Alexander MCQUEEN gothic anarchist (ISTD 2016)
For this years Istd I picked the undiscovered country brief in which deals with the issue of death and how we perceive it. The main thing we had to stay away from the portraying death in a cliché manor depicting death as dark, solemn, gruesome and gloomy. Death is such a broad topic that is hard to cover on a whole and effects everybody differently. I have looked into the area of suicide focusing on the suicide of the controversial fashion designer Alexander McQueen. I wanted to explore what exactly led McQueen to his untimely death. I wanted to look at his gothic pieces of work in particular the horn of plenty collection, McQueen dealt with the idea of death a lot with in his collections and makes subtle references to the idea of death in the clothes itself. want this book to be about the legacy of Alexander McQueen, his career and body of work rather than on his death alone. At the beginning of creating this book I was thinking of stylising death rather than making it dark.
