Alexander the Great
Julia Reed February 18th, 2010I bought my first Alexander McQueen suit more than ten years ago. On the hanger it didn’t seem like that big of a deal—it was black lightweight wool with a short skirt and a jacket with horn buttons that nipped in at the waist. But when I tried it on I was immediately transformed. I looked in the mirror of the dressing room and saw someone who looked like she knew what she was doing, someone strikingly confident, not to mention someone possessed of a far better shape than she actually had.
I wore it to a fundraising breakfast where then-presidential candidate Bill Bradley was speaking, and a photo of me interviewing Bradley I didn’t even know had been taken wound up on the pages of New York Magazine. I wore it to the trial of former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards and the next day, there I was leaving the courtroom, above the fold on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
It was the suit. “I try to protect people,” McQueen once said of his clothes, explaining that even a simple two-piece suit was for him a kind of armor. I knew exactly what he meant.
Alas, McQueen, who took his own life just before the start of New York’s fashion week last Thursday, was unable to protect himself in the end, and the loss to the industry, and to the legions of us who adored his clothes, is incalculable.
“When I first heard the news, I felt a deep knot to my core, just like the day John Lennon died,” Shelly Musselman, owner of Dallas’s Forty Five Ten, told me. “Having McQueen gone is not just a loss to the fashion world, but a loss to everyone who appreciates true art. Yes, he became a spectacular showman—a genius—but the art of his designs and the choices of his fabrics were mind blowing.”
Musselman and her partner Brian Bolke have carried the McQueen line since Forty Five Ten opened a decade ago. She, like the rest of us, understands the secret of McQueen’s ability to provide such excellent, transformative armor: He was a tailor first and foremost. In an age when fewer and fewer designers actually know how to properly cut clothes, McQueen had trained on Savile Row at Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes where he made suits for Prince Charles (in whose jacket lining he later claimed to have sewn a disparaging epithet!) and Mikhail Gorbachev. Upon the news of his death, Steven Cox of Duckie Brown called him “the best tailor in the world.”
Of course, he could also create spectacles. His shows might have been chronically late, but they never, ever disappointed. A show featuring a model dressed as Little Red Riding hood and leading a a mini-pack of grey wolves on leashes was held in the vaults of Paris’s Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette awaited her execution. His Fall 2006 show ended with Kate Moss in a pyramid hologram writhing in miles of silk organza ruffles—a sight a friend of mine calls “seriously the prettiest thing I have ever seen.”
The collection Musselman saw in New York last week was also among his best. “I was thrilled it was so magnificent,” she said. “It was very bittersweet. But it did nothing to help the knot in my core. I have a feeling that knot will be there for a long time. As well it should be.”
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