McQueen’s grounded angels

What do you say about a 40-year-old designer who has died? That he was extraordinarily talented? That he was inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Hugo van der Goes and Sandro Botticelli?

Or that the last collection designed by Lee Alexander McQueen, shown on the second-to-last day of Paris fashion week, said it all.

Composed of the 15 looks McQueen had cut and draped himself in preparation for the season and the shoes he had prototyped and displayed in a tiny salon in an ornate building, the show was eerily elegiac, inspired, as his studio noted, by “Byzantine art, the carvings of Grinling Gibbons, and Old Master paintings”

So it began with cocktail dresses tight and stripped down as a leotard on top, but decorated by tracings of the most elaborate (literally) gold embroidery or scenes from Bosch’s triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights”, ending in a dropped-waist skirt composed of hundreds of little folds, to create volume without a crinoline. There were gorgeously tailored flares paired with a jacket nipped in at the waist and folded into a peplum at the bottom and leg o’mutton sleeves, both in a gold jacquard filled by flying angels, and there was a black cape cut from one piece of fabric and edged in 24-carat thread – as much a technical puzzle as a visual stimulus.

And finally there were evening dresses in silver grey and white, printed with mirror images of the Virgin Mary with angel wings on the shoulder blades, woven densely at the bodice and descending into airy folds of chiffon at the skirt; a crimson and gold cape over an equally papal column; and a jacket of gold feathers over an exploding tulle skirt. The jacket took McQueen’s atelier three-and-a-half weeks to create and they finished it just before the show began. The fabrics had been designed and specially woven to meld elements from the different artworks into a single swath of material, the platforms on the shoes gilded and hand-
carved with angels, yet in its simplicity of form it was one of the most generous (which is to say, wearable) collections McQueen created.

Whatever the designer was thinking when he took the imagery of heaven, hell, and archangels as his own, the result was prophetic, romantic – and fully grounded.

He will be missed.