ALEXANDER McQUEEN Voss S/S 2001

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1 ALEXANDER McQUEEN Voss S/S 2001 Gothic breaks boundaries and closes the gap between binaries of social normalcy to evoke fear and wonder. With origins from the Medieval and the nineteenth century Gothic Revival, such gothic theories as the Sublime (Burke, 1757), the Uncanny (Freud, 1919), and the Abject (Kristeva, 1982) can be applied to contemporary moments. With twentieth century modernity and the advancement of technology, film and television became the mobiliser for the gothic genre, depicting many characters from traditional gothic literature, such as Bram Stoker s Count Dracula and Mary Shelley s monster Frankenstein. Gothicism is capable of visual impact in the extreme, such as the painting The Scream (Munch, 1893), the 1976 film Carrie (De Palma) and, when the fashion industry exploded in the 1990s, perhaps most prolific was the work of designer Alexander McQueen ( ). Lee Alexander McQueen was brought up in London and inspired by the gothic and dark romanticism of the city. Fascinated by history, McQueen utilizes neo-gothic architecture in a number of his shows, with echoes of literature and poetry such as The Raven (1845) by Edgar Allen Poe and Whispers of Immortality (1920) by T.S. Eliot. His shows were often criticized as being misogynist and sadomasochist McQueen said, People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality (Savage Beauty, no date) closing the gap between civilisation and passion. On 26 September 2000, McQueen delivered his Spring/Summer 2001 collection show Voss, a spectacle of tension that provoked terror and awe from the audience, an exhibition structured around the sublime. Ann Radcliffe s distinction between terror and horror is relevant as she says, the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them (1826). To Radcliffe, terror merely hints at the terrible and is morally good for the viewer, for example the bloodred of the vermilion gown (Image 3), whereas horror is explicitly brutal, so much so that it is morally bad and even damaging, for example the disturbing masked nude (Image 4). Voss manipulates gothic themes such as nature, insanity, and sexuality. The title is a celebration of nature referring to a Norwegian town renowned as a wildlife habitat (Wilcox, 2015) but this is drastically contrasted by the scenography of a mental institution or experimental laboratory, a traditional clashing of the natural and the scientific or unnatural. PAGE 1

2 The contemporary space of a London warehouse is made to look like an asylum with mirrors and padded walls, directly bringing associations with psychoanalysis, but more importantly with that which should be hidden. Freud theorized the strange yet familiar as the uncanny (unheimlich, literally meaning unhomely ), to look inside the human psyche at things that are hidden and that arouses dread and creeping horror (1919). The gothic narrative in many ways relies upon the uncanny, as the things that are most dreadful and strange come from what is also familiar, and so did McQueen, who said, I m about what goes through people s minds, the stuff that people don t want to admit or face up to. The shows are about what s buried in people s psyches (AMQ Savage Beauty, no date), which links to Freud s ideas of repression of infantile fantasies that project the narcissistic ego. This theory is interesting to consider in Voss when considering mirrors and notions of hysteria. IMAGE 1. Availble from: [Accessed 8 November 2015] The mirrored box creates a complex structure of perceptions and perspectives the audience can see from the darkness the models within, who are sharply lit and cannot see without. Reflections of the models contained inside are involuntary repetitions of the self, indicative of the uncanny double or doppelgänger. Each model reacts theatrically to her own reflection, the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own (Freud, 1919), and it is the sensuous interaction with the mirrored self (that from an outside perspective is enticing the audience) that provokes our fear of madness that is implied. The women show a sexual drive that is PAGE 2

3 unnatural to the traditional asexual expectation of women and related to insanity, a theme that is fundamentally gothic; McQueen said, I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress, (AMQ Savage Beauty, no date) and this is fully at play in Voss (Image 1). In addition each model, in majority, is ignorant or even blind to the others existence that can be interpreted in a number of ways. In retrospect of the uncanny, at times the models suggest a transgression to childlike narcissism, at other times they suggest automata and the absence of a soul. The milieu of the natural and animalistic suggests Herbert Spencer s survival of the fittest as each figure is prowling the confines of their territory. This has gothic connotations because it crosses boundaries of social norms and a dangerous ego that is not controlled and needs to be restrained, linking to sublimity which states that beauty is characterized by order, harmony and proportion, whereas sublime experiences are excessive to shock us out of the limits of everyday life (Bowen, no date), elements that establish McQueen s Gothicism. The models are wearing white head bindings defeminize gender and allude to hospital bandages, hinting at medical intrusion and fabricating terror. Their physical presence in McQueen s asylum show is threatening; tics, convulsions and manic laughter are evocative of nervous disorders. In psychoanalysis, Freud identified these as symptoms of hysteria, a disease peculiar to women who experience physical symptoms from emotional repression of traumatic events, if the reaction is suppressed, the affect remains attached to the memory (Freud & Breuer, 1919). The repression of women as subservient to men was not confronted and McQueen uses the politics of this to empower women to the point of terror. The notion of medical scrutiny adds terror to depictions of madness and incarceration (Wilcox, 2015). Andrew Bolton suggests that McQueen was seeking the sublime, citing Immanuel Kant, whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless (2015), giving meaning to the designer s desire to break down social boundaries with a voice of directness and fearlessness that was anti-establishment, anti-pomposity and wanted to prick the bubble of fashion (Wilcox, 2015). When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are, simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they maybe and they are delightful (Burke 1757). The distance between the models and the audience is crucial in McQueen s creation of the sublime. The possibilities within the box are limitless and effect astonishment, Burke explains, that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. PAGE 3

4 The natural is beautiful but dangerous, implicated by pieces like the razor-clam dress and the mussel-shell bodice (Image 2), inspired by life s ebb and flow, McQueen was enthralled by nature: its beauty, its complexity, its cruelty, it limitlessness, its decomposition, but above all by its potential (Faiers, 2015). They demonstrate McQueen s belief in the fragile but regenerative power of fashion (Wilcox, 2015) as an artistic moment that is fleeting. Model Erin O Connor tears the razor-lam shells from the dress in a sensuous melancholy, a romancing of decay and destruction that brings us close to the sublime as a reminder of pain and death, the idea of pain, in its highest degree, is much stronger than the highest degree of pleasure (Burke, 1757). Burke says that obscurity is necessary to create something terrible, how greatly night adds to our dread, and this scene is obscured by darkness and the spotlight is ghostly. IMAGE 2. Available from: [Accessed 8 November 2015]. McQueen s designs exude gothic elements. The vermilion ensemble modeled by Erin O Connor (Wilcox, 2015) is a direct clash of nature and science (Image 3). O Connor is an image of decadent sexuality and dissected bodies (Spooner, 2015), a metamorphosis of woman and bird in a skirt of black ostrich feathers that are drowned by the blood red of the PAGE 4

5 hand-painted medical slides that construct the bodice; a grotesque suggestion of the exposed viscera, the blood beneath the skin (Townsend, 2015). The colours are violently connotative of death and fragility, the dress seems to whisper Eliot s immortal notion of, the skull beneath the skin that McQueen was fascinated by. Though this theatrical garment is beautiful, the things that are hinted at the mind imagines worse and the implied brutality infers disgust and the abject. Bodily fluids, like blood or dung, question the self-contained form of the human body and confront our fear of death. Kristeva says, if dung signifies the other side of the border the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything (1982), and when examining McQueen s design, the skin appears as though peeled from the flesh. The idea of designer as surgeon is anchored in this collection as McQueen is altering and dissecting pale, fragile female bodies, a radically Gothic view of the body as surface that can be made and remade (Spooner, 2015), where fabric appears as a skin like the feathered vermilion gown. IMAGE 3. Available from: [Accessed 8 November 2015]. PAGE 5

6 The finale is a display intent on shocking the audience, as the glass smashes perhaps effecting violence and superstition and McQueen recreates the image of Joel-Peter Witkin s Sanitarium (1983), a voluptuous 20-stone nude sucking in the breath of a monkey through transparent tubes (Brown, 2015). Witkin was a photographer whose work was disturbing and explored themes of death and the outcast, like McQueen who finds beauty in the ugly. The naked female figure locked in the glass clinical box is a deliberate contrast to the slender models in order to confront what is dictated to be normal by society (Image 4). McQueen has said, I want to be honest about the world we live in and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work (AMQ Savage Beauty, no date), something that gothic novels tried to do. The narrative of Voss is set in a place away from reality to be able to comment on and expose social issues, on which the fetish writer Michelle Olley who posed for the show said, the idea that we are trapped by our civilized, socially approved identities is massively important. It causes women so much suffering (Brown, 2015). IMAGE 4. Available from: [Accessed 8 November 2015]. Voss is a show that can be viewed as abjection of McQueen s inner troubles, using gothic conventions and themes to express it. The medium creates an opportunity for escapism in PAGE 6

7 line with the sublime. Themes of death, insanity, and sexuality are sewn into nature but are also insignificant and McQueen uses fashion to display the transience and fragility of human life, relating to our insignificance as human beings. Power is in the longevity of existence. The sublimity of nature is a limitless tool to express because we are insignificant in comparison. Voss is a staging of conflicted binaries that create Gothic in McQueen s work. This collection of binaries could be; sanity and insanity, civilisation and passion, ephemeral and infinite, beautiful and ugly, nature and science, pleasure and pain, limited and limitless, and perhaps the most conflicted of all, life and death. In seeking sublimity, McQueen seems to replicate extreme emotional reaction in order to try to understand that which is beyond our reach. (1864 words) PAGE 7

8 BIBLIOGRAPHY AMQ Savage Beauty (no date). Available from: [Accessed 8 November 2015]. Bolton, A. (2015). In Search of the Sublime. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Bowen, R. (no date). Gothic motifs. Available from: [Accessed 8 November 2015]. Brown, S. (2015). Nightmares and Dreams. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Burke, E. (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Faiers, J. (2015). Nature Boy. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Freud, S. (1919). The Uncanny. Freud, S. and Breuer, J. (1895). The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena. Studies in Hysteria. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Radcliffe, A. (1826). On the Supernatural in Poetry. Spooner, C. (2015). A Gothic Mind. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Townsend, E. (2015). Memento Mori. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Wilcox, C. (2015). Edward Scissorhands. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, Wilcox, C (2015). Voss. In: Encyclopaedia of Collections. Alexander McQueen. London: V&A Publishing, 312. PAGE 8