets with torn and brutally ravaged lace dresses and ripped skirts. On a runway strewn with heather bracken, McQueen’s staggering and blood-spattered models appeared wild and distraught, their breasts and bottoms exposed by tattered laces and torn suede, jackets with missing sleeves, and skin-tight rubber trousers and skirts cut so low at the hip they seemed to defy gravity.

The show was described as “aggressive and disturbing.”⁴ Much of the press coverage centered around accusations of misogyny because of the imagery of semi-naked, staggering, and brutalized women, in conjunction with the use of the word “rape” in the title. But McQueen claimed that the rape was of Scotland, not the individual models, as the theme of the show was the Jacobite rebellion. “I’d studied the history of the Scottish upheavals and the Clearances … “Highland Rape” was about England’s rape of Scotland.”⁵ The harsh styling was intended to counter romantic images of Scottish history: “I wanted to show that the war between the Scottish and the English was basically genocide.”⁶ This was also the period of considerable coverage of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda in the Western press, a period in which the historical meaning of the word “genocide” acquired a contemporary resonance.

Criticisms of McQueen’s work as misogynist, however, tended to obscure its defining characteristic, the theatrical staging of cruelty. Although most apparent in the styling of his collections, his aesthetic of cruelty also extended to his designs where it was not only thematic but also intrinsic to his cutting techniques and his methods of construction. In the early collections cloth was usually slashed, stabbed, and torn, and each garment was a variation on the theme of abuse. When he arrived at Givenchy in Paris in 1997 as principal designer the staff described their terror as they saw him approach a garment with the scissors, knowing he was about to cut up the couture model they had just produced, like a malevolent Edward Scissorhands. “I’m intent on chopping things up,” he said in an interview early in 1997.⁷ Apart from the slashed garments, McQueen also developed a distinctive style of tailoring for which he became famous: razor sharp, its seams traced the body’s contours like surgical incisions, skimming it to produce pointed lapels and sharp shoulders.

The Vogue stylist Isabella Blow who became his patron commented on the way his cutting techniques and his practice of historical collage came together: “What attracted me to Alexander was the way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them thoroughly new and in the context of today. It is the complexity and severity of his approach to cut that makes him so modern. He is like a Peeping Tom in the way he slits and stabs at fabric to explore all the erogenous zones of the body.”⁸

Blow, who said McQueen combined “sabotage and tradition, beauty and violence” ⁹ referred here to Michael Powell’s film Peeping Tom, in which the protagonist is a photographer who murders women in the act of photographing them by means of a bayonet attached to his tripod so that the camera becomes the instrument of the death it records.

In McQueen’s 1996 catwalk show for his collection “La Poupée” the black model Debra Shaw walked contorted in a metal frame fixed to her wrists and ankles by manacles. Disavowing the obvious connotation of slavery, just as he disavowed the accusations of misogyny in “Highland Rape,” McQueen claimed he wanted the restricting body jewelry to produce the jerky and mechanical movements of a doll or puppet.¹⁰ The collection was based on Hans Bellmer’s dolls of the 1930s which the artist compulsively took apart and reconstructed for a series of photographs, a process described by Rosalind Krauss as “construction through dismemberment.”¹¹ Although McQueen’s collection was not a literal reinterpretation of Bellmer’s poupée in all his work of this period, he shared with the artist a compulsion to dissect and probe. Bellmer’s 1933 doll had six miniature panoramas fitted inside her stomach; illuminated by a torch bulb, operated by a button on her left nipple, and viewed through a peep-hole in her navel, the tiny panoramas displayed a collection of bric-à-brac which represented “the thoughts and dreams of a young girl.”¹² Going beneath the skin of conventional fashion, McQueen’s first collections explored the taboo area of interiority, breaching the boundaries between inside and out. The fantasy of exploring and probing the interior of the body, although commonplace in contemporary art, is habitually disavowed in fashion by its emphasis on surface, perfection and polish. McQueen, by contrast, actively explored the tropes of abjection in relation to the female body. In a television interview while he was working on the collection for “It’s a Jungle Out There,” he held up to the camera a piece of cloth with blond hair trailing from it like a pelt and said “the idea is that this wild beast has eaten this really lovely blond girl and she’s trying to get out.”¹³

Femme Fatale

The cruelty inherent in McQueen’s representations of women was part of the designer’s wider vision of the cruelty of the world, and although his view was undoubtedly a bleak one it was not misogynist. And this was not because the designer often talked of the “strong,” uncompromising women for whom he designed,¹⁴ but because of his fascination with an uncompromising and aggressive sexuality, a sexuality which, in his “Dante” collection, shown in March 1996, came to resemble that of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale, the woman whose sexuality was dangerous, even deathly, and for whom, therefore, male desire would always be tinged with dread. And, in this context, McQueen’s fascination with lesbian “decadence” was significant in his production of the femme fatale: “Critics who labeled me misogynist got it all wrong, they didn’t even realize most of the models were lesbians.¹⁵ I’m not going to say my clothes are for lesbians, but a lot of my best friends are strong lesbians and I design with them in mind. If anyone’s going to say my shows are out of order or anti-women it’s going to be them, not some dainty housewife sitting in the front row. You can’t please everyone when you design.”¹⁶

For the “Dante” collection McQueen used notoriously “blue-blooded” models (Honor Frazer, Elizabetta Formaggia and Annabel Rothschild) whose makeup emphasized their chiseled features with pale skin and dark lips. The collection featured fine boning and military embroidery, braid-trimmed hussars’ jackets and an 18^th-century style gold brocade admiral’s coat worn with a shredded lace dress and a black jet-encrusted headpiece made by the jeweler and art director Simon Costin. Costin’s previous jewelry, which McQueen had used in his graduate show at Central Saint Martins in 1992, used the techniques of taxidermy and dissection. The deathly references were explicit in this collection in which fashion became the locus of darker meanings. Costin’s jet headpiece made the memento mori imagery explicit, as did a McQueen lace top which extended over the head to cover the face like a hangman’s hood. Costin was also responsible for the figure of a plastic skeleton seated in the front row of the audience. Further references to death included models wearing masks set with crucifixes, imagery which McQueen “appropriated” from the grand guignol photography of Joel Peter Witkin; Simon Costin’s earrings of dangling bird claws; arms caught in silver crowns of thorns; and Victorian jet beading. Stella Tennant modeled a mauve and black lace corset which drew on the collection’s mourning color palette of black, bone beige, mauves and greys.¹⁷ The model’s berry-colored lips, against her pale flesh, were vampiric and deathly. The high, constraining lapels of the corset, like an exaggerated wing collar, forced her chin up in a pose which also suggested an orthopedic brace or truss. But in its dark sexuality, her image also recalled the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle whose terrifying allure was fatal to men.

The 19^th-century femme fatale was, arguably, a fearful representation which configured female sexuality as perverse, even deathly, and which echoed fears about the social, economic, and sexual emancipation of women at the turn of the century.¹⁸ Turn-of-the-century fears about syphilis were also articulated specifically in images of women whose sexuality was toxic, tracing a link between contagion and sexuality by suggesting that such women were the carriers of disease.¹⁹ McQueen’s designs, 100 years later, although similar stylistically, conjured up a very different concept of the femme fatale.  Like her 19^th-century counterpart, the late 20^th-century femme fatale could be thought of in relation to fears about illness, death, and sexuality, fears which were raised in relation to HIV and AIDS from the mid-1980s onwards. The ubiquitous rise of “the body” as a subject for artists and cultural theorists in this period was partially linked to this. Specifically, the imagery of both art and fashion was permeated by Kristeva’s concept of the “abject,” Freud’s “uncanny,” and Bataille’s “informe,” each of which was the subject of major exhibitions in the US and Europe in the 1990s.

What differentiated McQueen’s late 20^th-century representation of the femme fatale from her turn-of-the-century counterparts, however, was that she was no longer depicted as an object of fear. Rather, she became a frightening subject. Her highly sexualized appearance was a defense, but one which shaded into a form of attack. In the “Dante” show a model wearing Philip Treacy’s headpiece of stag’s horns created an image of a feral woman, only half human, recalling Baudrillard’s phrase in Fatal Strategies: “Imagine a thing of beauty that has absorbed all the energy of the ugly: that’s fashion.”²⁰ Her spiky, hybridized beauty and deathly pallor recalled the etymology of the words “glamour” and “vamp” as something potentially terrifying and bewitching rather than reassuring. Allying glamour with fear rather than allure, McQueen’s avowed intent was to create a woman “who looks so fabulous you wouldn’t dare lay a hand on her,” a statement which was illuminated by the knowledge that one of his sisters had been the victim of domestic violence.²¹

“I design clothes because I don’t want women to look all innocent and naïve, because I know what can happen to them. I want women to look stronger.”²² “I don’t like women to be taken advantage of. I disagree with that most of all. I don’t like men whistling at women in the street, I think they deserve more respect.”²³ “I like men to keep their distance from women, I like men to be stunned by an entrance.”²⁴ “I’ve seen a woman get nearly beaten to death by her husband. I know what misogyny is … I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”²⁵

In the “Dante” show in particular, the chilly elegance of the models, with their accessories of shaved feathers, antlers, and thorns, combined with McQueen’s razor-sharp cutting techniques to produce an image tinged equally with desire and dread, an image intended, like Medusa’s head emblazoned on a shield, to act as a talisman to protect its bearer in an uncertain world.

Terror

The representation of female sexuality as terror has a long history in which the power of female display, or allure, is pictured as terrifying, sometimes deathly.²⁷ Rather, like the artist Cathy de Monchaux’ wall-mounted vagina dentate from the 1990s, it reveals a triumphant perversity and an exuberant sexuality. It substitutes for the frozen immobility of the Medusa the obscene laughter of the Baubo, a primitive and obscene female demon according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, who “flashes” her genitals, recalling Freud’s phrase in … “the devil fled when the woman showed him her vulva.”²⁸ For all the links to the fin-de-siècle femme fatale, this form of female terror differentiated the 1990s from the 1890s. In the early designs of Alexander McQueen it emerged as the trope of cruelty and female domination.

Many representations of the femme fatale are ambivalent, both late 19^th-century ones and mid-20^th-century cinematic ones. Mary Anne Doane has pointed out that most of these comes to a sticky end, for the femme fatale is frequently an articulation of male fears about the social and sexual mobility of women in transitional periods.²⁹ Yet McQueen’s images of a woman so powerfully sexual that no one would dare to lay hands on her, a woman who used her sexuality as a sword rather than a shield, also drew on an earlier, and more dissident, representation than the fin-de-siècle vamp or her early 20^th-century cinematic successor. Both in the cruelty of McQueen’s cut, and in the choice and styling of his catwalk models, he recalled, rather, the great female libertines of the Marquis de Sade, with their repertoires of savage dominance and mastery. Sade’s dangerous female libertines were superwomen so exceptional that they were almost beyond gender; their power to terrify lay precisely in the distance between their purely biological femininity and their transgender actions. McQueen’s first ready-to-wear collection for the house of Givenchy, shown in March 1997, featured extraordinarily tall models, whose long coats and micro-minis emphasized their height, which was further augmented by especially tall wigs and high stiletto heels. These terrifyingly tall amazons stalked the cobbles of an old Parisian stable and posed like streetwalkers against its metal poles.  In Luis Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour (1976), the haute bourgeois, bored housewife played by Catherine Deneuve spends her afternoons working in a brothel dressed in Chanel. The film suggested a connection between Parisian chic and prostitution; but McQueen’s association of the two made Parisian chic aggressive rather than languid. The bruised and battered models of the earlier collections had given way, by approximately 1997, to a regiment of superwomen. McQueen, like Sade, was fascinated by a dialectical relationship between victim and aggressor, and the parade of women he created on the catwalk resembled Sade’s aggressors rather than their victims. They were far removed from, say, the parodic humour of Thierry Mugler’s use of actual drag queens as models in his Spring/Summer 1992 collection. McQueen’s runway suggested a world without men, not because men were absent from it (they were not), but because it was a world in which gender was unsettled by women who were both hyper-feminine and yet, in some respects, terrifyingly male.

In his collections of this period McQueen began to evidence a fascination with the dynamics of power, in particular with a dialectical relationship between predator and prey, between victim and aggressor. In “Dante,” Stella Tennant modeled with a hooded and tethered bird of prey on her wrist; in “Eclect Dissect” McQueen came onto the runway for his end-of-show bow with a tethered bird of prey on his. In his visual imagination there operated an economy much like that of double-entry bookkeeping: every instance of goodness was balanced by one of cruelty, every gesture of dominance also sketched a gesture of subservience. As his shows progressed the victimized model gave way to a more powerful image, as prey became predator. In “It’s a Jungle Out There,” shown in February 1997 in London’s Borough Market, McQueen meditated on the theme of the Thomson’s gazelle and its terrible vulnerability to predators. He used the idea of animal instincts in the natural world as metaphor for the dog-eats-dog nature of the urban jungle, staging the show against a forty-foot-high screen of corrugated iron drilled with imitation bullet holes and surrounded by wrecked cars, adding dry ice and crimson lighting for drama. In a television interview he said: “The whole show feeling was about the Thompson’s gazelle. It’s a poor little critter – the markings are lovely. It’s got these dark eyes, the white and black with the tan markings on the side, the horns – but it is the food chain of Africa. As soon as it’s born it’s dead, I mean you’re lucky if it lasts a few months, and that’s how I see human life, in the same way. You know, we can all be discarded quite easily … you’re there, you’re gone, it’s a jungle out there!”³⁰

Yet the design and styling of a hide jacket with pointed shoulders from which a pair of twisting gazelle horns stood up, worn by a model whose metallic contact lenses made her look like an alien, subverted the fatal passivity of the Thompson’s gazelle. Though the animal was referred to in the model’s dramatic black and white face make-up, the horns, and the hide jacket, McQueen repositioned its parts and added the huge shoulders and metallic contact lenses to create a woman more like Rider Haggard’s She: predatory, scary, powerful, and only half human. These were the characteristics of McQueen’s femme fatale, a figure who suggested the terrifying power of women rather than their soft vulnerability.

Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman, first published in 1979 by the feminist press Virago, was a late 20^th-century interpretation of the problems Sade raised about the culturally determined nature of women. Carter wrote that Sade’s heroines healed themselves of their socially inflicted wounds through sexual violence, for “a repressive society turns all eroticism into violence.”³¹ Sade, she wrote, “cuts up the bodies of women and reassembles them in the shapes of his own delirium.”³² Four women – the ruthless and self-serving Juliette, the aristocratic man-hater Clairwil, the microbiologist, poisoner, and magician Durand, and the voluptuary Princess Borghese – are merely four examples of what Angela Carter called “a museum of woman-monsters”³³ that Sade conjured up, because, she wrote, “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.”³⁴

McQueen created his own “museum of woman-monsters” in his second couture collection for Givenchy, “Eclect Dissect,” shown in July 1997. In thinking up the theme of the show his art director Simon Costin combined, in a series of collages, the late Victorian costumes McQueen was currently looking at with a series of animated skeletons and muscle men from the 16^th-century anatomical plates of Andreas Vesalius; the cut of some of the dresses in the collection was influenced by the figures from these anatomical plates in which the skeletons vogue, modeling their own bodies. The concept behind the collection was a paragraph written by Costin who dreamed up a fictional fin-de-siècle surgeon and collector who traveled the world collecting exotic objects, textiles, and women which he subsequently cut up and reassembled in his laboratory. The “scenario” of the catwalk show staged the return of these gruesomely murdered women who came back to haunt the living. It was shown in a Paris medical school, swathed with blood-red velvet curtains and decorated with medical specimens. The models impersonated the ghosts of the long-dead women, dressed in the exotica collected by their murderer on his foreign journeys. Spanish lace, Burmese necklaces, Japanese kimonos, and Russian folk dresses were jumbled up with the art of the taxidermist: stuffed animals and birds, and animals’ skulls. Baudelaire wrote that fashions should never be considered as dead things; you might just as well admire the tattered old rags hung up, as slack and lifeless as the skin of St. Bartholomew, in an old-clothes dealer’s cupboard. Rather they should be thought of as vitalized and animated by the beautiful women who wore them.³⁵

His explicit comparison between skin, or flesh, which clothes the body, and fashionable dress, was made through a gruesome comparison to St. Bartholomew, who was flayed alive (see Last Judgement, Sistine Chapel) and the passage suggests that there is something ghostly in the idea of a beautiful woman animating a lifeless corpse in the pursuit of fashion. When, in Alexander McQueen’s “Elect Dissect” collection, the fashion models impersonated the ghosts of long-dead women come back to haunt their murderer, the conceit was animated on the catwalk. The models, tall and imposing, were not, however, victims, but vengeful ghosts. One strode out in an outfit which fused Madam Butterfly kitsch with an imposing dominatrix look: the Japanese obi became a corset, the kimono a tight, Western skirt, in a late 20^th-century interpretation of Mirabeau’s turn-of-the-century text, The Torture Garden. The analogy between the doctor and the designer as anatomist was clear. McQueen himself could be seen as a kind of anatomist, dissecting and flaying conventional fashion to show us the death’s head beneath the surface, and, particularly, the link between eroticism and death which permeated much of the fashion imagery of the 1990s.

Angela Carter made the case for Sade as a “terrorist of the imagination,” a “sexual guerrilla,” who revealed that everyday social, economic, and political relations were mirrored in sexual relations. In Sade’s writings, the cruelty of statesmen, princes, and popes exceeded that of all other men. Yet his great women were even more cruel still, as they used their sexuality in an act of vengeance in a world which otherwise condemned them to a life of passive endurance – a life of victimization without power or autonomy, like that of Sade’s virtuous Justine. So although the “pornographer as terrorist” may not think of himself as a friend of women, he is always their unconscious ally because he approaches some kind of emblematic truth about gender relations and power.

Carter described Sade’s late 18^th-century writing as being at the threshold of the modern period, looking simultaneously backward to the ancien régime and forward to a revolutionary future. 100 years later, at the beginning of the 20^th-century, the French poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire equated Sade’s undoubtedly monstrous Juliette with the New Woman, writing – admiringly – that Juliette was the woman whose advent Sade, at the beginning of the 19^th-century, could only anticipate.³⁶ Yet Carter herself qualified her original assertion that Sade’s women were free women. In his darkly mechanistic world women were either sacrificial victims or ritual murderesses, but in either case always overseen by men, a world in which every instance of freedom was balanced by one of repression. This dialectical structure can be mapped onto McQueen’s visually plotted universe in which victims mutated into Amazons, a shield became a sword, the woman’s body an emblematic Medusa’s head. However, Sade’s female libertines, or McQueen’s Amazonian models, cannot be classified simply as New Women for a New Age, for the woman as aggressor is no freer from the trammels of gender relations than her dialectical sister, the woman as victim.  If one is a pawn and the other a queen, free to go where she will, nevertheless there is always a king elsewhere on the board, a Lord of the Game.³⁷ Sade’s free-wheeling Juliette was as locked into a dialectic of gender, power, and sexual violence, even as she transcended them, as the enslaved and miserable Justine.

Yet Sade’s pornographic narratives were also a critique of the nature and exercise of power, in particular of political oppression, in his own time and, like McQueen’s, his vision was singularly dark. Angela Carter wrote that, for Sade, “all tenderness is false … all beds are minefields.’³⁸ Similarly, for McQueen, there could be no sanctified view of history, culture or politics. The past was neither picturesque nor romantic. Such views merely served to mask vicious realities, and a desire to strip history of its romance defined McQueen’s imagery. Whereas a designer such as John Galliano romanticized history and culture, McQueen made it harsh and painful to watch, as in the “Highland Rape” collection. In building McQueen’s “yob” reputation, journalists stressed his working class upbringing, his education in a sink school in East London, and his taxi-driver father, but under-emphasized the fact that his mother was a local historian and former lecturer. As a child, he was taken with her to St. Catherine’s House where she researched the McQueen family origins, discovering that they had been Spitalfields Hugenots, a fact which influenced McQueen’s choice of venue for the “Dante” collection, Hawksmoor’s Christchurch, Spitalfields. McQueen’s mother recounted how, while she researched the family origins, her young son investigated the story of Jack the Ripper, a theme which subsequently informed his graduate collection.³⁹

Disenchantment

The violence of McQueen’s vision was fuelled by “a desire to strip romance to the truth”⁴⁰ as he saw it, just as the violence of Sade’s writing was fed by his own political disaffection, his disappointed utopianism. Amongst the chilly femmes fatales of McQueen’s “Dante” collection, with its male models styled to look like Los Angeles gang youths, were jackets photo-printed with images of Don McCullen’s war photographs. The collection was about religion as the cause of war throughout history.  It was staged on a candle-lit cross-shaped runway, against a backdrop of flashing, back-lit stained glass windows, and had a soundtrack of Victorian church music which, as the show started, was drowned out by the sound of gunfire, and then by a hardcore club track. Against this backdrop, the harshness of McQueen’s images of women shifted and began to re-signify.

Beyond the surface cruelty which patterned both Sade and McQueen’s work lay a deeper structural connection which unit these apparently disparate figures in the same tradition. McQueen’s lurid and grande guignol displays on the catwalk conjure up the artist Jacques-Louis David’s revolutionary spectacles in the 1790s, and his elaborate staging of the assassinated Marat’s funeral in the church of the Cordeliers in Paris.⁴¹ The darkness of McQueen’s view of history and culture echoed that of Sade’s utopian, yet despairing, political idealism. Over half of the extraordinarily violent and pornographic Philosophy in the Bedroom consists of a political treatise entitled “Just One More Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans.” This treatise was extracted from its pornographic context and reprinted as a pamphlet in the revolution of 1848 by the followers of the utopian Saint Simon. Sade’s books, inventoried at his death, included the complete works of Rousseau and Voltaire; yet his pornographic vision renounced both reason and enlightenment in favor of a view of the world as fundamentally driven by relations of power. For Sade, freedom only existed in opposition to, and was defined by, tyranny. Propelled by this seemingly Manichean dualism, Sade’s contradictions extended to his sexual choices and his political ideals equally. Despite the extreme cruelty of his sexual writings he claimed the smell of blood from the guillotine made him feel sick. Although a supporter of the revolution he was opposed to the death penalty and, as a judge during the Terror, was briefly imprisoned on the charge of “moderatism.”⁴²

It is Sade’s nihilism which makes him modern, as well as the proximity of sex and politics in his sensibility. Indeed, we might ask why it is that cruelty re-emerged as a trope of the late 20^th-century, be it in the 1990s’ turn to a fashionable sado-masochism, or the cruelty of, for example, films like Fight Club and American Psycho, films in which the hard bodies of cinema meshed with the fetishized body beautiful of consumer culture. Both Sade’s and McQueen’s worlds are post-Edenic. Each paints a picture of a tragic universe, an alienated world of Baudelairean modernity in which sexuality becomes the ruination of harmonious, “centered” love. There has arisen in the modern period a “literature of a sexuality that is not about love, happiness or duty but about trauma, otherness, and unspeakable truth.”⁴³ This literature is not new: it runs from Sade through Baudelaire to Genet and Bataille, and is now 200-years-old. What was new, however, at the close of the 20^th century, was that these ideas found expression in the work of a fashion designer, perhaps for the first time since the inception of this literature, the late 18^th century, which was also the period of post-Revolutionary French fashions à la victime in which, for example, women wore a red ribbon round the neck in reference to the cut of the guillotine. In a fashion plate of 1798 these scarlet croisures à la victime had moved down from the neck to traverse the bodice and to signify that their wearer would sacrifice everything for her lover.⁴⁴ As in many of McQueen’s designs today, political trauma has become eroticized; Terror bleeds into Eros.

The art historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has argued that, in the Directoire period, trauma was played out on the way the body was represented. If the body is a historically privileged cultural representation of the self, Directoire fashions represented an effort to come to terms with the Terror, a moment of historical trauma that had subsequently to be accommodated through a series of bodily practices. However, although the Directoire body was, according to Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “marked by trauma” the same period saw a resurgence of bodily narcissism that was mobilized to heal trauma through pleasurable display: the public parading of fashion, the rise of gymnasia and swimming pools, and the development of an entirely new industry of bodily care and pleasure through the development of unguents and creams.⁴⁵ It is precisely this balancing of competing forces in the one body – marked on the one hand by trauma, yet characterized, on the other, by an entirely hedonistic cult of the body beautiful – that makes this post-revolutionary body modern. Anthony Giddens has referred to identity as self-conscious and self-reflexive in modernity, and this process of continual self-scrutiny and self-creation takes place through the thoroughly banal daily rituals of beauty, exercise, and the pursuit of the toned body.⁴⁶ Yet it was on that very same body that designers like McQueen staged their late 20^th-century images of trauma and anxiety, and it is entirely due to the fact that Western consumer capitalism fetishes the toned body that experimental designers have had a canvas on which to paint its abject counterpart.

Sade’s books have been banned to the general public for the best part of 200 years; they are in print now, as they were at the time of the French Revolution, both periods of instability and oscillation, between revolutionary freedom and state or corporate oppression. If, in Angela Carter’s phrase, ‘our flesh arrives to us out of history’⁴⁷ (her more poetic formulation of Foucault’s concept of sexuality as historically determined) perhaps such fashions gesture towards moments of cultural trauma which we can only just begin to describe. The philosophical nihilism of the late 20^thcentury, the dark fact of intifada, genocide, and torture in Palestine, Rwanda, and the Balkans; and the prurient accounts of murder, child abuse, and street crime in both the British and the American press, seem glib, even tasteless images to cite in this context. Yet in the 1990s McQueen’s fictional visions of beautiful women, like Andrew Groves’ collection based on “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, were easily as dark, while they masqueraded under the lightness of “fashion.” And the same newspapers that brought lurid news accounts of contemporary horrors extended their coverage to fashion and beauty. In American fiction of the 1990s, both Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis linked fashion to pathological violence. Ellis’ American Psycho (1991) linked sadistic murder with designer accessories, while his Glamorama (1998) drew parallels between the American obsession with fame and fashion to European terrorism and sadistic torture. Ellis’ horror scenes are masked by a veneer of fashionability of which the model becomes the very emblem, while the novel is punctuated by references to brands and labels: Gucci, Prada, Comme, and Versace. Indeed, as the heart of darkness gradually comes closer to home, the references to more avant-garde European labels are gradually replaced by American ones such as Brooks Brothers and the Gap. In Bright Lights Big City (1984) Jay McInerney directly assimilates a model to a mannequin, highlighting the dead gaze of capitalism. In McInerney’s Model Behavior (1998) the author contrasts the protagonist’s ambitious “dumb blonde” model girlfriend with his intelligent, educated, beautiful – but anorexic – sister who, unable to go to work, spends her days watching videotapes of witnesses’ testimonies of Bosnian atrocities from the United Nations’ War Crimes Tribunal. Her boyfriend works in the trauma department of a large public hospital. Like the characters in the American television series ER who oscillate continually between “trauma and techno-speak, cardiac arrest and broken hearts,”⁴⁸ McInerney’s characters mimic the endless repetition of trauma itself against the backdrop of fashionable uptown New York chic.

It is precisely this oscillation between beauty and horror in the fashion and fiction of the late 20^th century that recalls earlier moments of beauty shot through with darkness. Again, Baudelaire’s avant-garde aesthetic in the mid-19^th century resurfaces in the late 20^th, highlighting the connection between Baudelairean modernity and late 20^th-century postmodernity. But in McQueen’s work, the ghosts of the period after the French revolution, rather than those of the 1840s-50s, provide us with a comparable model of historical trauma and rupture. The art historian T.J. Clark traced this “moment of modernity” first to Paris of the 1860s,⁴⁹ but subsequently revised the argument in his analysis of David’s painting The Death of Marat, “pushing” the date further back to the period immediately after the French Revolution.⁵⁰ For Clark, artistic modernism is associated with politics and contingency, and he argues that modernism’s engagement with politics is a way of “coming to terms with the world’s disenchantment.”⁵¹ In McQueen’s work too, a warped engagement with politics as trauma sketches a strong sense of disenchantment with the world through the expression of a rough sensuality and refined cruelty.

Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity and Deathliness, Yale University Press, 2003

Quotes:

1 Hume, Marion. 1993. “McQueen’s Theatre of Cruelty,” The Independent, Thursday 21 October, p.29.  In fact this review was not of McQueen’s first but of his second collection, “Nihilism,” shown at the Bluebird Garage in London in October 1993.  In her article Hume’s tone was shocked but not disapproving, and she went on to equate McQueen’s work, in its significance, with that of Vivienne Westwood in the 1970s and Comme des Garçons in the 1980s.

2 Hume, ibid

3 Heath, Ashley, “Bad Boys Inc,” The Face, vol.2. no.79, April, 1995: 102

4 Women’s Wear Daily, Tuesday 14 March, 1995: 10

5 Lorna V., “All Hail McQueen,” Time Out, September 24-October 1, 1997: 26

6 Womens Wear Daily, op.cit.

7 Cited in: “Cutting Up Rough” (series: The Works, producer: Teresa Smith, series editor: Michael Poole), BBC2, broadcast 20.07.97

8 Cited in: Hoare, Sarajane, “God Save McQueen,” Harpers Bazaar,USA, June, 1996: 30 & 148

9 “Cutting Up Rough”, op. cit.

10 Lorna V, op. cit

11 Rosalind Krauss, “Corpus Delicti” in: Rosalind Krauss & Jane Livingston, L’amour fou: photography & surrealism, Abbeville Press, New York, & Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1986: 86

12 Peter Webb, Hans Bellmer, Quartet Books, London, 1985: 29-30

13 “Cutting Up Rough,” op.cit.

14 For example, “I don’t like frilly, fancy dresses. Women can look beautiful and wear something well without looking fragile.” (McQueen, quoted in Jennifer Scruby, “The Eccentric Englishman,” Elle American, July 1996); of the type of model chosen for McQueen shows, his assistant Katy England said “They must be able to carry off the clothes, as well as being beautiful.  Some of the really young girls are gorgeous, but are not ready to do McQueen yet, they just haven’t got enough attitude.  We need strong, ballsy girls. ”(Katy England in Melanie

Rickey, “England’s Glory,” The Independent Tabloid, Friday 28/02/97: 4)

15 Cited in Lorna V, op.cit.  McQueen was referring here to his sixth show after graduation, “The Hunger,” shown in October 1995.

16 Cited in: Heath, op. cit.

17 Menkes, Suzy, “The Macabre and the Poetic,” International Herald Tribune, 5 March, 1996: 10. Menkes cited McQueen’s comment on this collection that “it’s not so much about death, but the awareness that it is there.”

18 Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture, Oxford University Press, New York & Oxford 1986 ; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-siècle, Bloomsbury, London 1991.

19 Ibid.  See too: Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason: the aesthetics of modernity, trans. Patrick Camiller, Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1994; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, Routledge, New York & London 1991; Elizabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992.

20 Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, Semiotexte, New York, 1990: 9

21 Hume, Marion, ‘Scissorhands’, Harpers & Queen, August 1996: 82

22 cited in ibid

23 Cited in: Tony Marcus, ”I am the ressurection,”  i-D, 179, September, 1998: 148

24 Cited in: Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 22nd September 1996. In relation to the “Highland Rape” collection McQueen commented that he wanted men to think, when a woman came into the room, not “cor I’d love to screw her: but “she looks amazing but I couldn’t go near her.”

25 Cited in: Vogue USA, October 1997, p.435

27 Effrat Tseëlon, The Masque of Femininity: The Presentation of Woman in Everyday Life, Sage, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1995

28 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’ [1922] in Works: The Standard Editgion of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, under the general editorship of James Strachey, vol.XVIII, Hogarth press, London, 1955: 273-4

29 Doane, op. cit.: 2

30 Cited in: “Cutting Up Rough,” op. cit

31 Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History, Virago, London, 1979: 26

32 ibid

33 ibid: 25

34 ibid: 27

35 ibid, 33

36 ibid: 75

37 ibid: 80

38 ibid: 25

39 Judy Rumbold, “Alexander the Great,” Vogue UK, July 1996, catwalk report supplement

40 Hume 1993 op. cit.

41 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Viking, London & New York, 1989: 742-746

42 Carter op. cit.: 32

43 John Rajchman, “Lacan and the Ethics of Modernity,” Representations, 15, Summer 1986: 47

44 Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion in the French Revolution, B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1988: 124

45 Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Necklines: the Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1999: 2

46 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, London, 1991. If the idea of modernity connotes a certain self-consciousness or self-scrutiny measurable in the social sciences, T J Clark has identified a similar self-consciousness or, rather, self-reflexivity, in the field of representation rather than social praxis. Clark has argued for self-reflexivity in art as a defining moment of modernism, first in relation to Manet and the Paris of the 1860s and subsequently to David and Paris of the 1790s. T J Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the art of Manet and his Followers, Knopf, New York, 1984.  T J Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from A History of Modernism, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 1999

47 Carter op. cit.: 9

48 Mark Seltzer, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere,” October, 80, spring 1997: 26

49 T J Clark, 1984 op. cit.

50 T J Clark, 1999 op. cit.

51 T J Clark, 1999 op.cit: 22