McQueen and Melancholy

The beauty of sadness

As of last Wednesday, more than half a million people–many of whom waited in lines of up to two hours, and some who returned for a second visit—will have taken in the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum’s blockbuster “Savage Beauty” show of the work of the late British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. So popular has the show proved with museum visitors that it’s run has been extended twice– an amazing turn of events considering the show is essentially a presentation of clothes on mannequins not entirely unlike what one might see in the windows of a store. As the show wraps up this weekend with extended hours until midnight, it is worth asking: what exactly did people see in it that proved so compelling?

Hard as it is to examine the artistic output of a suicide without peering at it through a veil of melancholy, in the case of McQueen it is that much harder. His twisted High Victorian tailoring and strangely rent and shredded hems and bodices always seemed like mourning clothes even when he was alive. The man loved black lace, jet beads, fringe, skulls, crosses and bones–all from a design perspective almost evocations of death, loss, fragility and sadness. Wildly inventive and, in retrospect, stunningly directional (his 1992 graduate collection from Central St Martins, which was immediately purchased by the influential stylist Isabella Blow, featured the innovative, sculptural tailoring and raw selvedge hems now familia on trendy boutique racks everywhere), McQueen embodied in every respect the tortured artist obsessed with the romantic drama of that role.

With the staging of Savage Beauty, the Metropolitan’s Costume Institute has played this to the hilt. An overblown full length cape of black taffeta was further blown by a hidden wind machine as a recording of wolves baying to the moon played in the near pitch-dark background. A barn board floor supporting McQueen’s “Highland Rape” tartans was splintered, as if by a maniac wielding an axe as a punk version of “God Saves the Queen” screeched and howled.

“I don’t really get inspired by specific women”, McQueen is quoted in one display. “It’s more in the minds of the women in the past like Catherine the Great or Marie Antoinette, people who were doomed.” Or, “I find beauty in the grotesque…like most artists I have to force people to look at things.” In his hands, pain itself is an aesthetic: a classic French damask bleeds into drips of blood, a neckline of a dress is savagely ripped open.

Seeing them on display in a museum it is inarguable that McQueen’s clothes are sculpture and that fashion can be art (and, clearly, that this art form can appeal to a lot of people). What is interesting is how much of what we see as art has to do with pain and sadness. And how much we have romanticised the artist who self-destructively brings about his or her own death. Since the days of the Romantic poets, maybe even the death-obsessed Hamlet, gloom and doom has been an enduringly attractive leitmotif. So much so that it is hard to imagine revering the work of anyone who paints candy-box sunny skies or is relentlessly upbeat.

Is it possible that we require our artists to adopt a style of being tortured and miserable in order to be taken seriously? Or that art that doesn’t appear to require its’ creator to tear themselves to shreds to produce it we don’t see as worthwhile?

The week that I managed to see the McQueen show happened by chance to be the very same week that poor doomed Amy Winehouse—the self-destructive train wreck that everybody watched die on youtube—was found dead at 27. One couldn’t help thinking of all the young, brilliantly gifted and very sad artists who died well before their time just like Alexander McQueen did while admiring his beautifully melancholy and tortured clothes.