Life And Fashion Of Alexander Mcqueen

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Timeless Fashion and Art Lives ON JULY 16, 2011 BY Bianca V London Fashion Week was paused this past Monday for the ringing of somber bells. St. Paul’s Cathedral filled with designers, actresses, family and friends gathered for the funeral of Alexander McQueen, the renegade genius designer who committed suicide before his fashion show last February at the age of forty. McQueen was known for a certain macabre attitude toward life and dress. He found the gruesome glorious and found beauty in the shudders and ashes of life. Although he was revered in the fashion world on the basis of his precise tailoring and perfection of fit, like all great artists he twisted the traditional and even tortured it. Grand theatrics were a consistent theme of his fashion shows, which have variously featured huge living trees, live wolves, holograms and automobile spray-paint machines — not to mention the premier of the Lady Gaga song, “Bad Romance,” which crashed the website where the show streamed live. Through these eccentric stagings, McQueen always presented a clear message in his shows. From the fleeting nature of celebrity to the promise of soft escape from a painful world, he usually expressed that intersection of life and death known as the bittersweet. McQueen walked fields of land mines and wasn’t afraid to set them off with his walking stick. He usually managed to step away in time. A fond theme of McQueen was Victorian Gothic, a tale told in raven feathers, lace and binding corsetry. He drew upon the original mourning dress, which became trendy in England after Queen Victoria’s beloved husband King Albert died, and she wore only black for the rest of her life. Ironically, mourning dress became an elaborate ritual with layers of skirts and veils and jewelry made of human hair — all properly coordinated, of course. What was intended to be ascetic became

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