![]() ![]() ![]() "And he said he wanted the sound of African animals at night." Costin and Chaudoir had to pull it all together quickly on a slim budget, as usual for McQueen: $100,000 for everything. "He told me how he wanted the audience lit, with a degradation of lighting like fabric dyeing," Chaudoir remembers. McQueen called Simon Chaudoir for lighting and sound. "Let's do that!" McQueen also said he liked the malevolent urban atmosphere of Uli Edel's 1989 violent drama Last Exit to Brooklyn. "Oh yeah!" McQueen exclaimed after he viewed it. ![]() McQueen had never seen the film, so Costin showed it to him. Costin got the idea from the dramatic closing scene of Arthur Penn's classic Bonnie and Clyde, when the bank-robbing duo was mowed down by law officers in a hail of bullets. As he fondled the hair, he deadpanned: "This is an assistant who didn't work out."Ĭostin then suggested they wall in the space with huge sheets of corrugated metal punctured with holes, as if it had been blasted by machine-gun fire. He grabbed another outfit-a cowhide dress that had blond human hair sewed into it. Costin mentioned the car accident scene in Irvin Kershner's spooky 1978 thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, and proposed to use derelict cars as set decor. "The savagery of the natural world." McQueen was also "talking about car crashes," he remembers. "His mood boards were covered with blow-ups of images from National Geographic of gazelles being torn apart by tigers or lions," Costin says. "Now it's lovely, with cafés and Whole Foods, but then it was rough."Ĭostin went to see McQueen at his Hoxton Square studio to talk about the collection and show. "The Borough Market was really rough then," says art director Simon Costin, who was hired to do the set. It was a beat-up macadam spread tucked under elevated train tracks near London Bridge. With the help of his show producers Sam Gainsbury and Anna Whiting, McQueen chose an old Victorian outdoor fruit and vegetable market known as the Borough Market in Southeast London as the venue. Fashion is a jungle full of nasty, bitchy hyenas." "I watched those gazelles getting munched by lions and hyenas and said, 'That's me!' Someone's chasing me all the time, and if I'm caught, they'll pull me down. McQueen came up with the idea while viewing a television documentary on Thomson's gazelles. Polaroid from the Newsweek cover shoot of McQueen and models wearing clothes from his landmark It's a Jungle Out There women's wear show, March, 1997 Mark Arbeit He titled the show "It's a Jungle Out There." What follows is an excerpt from my book Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.Īt the end of February, just five weeks after McQueen's Givenchy couture fiasco-which by then he had agreed was "crap"-it was time for him to present his namesake collection in London. They both ended, tragically, with his suicide in February 2011 at the age of 40. McQueen went on superstardom, but his career and life were slowly destroyed by drug addiction and depression. It was one of the most hilarious and sad afternoons of my life. Happily, my editors agreed, and I interviewed McQueen for a story that made the cover of Newsweek International during Paris Fashion Week in March 1997. That's what I wanted to capture in my article. For me, McQueen was the most courageous soul in fashion at the time-maybe ever. In less than eight weeks, he had two more shows, his own brand's collection in London and his first Givenchy women's wear outing in Paris. (Pieces from it have since been copied by lesser designers and hailed as genius).ĭespite the savage reviews-and they were savage-McQueen picked himself up and headed straight back to work. McQueen's debut there-the Spring-Summer 1997 couture show of gold and white Grecian-inspired clothes at the École des Beaux Arts-was deemed by critics and clients as an utter failure. Bernard Arnault, chairman of the luxury group Moët Hennessey Louis Vuitton-LVMH, saw this and, in the fall of 1996, hired McQueen to take over as creative head of the venerable French couture house of Givenchy. In addition to the controversial, headline-making spectacles, what set McQueen apart from his confreres was his talent: he was an artist with exceptional tailoring skills, honed as a teenage apprentice on Savile Row. ![]() Naomi Campbell in McQueen's first Givenchy show, Haute Couture Spring-Summer 2007, inspired by ancient Greece and presented at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in January, 1997 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |