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Alexander McQueen: Demolition Derby Chic

If you thought that deconstructed fashion was radical, then take a look at the latest collection from Alexander McQueen, where every look contained some piece of detritus from our contemporary civilization.

Dedicated to his mother, Joyce Barbara McQueen, the show was staged on Tuesday, March 10 in Paris’ famed Marcel Cerdan boxing ring, but the place was reinvented with a an enormous trash heap – "Close Encounters of a Third Kind" large – composed of car debris, used tires, wrecked computers, dead TV sets and various parts of former McQueen shows.

Most of the headgear, too, was made up of empty beer cans, tied together with plastic tape, and worn over models whose deathly pale faces were made more grotesque by huge rouge clown lips. Other hats were miniature umbrellas, flowerpots, lampshades, a supermarket shopping bag and a three-dimensional halo.

However, don’t get the impression that this collection was just weird. The show featured lots of great clothes, from the giant collar houndstooth series that opened the proceedings and a perfect thirties suit in a broken pattern version of the same fabric that looked like it had been dipped in spice. Leggings in a larger print version of the same pattern will be huge hits.

The collection was so rich that one had a moment of free associaton connecting each look with various images deposited in the back of the memory. One particularly outlandish leather coat seemed like a like King Crimson album cover and another black Aran sweater dress looked like a mythical Celtic goddess exiting the black Atlantic of Donegal in Ireland. Another epiphany was the remarkable Escher print dresses.

Entitled “The House of Plenty,” the show contained a very bizarre cast of characters, even by the standards of McQueen, who has one of fashion’s most fertile imaginations.
There were deranged Miss Havershams in jagged tweed, bag ladies in bubble wrap coats, mistresses in swirling orange prints, S and M highwaywomen in sharded chiffon bustiers and a society hostess in a superb snake print column. The result made "Grey Gardens" look like "Gossip Girl."

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