Why Alexander McQueen’s Vision is More Relevant Now Than Ever

It’s a weird time to be thinking about the fashion industry and what it means to the culture.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted many of the fault lines around the business’ current (well, until March 2020) preoccupations: “destination shows” without much, if any, specialness; the flimsy and porous clout of certain influencers; and a dogged need for speed, which many hope will slow down once the viral air clears. 

On the bright side, designers and labels have shifted their output to help combat the present situation, in as big a way as the Paris-based luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, which has been producing free hand sanitizer for French hospitals, to gestures such as independent houses sewing facemasks from leftover seasonal fabric. The point: like many enterprises, this one is in both a reactive state and in turmoil, and it is too soon to reach any conclusions about how fashion will function in the future.

But there’s something in fashion’s recent past that is holding up with notable relevance, right now: the work of Lee Alexander McQueen, who died by suicide just over ten years ago. He was only 40. 

Ironically, it’s hard to land on a current designer whose creativity feels apropos of this surreal new decade and its expected “new normal.” Much of what McQueen made revolved around themes of death, horror, psychological tolls and deep-seated anxieties, and frustrations with corporate complexes and political ineptitude alike. Sound familiar? But he did so in a way that sourced beauty from “the ugly.” His commitment to creativity, in facing what amounted to endless personal demons, rarely faltered. He permitted his audiences and buyers to flee or to flit or to trudge into the shadows by saying that gloominess will always be around, it is human to live with and to live through it, so we might as well embrace it.