Photos: Vogue UK
I’ll be honest, I’ve never really paid much attention to Alexander McQueen’s menswear. What drew me to him was his flair for dramatics which seem to be nested within his women’s main line. Things got interesting last Fall with his Jack the Ripper collection but that was followed up with a pretty boring, butch-lesbian construction worker offering. Yep, not a fan.
However, Fall 2010 was different, and beautifully so. Prints are nothing new with McQueen’s menswear but these prints and fabric combinations are finally on par with his womenswear. Fur, skulls, snakes and smoke (so typically McQueen) along with water, rust, and more geometric prints envelope almost every piece creating such rich faux-tactillity. The applications of each are highly refined as well. You can tell that along with flawless construction, great care was taken to make sure the prints were either perfectly symmetrical, faded in and out in the right areas in terms of physical location, or edited in certain areas to suggest movement—an example of which can be found in the smoke series where portions of the prints are heavily blurred at the arms and shoulders. Stunning! Ropey knit, wool, plastic?, and leather were also combined into hybrid coats and jackets with large stitch details.
I could see how it all may get a bit repetitive as a whole but it’s the subtle details within each piece that really make this collection so interesting. It’s by far one of my favorites from McQueen.
The Sway of Trains
Images: New York Public Library
Music: Love’s Lost Guarantee by Rogue Wave
Short Story: Lydia Copeland
In bed at night, hearing the last conversations on the street, I’m still moving with the train cars. Still looking in the living rooms of the houses along the tracks. Lights are orange over oil paintings of barns and swallow-filled skies. Potatoes boiling in the air, a hiss of someone’s tongue. You are already in the kitchen, perhaps sorting beans, filling a glass with milk. Our son asks you to be the bear. More, he says, but he means again. In the new town, I think of the bay and the ducks floating asleep. The cups and cans, shoes, jump ropes washing up on the rocks at night. This is our only nature. Some winter we will smooth a path on the street and slide on our stomachs. Under cars. Past the laundry mat where our clothes are folded and numbered. Past the Polish Bakery. Through the long hollow that brings city to city. Blue hands in snow drifts. The sway of trains. The summer water that is long gone. You tell me we must accept these things for a time. We kiss before sleeping, and I taste your salty cheek. Your hands fold under my pillow.