The article discusses suicide.
I made a jacket out of denim the night before my SAT. I hadn’t made clothes for myself before, but doing so suddenly felt urgent. I already had denim, purchased at some previous point when I’d mistakenly thought I was ready to start the fashion design journey fated upon me the first time I watched Tim Gunn’s brow furrow over a disastrously dressed mannequin on my grandma’s TV. I didn’t use a pattern because that would make my creation unoriginal and therefore “not art.” I knelt on my bedroom floor with a roll of pattern paper spread over the cement and tried to understand the quantum mechanics of sleeves, which perplex me to this day. The sleeves didn’t fit over my shoulders and I had to remake them. I underslept and the revised sleeves were still too small, which I didn’t realize until I was writing about ethos and logos in a room with the rest of my high school class and felt my right arm losing circulation.
I couldn’t take the jacket off because the dress I wore under it had straps too thin for the dress code. The pain in my arm lasted the entire day. Torture has probably always been a part of the great art.
The next year, I watched “McQueen,” a documentary not about Lightning or either Steve McQueen, but British fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen. The film’s first half is a campy, triumphant story of a kid who fails his classes because he’s drawing clothes, gets a job as a tailor’s apprentice and soon finds himself working for Givenchy and Gucci while making a name for himself as one of the most innovative and evocative designers of all time. This rise is set to a score from Michael Nyman (“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”) that leans heavily into dramatics and assuages any doubts that we are witnessing a genius.
Of course, any movie about someone’s entire life ends with their death. In McQueen’s case, that death is a suicide preceded by cocaine use, loneliness and betrayal. His set designer, Simon Costin, called McQueen “a singular individual, and his strength of personality was quite phenomenal.” He said, “You don’t see many people like that. They don’t come up very often.” Despite this rare personality — one so attractive that people paid him to hire them — McQueen was unhappy. Hairstylist Mira Chai Hyde said after McQueen’s death that he never had the happiness she wished for him, a sentiment repeated by others throughout the film.
“Everything in his life had just led to these feelings of torment.”
“He was this successful, flamboyant being who was actually so lonely deep inside.”
“There’s so much sadness in him.”
The inspiration for McQueen’s shows often came from an internal “dark side.”
“I would pull these horrors out of my soul and put them on the catwalk,” he said. McQueen’s ex-boyfriend said that “garments (McQueen designed) all tell you about Lee and they’re almost, like, confessional. They do relate to things that happened in his childhood.”
“McQueen” is one of many documentaries about tortured artists. The reason we love tortured artist stories and the trauma they have experienced is that it makes for an interesting story. But also, great art can be expected from them. Clothing is the only art form where this expectation can be more complex. Clothing, just like architecture and product design, can serve non-artistic purposes. The wide hems of my jeans made me happy when I was walking, but my winter jacket I picked because it kept me warm.
Clothes cover us so that we are visible to the public. It covers our shoulders so we don’t get sent to the high school principal’s office for wearing a dress with thin straps. We feel comfortable. We feel safer if we make the right choice.
McQueen’s early fashion shows were a prime example of this. His clothes looked as non-functional as possible. He took pieces of garbage bags or plastic wrap, wrapped them around models or cut them into tight dresses that couldn’t have been worn a second time. Most garments don’t look comfortable or even breathable. Dresses were slashed so that models’ nipples showed, removing that basic social function of clothing.
If clothing isn’t meant to be worn, is it functioning correctly? A designer can create the most moving shows in fashion history, work with emotions as with fabric, but if he’s making something we can only Look at the pictures below. at, and if the show itself, and the collection of pieces together is part of the message, isn’t that more of an art installation than it is clothing?
You can also check out our Fashionable Clothing. You can learn more about it here. art. It must be both functional and uniform, and fall somewhere in between. If functional art doesn’t strike this balance, it can be meaningless for the creator. McQueen ridiculed floral and flowy clothes from other designers during a show because they didn’t have anything to say. McQueen scoffed at the flowy, floral outfits of other designers because they had nothing to say.
If functional art doesn’t strike this balance, it can be uncomfortable, even painful for the wearer. I made that first jacket without a pattern because even though I was making something as uninspired as a cropped denim jacket and there was no inner turmoil or history behind it, the piece — design included — had to come from me. The piece had to have a personal touch. Because I didn’t use a pattern, I made something that hurt me and that I can’t wear again. In my desire to express myself as an artist in its own right, I made something unwearable and not very functional.
McQueen couldn’t imagine his brand continuing without him one day because every piece was expressing a part of himself.
I have made many basic pieces of clothing since that jacket, but after watching “McQueen,” I think twice every time I start a new project. The shapes and colours of my garments make me wonder what message I’m trying to convey. I ask myself if there’s anything deep within me that needs to manifest physically as a sweater or dress. Usually I don’t find anything deeper than a desire for cute clothes. McQueen is not someone like me who has the ability to see what will come in fashion. He sends out digitally created oceanic designs on models so we can get a glimpse of it. Only clothes that I feel express me can I wear.
Clothing differs from other forms of functional art because it almost becomes a part us. The chair may be used as either a seating area or an art piece. Clothing doesn’t work without our bodies.
Bodies are more strictly functional than clothing, and most people wouldn’t consider them artistic mediums. If clothing is an art form, then the wall on which it’s hung is also part of that. An artist may imbue clothing with a particular emotion or pain. However, the person wearing it must also take that on.
McQueen’s clothing may have been uncomfortable for models to wear, but the primary pain was his. His anger, loneliness, and trauma were externalized on the runway. In the process, he lost one of his closest friends Isabella Blow — magazine editor, tastemaker and wearer of massive hats — when he surpassed her in fame and distanced himself. In order to see the sudden fame he was experiencing in a more clear light, he began taking cocaine. Sebastian Pons said that he felt only bones when he hugged him. He was creating 18 collections a year. He used fashion to let out his thoughts and feelings, which can be cathartic – until they become self-destructive.
In my imagination, McQueen or other so-called tortured genuises create in the same way. Instead of trying to calm down any negative or strong feelings, I would rather turn them into artwork. These feelings will make me crazy. I want to be so passionate about a project that I can’t see anything else. My work should be my only purpose. I will not stop working until I create something that is revolutionary and meaningful. It’s my goal to devote so much time to work that it feels like I am missing parts of myself. Once I’ve made something exactly how I want it, I want to collapse from exhaustion and lie on the ground not because I want to but because I can’t hold myself up and finally feel like I deserve to fall. No nagging voice would tell me I hadn’t done enough. This fantasy does not limit pain to the artistic process or final piece. This is an integral part of the creative process.
McQueen acted as though he created all of his shows, because he felt compelled to. In order to cope with depression, loneliness, and the trauma of his past, McQueen created. When I see McQueen walking off the screen with text fading in telling me he killed himself, I tell myself I need this. He used his clothing to tell stories, evoke feelings and inspire. You can say anything in a way I can’t find anywhere else and can only dream of doing with any art form myself.
My favorite of McQueen’s shows is called Plato’s Atlantis. His last show. He said to Pons that his final act would be to shoot himself from a box the size of a person and rise onto the catwalk. Pons talked Pons down, telling him the number of people that he could hurt. Plato’s Atlantis is perhaps the most wearable of the shows pictured in the documentary. It is art, but it isn’t just meant to be looked at. The audience is let into the possibility of the designer’s vision. It is the balance — of art, of utility, of story. The clothing appears out of an aquatic haven; the models’ hair stands up straight and undulates as if underwater. It is a vision of fashion’s future, and, it seems, a hopeful one for humanity. McQueen said of the concept, “I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist.” A serenity and safety that he could never find.
One day I’d like to be nearly destroyed by art. I would like to experience both the pain of fashion designers and their wearers, the inspiration and genius. Next, I would like to feel safe.
Erin Evans, Daily Arts writer can be reached by email at [email protected].