Zeewan Lee Address: P.O.

Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

Biography: Zeewan Lee is a senior at Duke University double majoring in English and political science. Much concerned and interested in art, she plans to combine her interest in aesthetics/design, politics, and writing by pursuing a career in urban design and planning.

The Grotesque is Beautiful: Alexander McQueens World of Fashion

Elegance is refusal. - Coco Chanel

Some may say that the day of Alexander McQueens death or rather, suicide means a great loss to the world, a complete stoppage of influx of the genius McQueen wholly encased in his designs. However, as distorted as the words may sound, I view his death as one of McQueens greatest accomplishments. In his works of art, McQueen had often played with the notion of death and the deadly; he had done so by incorporating in his designs ideas and themes that could be best described as nonexistent and nonliving and hellish, indicative of death: war, rape, violence, fear, destruction, distortion, etc. For McQueen, who had constantly thrust himself and his work of art closer to the notion of death than any other artists of his time, the day of his suicide was almost climactic in that he went not only close to but also past the threshold of death. Lee Alexander McQueen is my favorite designer whom I consider to be one of the greatest artists of all time. He was a British fashion designer and a couturier also known as LEnfant Terrible, a title he got out of his notorious 1995 collection called the Highland Rape. If asked to define McQueens work, I would describe it is a harmony of the irreconcilable, an intermingling of opposite extremes. Even before McQueen created his own clothing line, McQueens designs had always been both feeble and fierce. His genuine talent enabled him to treat morbidity with such elegance and life that his work was less about making wearable clothing and more about delivering via fashion the initially incompatible concepts beauty and ugliness, tranquility and chaos, etc., in a perfect harmony in order to provoke, to shock. I believe the overarching theme as well as the ultimate objective of McQueens works was the grotesque. The grotesque was an end in itself to which McQueen aspired, and it was also a means by which he hoped to achieve the end. Now, in art, unlike in literature, the term grotesque is not
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Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

equivalent to ugly. What differentiates the term from the purely and wholly ugly is the duality inherent in grotesque. In other words, for something to be grotesque, it has to be strange and familiar, fantastical and real, beautiful and yet disgusting. The term ought to invoke in viewers both a feeling of bizarreness and empathy. Upon sensing the complexity of feelings the grotesque more specifically, the gorgeousness within the grotesque arouses from its viewers, one will find oneself infatuated with the grotesque. Grotesque is mesmerizing because it is a rare kind of a beauty far from the standard. The concept of grotesque sticks in ones mind in part because one can neither forgive nor understand oneself for sensing both beauty and repulsion in one thing. Then, one cannot help but wonder if what he or she sees and feels is

what is truly there. McQueen shared a similar kind of obsession with the grotesque and was fascinated with the idea in that he found beauty in the grotesque.1

Nevertheless, in some of his mostly earlier collections McQueen fell short of fully depicting the grotesque and its duality, and captured mostly its pure ugliness: frightening, uncomfortable, and almost offensive. For instance, in one of his earliest collections called Highland Rape, McQueen featured tattered and tampon-strewn dresses and played with the notion of sexual violence and genocide. In another controversial collection, the stage was made of a garbage heap of scrap metals, and McQueens models with their oversized, sex-doll lips (above, left), painfully theatrical costumes (below, left), and hats made out of trashcan lids (above, right) seemed far from beautiful in any sense. These infamous collections irked enough people so that some fashion critiques even accused McQueen of being a misogynist, guilty of distorting the beauty of human existence, especially that of females.
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http://www.fashioncraz.com/alexander-mcqueen-in-his-own-words/

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

In their outright ugliness, McQueens early works were reminiscent of paintings of a mid-18th century Spanish painter Francisco Goya. Themes prevalent in Goyas paintings as well as his aesthetic renditions of the themes were often obscene and grotesque. As in the early works of McQueen, the demonic dimension of the grotesque in Goyas works for example, a devilish-looking man with a gargoyle face and bloodshot eyes (below, left), or an anthropophagus with a crazed, almost excited look on his face and blood on his lips (below, right), both in pitch black backgrounds was not hard to notice, because the artist shoved it right in the viewers face, wanting them to be shocked and repulsed.

As time elapsed, however, the demonic dimensions of the grotesque were gradually attenuated in McQueens designs. McQueen began to associate with grotesque not only the ugly but also a kind of beauty. The grotesque in McQueens later works was more complete in its duality as McQueen incorporated both repulsive and more serene and sublime qualities to his designs. The ugliness once so visible in his designs that it outshined everything else became subtler and more nuanced. McQueens grotesque in its evolved form emulated less the horrific grotesque of Goya and more the fantastic grotesque of Kris Kuksi, an American sculptor and an artist. Kuksis art spoke of a timelessness-potentiality and motion attempting to reach on forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep 2. This
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http://kuksi.com/

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

beautiful and accurate definition of Kuksis work (below) depicts exactly what McQueens later designs encapsulated. Just as in Kuksis arts, the notion of the grotesque was less apparent in themes and issues McQueen addressed in his designs. Instead, what made viewers uncomfortable were the outrageous combinations of colors (the first two pictures shown below) and incomprehensible, out-of-place shapes (all four below).

<Four pictures above, going clockwise from the upper left corner: Kuksi, McQueen, McQueen, Kuksi>

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

Towards the end of his career, McQueen magnified the sense of sublime beauty within the grotesque to the extent that his work became similar to that of Amedeo Modigliani, an early 20th century Italian artist. While unsettling due to the curious eeriness in the exaggerations of the forms, elongations of human body parts, and dead gazes (left), figures in Modiglianis works of art represented yet another version of the grotesque: a sublime type. Modiglianis works are excellent examples that show even a sense of serenity can serve as a vehicle for the grotesque. McQueen in his latest designs successfully captured the same queer serenity and lightness of being present in Modiglianis paintings.

<Above, from left to right: McQueen, Modigliani, McQueen>

Comparing the more nuanced and serene grotesque to the more outright, I believe the former is more powerful because its nuance enables it to encapsulate raw energy within itself as opposed to holding out the energy for it to evaporate almost immediately. Somehow I find the subtlety of McQueens later grotesque render his designs to be more aesthetic. One may wonder why McQueens designs are compared to paintings and drawings instead of other couture designs in this essay. I believe that such comparisons between McQueens
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Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

works and paintings do the designer justice, because while worked with fabrics, McQueens designs were something to see instead of wear around. In this manner, the designers works of art are more similar to paintings than to fashionable Balmain jackets or Chanel trousers. McQueen in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection was at his best3, both in terms of artistry and achieving the perfect duality within its grotesque. Titled Platos Atlantis, it was McQueens last womens collection before his death. In the show, McQueen cast an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdown: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea, a nod to the idea that we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves4. The entire show was a reversal of Darwins Theory of Evolution in that McQueen made it that we human beings came from the land and would eventually go back into the sea.

While McQueen got the idea for this collection from H. R. Giger5 (below), a Swiss surrealist painter whose main theme for his work of art is the rampant proliferation of the most demonic grotesque, McQueens designs in the collection surpassed the bounds of the horrific grotesque. Instead, McQueen here exhibited a complete mastery of finding and capturing elegance in the macabre. Before this collection, McQueens grotesque had a hint of elegance, but the quality
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Here is a link to the 2010 S/S collection: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0I http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.html 5 http://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htm

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

did not have a strong impact on the viewers because the focus was definitely on the ugliness of the grotesque, which McQueen depicted with the intention of taking something of the world people in [his fashion] world dont want to see and bring it to them6 and force them to watch it7. Because the impact of the outright hideousness and bizarreness expressed in themes of war, religion, sex, etc., was too strong in McQueens previous collections, many failed to appreciate the utmost tranquility, elegance, and grace inherent in the idea of grotesque.

<From left to right: Giger, McQueen in 2010 S/S, Giger>

Nevertheless, in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection I daresay for the first time in his career McQueen made it crystal clear that elegance existed within his grotesque. McQueens models on the runway with alienlike facial protrusions, reptilian digital prints, and extreme anteater shoes made the viewers wince and sigh with awe at the same time. With their gangly legs sucked in the gigantic, monstrously high heels whose shape reminds of the round exoskeleton of a beetle (left), the models looked like they were floating in an airless space, their feet used
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McQueen, in an interview with the BBC. McQueen 2002

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

not to walk but to paddle aimlessly in the vacuum; their shoes served as flippers. These creatures on the catwalk imbued a sense of otherworldliness: they were at a cross-section of butterflies and humans and fishes. Regardless of what they really were, however, it was not hard for people to see the beauty McQueen had encased in their strange ugliness and soon people discovered the encasement separating the beauty and the ugly tearing away. And the revelation came the grotesque was beautiful. Some features of McQueens presentation in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection were the same and just as good as his previous collections. His designs in this collection, like before, gave the feeling that they lay outside time as they featured both tradition and postmodernity; there were hints of tradition in that there existed in this collection an emphasis on shoulders with padded and jeweled shoulder rolls and slashed upper sleeves that reminded of fashion in the Elizabethan era; in the meantime, the collection also imbued a sense of postmodernity, a sense of an ontological emptiness that is a characteristic of postmodernity, that was intent upon the destruction (deconstruction) of great truths modernity had once created. The same powerful energy that had mesmerized viewers in his previous shows was manifest in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection through the ghost-like mannerisms of McQueens stoic, haunting cast of models. These models in McQueens shows were forms of duality: the estrangement of the living and the personification of the dead. I miss Alexander McQueens painstakingly aggressive aesthetic. I miss his bizarre celebration of the immaterial and his mastery of compressing life and death, the grotesque and ornament, and the feeble and the fierce. I, along with millions of others, will remember McQueens bold acknowledgment of socially imposed otherism and celebration of the ignored and the ugly by making them the essence of his shows. Fashion will never be quite as interesting again.

*** For your reference, I have included links to the full show of McQueens Spring/Summer 2010 Collection below: (Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embedded (Part 2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=related

Zeewan Lee Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708 Cell: 919-208-9958

Email: zeewanish@gmail.com

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Alexandra McKnight, Grace Kohut, Margrette Kuhrt, and Andrew Brown for their insights and feedback. Without their willing attempts to read through and to make sense of the nonsense I had put in my earlier drafts, I would not have gotten to where I am now with this piece. This piece is not a work solely of mine, but of my entire writing group. Thank you so much. My next thanks must go to Professor Joseph Harris for his invaluable guidance. My discussing my paper with him made me understand the piece better, and gave me ideas as to how to go about improving the piece. Lastly, thank you, Alexander McQueen, for prompting me to write this piece. You and your genius will be forever missed by your fans, including myself and as Margrette has noted Lady Gaga.