Runway Autopsy: McQueen Flayed

 

Isabella Blow, the celebrated fashion editor and disciple of Anna Wintour, couldn’t believe her eyes. She immediately decided to buy the entire show, every piece. It was 1992, and a graduate collection inspired by the legendary serial killer Jack the Ripper, which no one else dared touch at the time, seized her attention. Its creator, a 22 year old named Lee Alexander McQueen, had just discovered, through his mother’s genealogical research, that one of the Ripper’s victims had stayed at an inn owned by his ancestors in Whitechapel. At some point, McQueen remarked that he was convinced the Ripper was related to him. The collection was titled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, a name that evoked the style of a Lars von Trier film. McQueen’s early fascination with the Victorian era, darkness, and death was unmistakable. Each garment in the collection featured a lock of his own hair encased between two layers of acrylic, like Victorian mourning jewelry that celebrated murder. Blow wasn’t buying fashion, she was sealing a blood pact.

What no one seemed to grasp then, and what the industry still dodges, is that McQueen didn’t design clothes. Like a real life Buffalo Bill, his creations were a “new skin.” His fascination with the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t a metaphor, it was a method. The killer who skinned women to sew his own feminine dress understood something fashion has always known but never admits: the body is textile, the skin is fabric, and beauty, like in a John Waters movie, demands violence. McQueen had the honesty to make it explicit. While Tom Ford sold polished sex and Rei Kawakubo deconstructed the silhouette, McQueen dissected. His references spanned from the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom to H.R. Giger’s biomechanical designs in Alien, through the sadomasochism of the Cenobites in Hellraiser and the obsessive geometric carpets of Kubrick’s The Shining. McQueen didn’t create clothes, he documented the architecture of raw trauma.

His connection with Blow was always a genuine ghost story. She had worked closely with Warhol and Basquiat in New York and understood that fashion had ceased to be commerce and become the last great frontier of extreme art. Blow had discovered Stella Tennant, Sophie Dahl, and Philip Treacy, but McQueen was different. In him, she saw not just talent but destiny, the same self destructive drive that led her to attempt suicide multiple times before succeeding in 2007 with poison. When McQueen sold his brand to Gucci and excluded her from the deal, the betrayal was total. Blow died feeling like discarded merchandise. Obsessed, McQueen spent vast sums in the years that followed, trying to contact her through mediums and spiritualists who delivered “messages” from Blow. He was desperate to speak to the spirit of the woman who had bought him entirely when no one else would.

McQueen despised Radiohead’s Creep. He loathed grunge sentimentalism, alienation as victimhood, and self pity disguised as rebellion. Instead, he eagerly listened to Bauhaus’s Bela Lugosi’s Dead, nine minutes of gothic post punk where death is glamour and vampirism is the ultimate aesthetic. He designed jackets for David Bowie because he understood that Ziggy Stardust had turned androgyny into a weapon, not a lament. He collaborated with Björk on Homogenic, blending Icelandic tradition with techno organic futurism, the body as landscape. The difference was stark: Radiohead wanted you to pity the monster, McQueen wanted you to realize the monster was always you, wearing a suit sewn from your own skin.

Beyond his suspicions of a connection to Jack the Ripper, McQueen’s real genealogy included Elizabeth How, burned during the Salem witch trials. McQueen didn’t choose themes, he inherited curses. His shows were funerary rituals: models walking on water, robots painting dresses in real time, bodies wrapped in textiles that resembled viscera. While Helmut Lang explored brutalist minimalism and Vivienne Westwood subverted British tradition, McQueen operated in a darker realm. Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, an obsession of Isabella Blow, had proposed anti fashion and the reimagined body. McQueen took that logic to its conclusion: if the body is reimaginable, it is replaceable, discardable, material.

The problem with selling your soul to Gucci is that your soul is likely worth more than you thought. The massive financial resources and global platform came at a cost: the commercialization of transgression, corporate control over the grotesque. Tom Ford, with his polished ’90s glamour, and McQueen, with his sublime and terrible gothic, coexisting under the same corporate umbrella, is the great capitalist irony. Norman Bates in Psycho dressing as his dead mother, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver shaving his head into a mohawk for urban warfare, the patterns of the Overlook Hotel bleeding geometric madness: McQueen understood that Hitchcock, Scorsese, and Kubrick weren’t making films, they were performing autopsies. Patrick Süskind in Perfume, narrating a killer who distilled feminine essence from corpses (an inspiringa sing by Nirvana), J.G. Ballard eroticizing car crashes in Crash, Pasolini adapting Sade in Salò: an entire lineage of horror reminding us that beauty has always been postmortem.

When McQueen hanged himself in 2010, nine days after his mother’s funeral, Björk sang at his funeral. The circle closed: the Icelandic girl who let the British designer dress her in the future now sang over his body. Isabella had been dead for three years. The brand was worth millions. The collections keep selling without him. Here’s what no one wants to admit: McQueen was right. Fashion is elegant necrophilia, it always was. We buy the skin of what we kill, animals, identities, past versions of ourselves, and call it style. Buffalo Bill, sewing his woman’s suit, wasn’t the villain but the ideal customer. McQueen simply showed the sewing pattern. And instead of facing it, we keep walking the runway, wearing the ghosts of everything we flayed to get here, and ultimately find beauty in the grotesque.