My Own McQueen Retrospective Part One of Many

I almost spent way too much money on books yesterday when I was very close to purchasing a $30 McQueen Retropective. My mom wisely told me, "You can look up all that stuff online." How true how true. So I decided to make my own retrospective of his collections a little bit at a time. Two websites were invaluable in this endeavor:
Hapsical
And The Fashion Spot

I'm going to start with his earliest collection and his most controversial.

Isabella Blow discovered McQueen in 1995 after he graduated from design school and she famously bought his graduate collection. Soon after he went on to be the creative director of Givenchy. Which is a time period I will address in a later post becuase I want to compare it with Riccardo Tisci's collections there and of course with the orginal Hubert de Givenchy.

From what I gathered this collection from Spring of 1994 was from when he was in school still and boy is it something! He is already using his name as a brand because I think he knew what a genius he was.
(some of these are orginally from contemporaryfashion.net)





In this collection we see the beginnings of themes that will pop up in later McQueen collections. His love of birds and feathers being one. Also just the overall dark feel. His clothes, more than any other designer's I feel, put fashion as an art first then as wearable later. That might not sound like a complement, but I assure you it is. He thought so highly of the women who would wear his clothes that he entrusted them with being the showcases of his artist vision.

The Highland Rape collection of Fall/Winter 1995 was definitely his most controversial becuase many thought that it was a glorification of abuse against women. I don't know why anyone would think that of McQueen, but they did. Being the history nerd that I am I thought first of all the trouble that England caused Scotland in their past together and this is what McQueen was thinking of as well. Throughout a lot of his shows plaids have popped up because it is apart of his heritage. This is just another way of him paying homage to that past.


I'm going to stop here, but rest assured I will be back on this theme soon. I intend to do my Givenchy comparision next.

Thanks for reading my blog you guys you don't know how much it means to me to be able to share my passions with people.