Alexander McQueen and the enduring power of an image
Editorial by Gulfiya Yebergenova | ARRVL
In March 2006, at the close of Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter collection The Widows of Culloden, the runway darkened and a figure began to materialise inside a glass pyramid. Kate Moss appeared almost weightless, surrounded by layers of pale fabric that moved around her body before her image gradually dissolved.
For a few minutes, Moss existed somewhere between model, moving image and memory. It was an ending conceived as disappearance, yet it became one of McQueen’s most enduring images.
The moment is often remembered for its technological effect. Its real significance, however, lies elsewhere. It distilled many of the tensions that had long occupied McQueen: history and futurism, beauty and unease, discipline and fantasy, the physical body and its transformation through clothes.
THE DISCIPLINE BEHIND THE DRAMA
Long before the theatrical runways, there was tailoring.
Born Lee Alexander McQueen in London in 1969, McQueen entered fashion through the traditional discipline of Savile Row, apprenticing at Anderson & Sheppard before moving to Gieves & Hawkes. Further experience in theatrical costuming and with designers including Koji Tatsuno and Romeo Gigli preceded his master’s degree at Central Saint Martins.
That training remained visible throughout his career.
However provocative the presentation became, McQueen understood construction with unusual precision. He could alter the perception of the body because he understood how a conventional garment was supposed to sit upon it.
His tailoring sharpened shoulders, manipulated hips and elongated or exposed the torso. The famous low-rise “bumster” trousers shifted attention towards the base of the spine and challenged established proportions. Corsetry could appear protective in one collection and restrictive in another.
McQueen did not abandon the rules of tailoring. He learned them closely enough to know exactly where they could be broken.
HISTORY, WITHOUT NOSTALGIA
History was equally fundamental to McQueen’s vocabulary, although rarely treated sentimentally.
The Widows of Culloden referred to the Battle of Culloden of 1746 and drew upon McQueen’s Scottish heritage. It revisited territory he had confronted much earlier in Highland Rape, but the anger of the earlier collection had evolved into something more melancholic.
Tartan, lace, feathers and historically informed silhouettes moved through the collection alongside references to nature and the Highlands. Bodies appeared tightly controlled in one look and almost untamed in the next.
McQueen’s use of the past was never simply decorative. Historical references became material to be dismantled and reconstructed, allowing clothes to carry ideas about identity, power, violence, inheritance and loss.
It is one reason his work resists being reduced to spectacle. The theatre was visible; beneath it sat a highly considered system of references.
THE APPARITION
The appearance of Kate Moss at the collection’s conclusion was therefore not an isolated theatrical flourish.
Moss was then emerging from a period of extraordinary tabloid scrutiny that had resulted in the loss of several commercial contracts. McQueen had publicly supported her. Her presence in the finale inevitably carried that recent history with it.
Yet she did not walk onto the runway.
Instead, her recorded figure appeared within the pyramid through an illusion derived from the nineteenth-century theatrical technique known as Pepper’s Ghost. Moving in a pale, billowing dress, Moss seemed simultaneously present and inaccessible.
McQueen took one of the world’s most photographed women and removed the physical woman from the room.
That reversal is what gives the sequence much of its force. A figure whose image had been reproduced relentlessly by contemporary media was transformed into something deliberately elusive.
The effect also reflected McQueen’s ability to collapse different periods into a single fashion image. A nineteenth-century illusion, references to early moving-image culture and contemporary digital production existed alongside a collection preoccupied with eighteenth-century history.
The future, in McQueen’s hands, frequently began with the past.
BEYOND THE GARMENT
By 2006, McQueen had already established that the presentation of fashion could become part of the fashion itself.
For Spring/Summer 1999’s No. 13, Shalom Harlow rotated between two industrial robots as they sprayed black and yellow paint across her white dress. The garment was completed in front of the audience, with control surrendered to machines whose movements appeared at once mechanical and strangely expressive.
In VOSS, Spring/Summer 2001, the audience initially faced its own reflection in a large mirrored structure before the interior was revealed. Fashion became entangled with observation, beauty and the discomfort of looking.
And in Plato’s Atlantis, Spring/Summer 2010, McQueen imagined an evolutionary future in which the human body appeared to mutate in response to a changing natural world. Digitally engineered prints and the now instantly recognisable Armadillo footwear pushed the silhouette towards something almost non-human.
Across these collections, spectacle was never merely decoration surrounding the clothes. Space, sound, movement and technology expanded the argument being made by them.
McQueen understood the runway as a medium.
THE MAKING OF AN ICON
Fashion uses the word “iconic” easily. History is considerably more selective.
An image becomes important not simply because it was widely seen when it appeared, but because it continues to communicate after its immediate context has disappeared.
The Moss finale has survived that test.
Removed from the season, it remains recognisable. Removed from the original audience, it retains its emotional charge. Even separated from the technical mechanics that produced it, the image still feels strangely contemporary.
This is partly because the questions surrounding it have only become more relevant.
What constitutes presence when a person can exist as an image? Where does the physical body end and its technological representation begin? What happens when fashion is designed not simply as clothing, but as an image intended to circulate?
Today, when runway moments travel globally within seconds and are consumed through screens by audiences far larger than those seated beside the catwalk, such questions feel ordinary.
McQueen was exploring them before this became fashion’s everyday condition.
WHAT REMAINS
Alexander McQueen died in 2010, but the work has continued to move through fashion’s visual culture and its institutions. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011 and later travelled to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2015, placing the technical and conceptual complexity of his work within the context of museum history.
Yet institutional recognition tells only part of the story.
McQueen’s influence can also be found in the continuing expectation that a runway might do more than present a wardrobe; that fashion can construct an environment, provoke discomfort, manipulate scale, borrow from history and experiment with technology without surrendering the craft of making clothes.
Nearly twenty years after The Widows of Culloden, its finale remains compelling precisely because it contains those ideas without needing to explain them.
A woman materialises in the darkness. Fabric moves around a body that is not physically present. The image grows brighter and then begins to disappear.
The runway ends.
The image remains.