The fashion designer who hated women

Published Feb 9, 2015

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London – The extraordinary biography of fashion designer Alexander McQueen confirms what many of us have suspected from his designs: the guy was a serious basket case.

McQueen’s madness took many forms. He was impulsive, irascible and irresponsible. He was disloyal, ungrateful and fickle. He betrayed friends and lovers alike. He had a voracious appetite for drink, drugs and seedy sex.

From the beginning, the clues were in the clothes: operatic fantasies, dark, nightmarish visions of womanhood, sado-masochistic in tendency, cartoonishly feminine in form.

Were he alive today, the makers of Fifty Shades Of Grey would doubtless have commissioned him to design a lavish set of accessories for the movie.

Like EL James’s bestseller, there was something in McQueen’s maniacal vision that, perhaps against our better judgment, spoke to the dark, oft-suppressed corners of the female psyche.

What made him even harder to resist was the fact that his insanity was underpinned by talent, training and - in contrast to so many designers - exquisite tailoring.

Through Andrew Wilson’s book Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin (to be released later in January) , we see everything about him seemed to capture this tension - between talent and hype, innocence and perversion, love and debauchery.

It’s hardly surprising. For in the years before his death, McQueen confided that he had been sexually abused from the age of nine or ten – by his brother-in-law.

Such appalling damage had to work its way out somehow, and the anger was palpable in his collections. Many of his most famous designs bordered on the perverse, if not perverted.

There was a bridal gown that made the wearer look like she was trapped in a straitjacket, her mouth a silent agony of smudged lipstick.

And who can forget the stratospherically high and weirdly misshapen shoes, disturbingly reminiscent of the cruel and misogynistic practice of Chinese foot-binding.

Ah, misogyny. Many gay men adore women – not for nothing has the idea of the ‘gay best friend’ become a staple of female culture. But not McQueen.

The only woman he loved was his dear old mum, Joyce; all the others seem to have been objects of loathing – save, that is, for a few supermodels like Kate Moss, but then they are hardly ‘ordinary’ women.

As to womanhood in general, he seemed to despise us as a species from the start (his debut collection was entitled ‘Jack the Ripper Stalks his Victims’).

Look how he mistreated Isabella Blow, the eccentric aristocratic fashion stylist who launched his career, buying that first blood-splattered collection, and suffered vicious cruelty in return.

Of course, McQueen wasn’t the first misogynistic male fashion designer - nor will he be the last.

John Galliano’s unfavourable views on women are well-known, as are those of Karl ‘no one wants to see curvy women’ Lagerfeld.

But no one epitomised better than McQueen the almost sado-masochistic relationship between women and the world of high fashion.

A world that tortures and humiliates us with endless, unfeasible demands, from unflattering shapes to impossible necklines.

A world that sneers at our petty desires to stay warm and dry. A world that makes us regard our natural curves as at best an inconvenience, at worst an abomination to be destroyed through dieting.

And yet, like the infamous Mr Grey in Fifty Shades, it somehow has us coming back time and again for more - and charging us handsomely for the privilege.

McQueen was a genius all right. But however much one might admire his work, it should never detract from the fact that, like so many who thrive in the high-octane, morally ambiguous world of high fashion, he was also a monster who hated women.

Daily Mail

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