Before there was Sarah Burton’s Alexander McQueen, the chic, highly finessed and now financially successful fashion label, there was the Alexander McQueen of its namesake that – as this touching new documentary tells it – could barely sustain the creative dysfunction its creator and his companions wrought upon it.
The man at its core, we know, killed himself aged just 40. What story is left to tell? McQueen left behind five distinct silhouettes, or reimaginings for the shape of clothing on a woman’s body: more than Givenchy, Dior, Chanel, Saint Laurent or any other designer, according to the film’s co-directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui.
The pair spent a year refashioning existing film of McQueen and his protector-antagonist Isabella Blow, and threading it through with new interviews with McQueen’s family and surviving, if somewhat shell-shocked, collaborators.
The result, in the opinion of Vogue international editor Suzy Menkes is “the most sensitive vision about a creative who never lost his rough edges, and who put his life – the bloody history of distant warriors in Scotland and childhood abuse within his family – on stage.”
On this journey, we learn that fashion is probably best admired as a playground for creative people to exercise restless and highly stimulated imaginations. McQueen thrilled and terrified his models and clients: a perspiring, huffing beast coming at them with giant tailors’ scissors, wildly cutting at fabric as they stood in the designs. That such people should also swing between intense highs and lows – often to the bewilderment of those around them – should come as no surprise.
