Lee the Grotesque is Beautiful

8/3/2019 Lee the Grotesque is Beautiful

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Zeewan Lee

Address: P.O. Box 94723 Durham, NC 27708

Cell: 919-208-9958 Email: [email protected]

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Biography: Zeewan Lee is a senior at Duke University double majoring in English and political science.

Much concerned and interested in art, she plans to combine her interest in aesthetics/design, politics,

and writing by pursuing a career in urban design and planning.

The Grotesque is Beautiful: Alexander McQueens World of Fashion

Elegance is refusal. - Coco Chanel

Some may say that the day of Alexander McQueen s death or rather, suicide means a

great loss to the world, a complete stoppage of influx of the genius McQueen wholly encased in

his designs. However, as distorted as the words may sound, I view his death as one of

McQueens greatest accomplishments. In his works of art, McQueen had often played with the

notion of death and the deadly; he had done so by incorporating in his designs ideas and

themes that could be best described as nonexistent and nonliving and hellish, indicative ofdeath: war, rape, violence, fear, destruction, distortion, etc. For McQueen, who had constantly

thrust himself and his work of art closer to the notion of death than any other artists of his time,

the day of his suicide was almost climactic in that he went not only close to but also past the

threshold of death.

Lee Alexander McQueen is my favorite designer whom I consider to be one of the greatest

artists of all time. He was a British fashion designer and a couturier also known as LEnfant

Terrible, a title he got out of his notorious 1995 collection called the Highland Rape. If asked to

define McQueens work, I would describe it is a harmony of the irreconcilable, an intermingling

of opposite extremes. Even before McQueen created

his own clothing line, McQueens designs had always

been both feeble and fierce. His genuine talent

enabled him to treat morbidity with such elegance

and life that his work was less about making

wearable clothing and more about delivering via

fashion the initially incompatible concepts beauty

and ugliness, tranquility and chaos, etc., in a

perfect harmony in order to provoke, to shock.

I believe the overarching theme as well as the

ultimate objective of McQueens works was the

grotesque. The grotesque was an end in itself to

which McQueen aspired, and it was also a means by

which he hoped to achieve the end. Now, in art,

unlike in literature, the term grotesque is not


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equivalent to ugly. What differentiates the term from the purely and wholly ugly is the duality

inherent in grotesque. In other words, for something to be grotesque, it has to be strange and

familiar, fantastical and real, beautiful and yet disgusting. The term ought to invoke in viewers

both a feeling of bizarreness and empathy. Upon sensing the complexity of feelings thegrotesque more specifically, the gorgeousness within the grotesque arouses from its

viewers, one will find oneself infatuated with the grotesque. Grotesque is mesmerizing because

it is a rare kind of a beauty far from the standard. The concept of grotesque sticks in ones mind

in part because one can neither forgive nor understand oneself for sensing both beauty and

repulsion in one thing. Then, one cannot help but wonder if what he or she sees and feels is

what is truly there. McQueen shared a similar

kind of obsession with the grotesque and was

fascinated with the idea in that he found

beauty in the grotesque.1

Nevertheless, in some of his mostly earlier

collections McQueen fell short of fully

depicting the grotesque and its duality, and captured mostly its pure ugliness: frightening,

uncomfortable, and almost offensive. For instance, in one of his earliest collections called

Highland Rape, McQueen featured tattered and tampon-strewn dresses and played with the

notion of sexual violence and genocide. In another controversial collection, the stage was made

of a garbage heap of scrap metals, and McQueens models with their oversized, sex-doll lips

(above, left), painfully theatrical costumes (below, left), and hats made out of trashcan lids

(above, right) seemed far from beautiful in any sense. These infamous collections irked enough

people so that some fashion critiques even accused McQueen of being a misogynist, guilty of

distorting the beauty of human existence, especially that of females.

1http://www.fashioncraz.com/alexander-mcqueen-in-his-own-words/


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In their outright ugliness, McQueens early works were

reminiscent of paintings of a mid-18th

century Spanish

painter Francisco Goya. Themes prevalent in Goyas

paintings as well as his aesthetic renditions of thethemes were often obscene and grotesque. As in the

early works of McQueen, the demonic dimension of

the grotesque in Goyas works for example, a

devilish-looking man with a gargoyle face and

bloodshot eyes (below, left), or an anthropophagus

with a crazed, almost excited look on his face and

blood on his lips (below, right), both in pitch black

backgrounds was not hard to notice, because the

artist shoved it right in the viewers face, wantingthem to be shocked and repulsed.

As time elapsed, however, the demonic dimensions of the grotesque were gradually

attenuated in McQueens designs. McQueen began to associate with grotesque not only the

ugly but also a kind of beauty. The grotesque in McQueens later works was more complete in

its duality as McQueen incorporated both repulsive and more serene and sublime qualities to

his designs. The ugliness once so visible in his designs that it outshined everything else became

subtler and more nuanced. McQueens grotesque in its evolved form emulated less the horrific

grotesque of Goya and more the fantastic grotesque of Kris Kuksi, an American sculptor and an

artist. Kuksis art spoke of a timelessness-potentiality and motion attempting to reach on

forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep2. This

2http://kuksi.com/
http://kuksi.com/http://kuksi.com/http://kuksi.com/http://kuksi.com/


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beautiful and accurate definition of Kuksis work (below) depicts exactly what McQueens later

designs encapsulated. Just as in Kuksis arts, the notion of the grotesque was less apparent in

themes and issues McQueen addressed in his designs. Instead, what made viewers

uncomfortable were the outrageous combinations of colors (the first two pictures shown below)and incomprehensible, out-of-place shapes (all four below).


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Towards the end of his career, McQueen magnified the

sense of sublime beauty within the grotesque to the extent

that his work became similar to that of Amedeo Modigliani,

an early 20th

century Italian artist. While unsettling due tothe curious eeriness in the exaggerations of the forms,

elongations of human body parts, and dead gazes (left),

figures in Modiglianis works of art represented yet

another version of the grotesque: a sublime type.

Modiglianis works are excellent examples that show even

a sense of serenity can serve as a vehicle for the grotesque.

McQueen in his latest designs successfully captured the

same queer serenity and lightness of being present in

Modiglianis paintings.

Comparing the more nuanced and serene grotesque to the more outright, I believe the

former is more powerful because its nuance enables it to encapsulate raw energy within itself

as opposed to holding out the energy for it to evaporate almost immediately. Somehow I find

the subtlety of McQueens later grotesque render his designs to be more aesthetic.

One may wonder why McQueens designs are compared to paintings and drawings instead

of other couture designs in this essay. I believe that such comparisons between McQueen s


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works and paintings do the designer justice, because while worked with fabrics, McQueens

designs were something to see instead of wear around. In this manner, the designer s works of

art are more similar to paintings than to fashionable Balmain jackets or Chanel trousers.

McQueen in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection was at his best3, both in terms of artistry

and achieving the perfect duality within its grotesque. Titled Platos Atlantis, it was McQueens

last womens collection before his death. In the show, McQueen cast an apocalyptic forecast of

the future ecological meltdown: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea,

a nod to the idea that we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap

dissolves4. The entire show was a reversal of Darwins Theory of Evolution in that McQueen

made it that we human beings came from the land and would eventually go back into the sea.

While McQueen got the idea for this collection from H. R. Giger5

(below), a Swiss surrealist

painter whose main theme for his work of art is the rampant proliferation of the most demonicgrotesque, McQueens designs in the collection surpassed the bounds of the horrific grotesque.

Instead, McQueen here exhibited a complete mastery of finding and capturing elegance in the

macabre. Before this collection, McQueens grotesque had a hint of elegance, but the quality

3Here is a link to the 2010 S/S collection:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0I

4http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.html

5http://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0Ihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0Ihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0Ihttp://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.htmlhttp://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.htmlhttp://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.htmlhttp://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htmhttp://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htmhttp://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htmhttp://www.harpersbazaar.com.au/alexander-mcqueen-the-final-interview.htmhttp://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/2010/03/justin-presents-alexander-mcqueen-kit.htmlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4_RZxlYP0I


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did not have a strong impact on the viewers because the focus was definitely on the ugliness of

the grotesque, which McQueen depicted with the intention oftaking something of the world

people in [his fashion] world dont want to see and bring it to them6 and force them to watch

it7

. Because the impact of the outright hideousness and bizarreness expressed in themes of

war, religion, sex, etc., was too strong in McQueens previous collections, many failed to

appreciate the utmost tranquility, elegance, and grace inherent in the idea of grotesque.

Nevertheless, in the 2010 Spring/Summer

collection I daresay for the first time in his

career McQueen made it crystal clear that

elegance existed within his grotesque.

McQueens models on the runway with alien-

like facial protrusions, reptilian digital prints,

and extreme anteater shoes made the

viewers wince and sigh with awe at the same

time. With their gangly legs sucked in thegigantic, monstrously high heels whose shape

reminds of the round exoskeleton of a beetle

(left), the models looked like they were

floating in an airless space, their feet used

6McQueen, in an interview with the BBC.

7McQueen 2002


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not to walk but to paddle aimlessly in the vacuum; their shoes served as flippers. These

creatures on the catwalk imbued a sense of otherworldliness: they were at a cross-section of

butterflies and humans and fishes. Regardless of what they really were, however, it was not

hard for people to see the beauty McQueen had encased in their strange ugliness and soonpeople discovered the encasement separating the beauty and the ugly tearing away. And the

revelation came the grotesque was beautiful.

Some features of McQueens presentation in the 2010 Spring/Summer collection were the

same and just as good as his previous collections. His designs in this collection, like before, gave

the feeling that they lay outside time as they featured both tradition and postmodernity; there

were hints of tradition in that there existed in this collection an emphasis on shoulders with

padded and jeweled shoulder rolls and slashed upper sleeves that reminded of fashion in the

Elizabethan era; in the meantime, the collection also imbued a sense of postmodernity, a senseof an ontological emptiness that is a characteristic of postmodernity, that was intent upon the

destruction (deconstruction) of great truths modernity had once created. The same powerful

energy that had mesmerized viewers in his previous shows was manifest in the 2010

Spring/Summer collection through the ghost-like mannerisms of McQueens stoic, haunting

cast of models. These models in McQueens shows were forms of duality: the estrangement of

the living and the personification of the dead.

I miss Alexander McQueens painstakingly aggressive aesthetic. I miss his bizarre celebration

of the immaterial and his mastery of compressing life and death, the grotesque and ornament,

and the feeble and the fierce. I, along with millions of others, will remember McQueen s bold

acknowledgment of socially imposed otherism and celebration of the ignored and the ugly by

making them the essence of his shows. Fashion will never be quite as interesting again.

*** For your reference, I have included links to the full show of McQueens Spring/Summer 2010

Collection below:

(Part 1)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embedded

(Part 2)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embeddedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp3GynpZWcE&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvWyK-llPlA&feature=player_embedded


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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexandra McKnight, Grace Kohut, Margrette Kuhrt, and Andrew Brown for theirinsights and feedback. Without their willing attempts to read through and to make sense of the

nonsense I had put in my earlier drafts, I would not have gotten to where I am now with this piece. This

piece is not a work solely of mine, but of my entire writing group. Thank you so much. My next thanks

must go to Professor Joseph Harris for his invaluable guidance. My discussing my paper with him made

me understand the piece better, and gave me ideas as to how to go about improving the piece.

Lastly, thank you, Alexander McQueen, for prompting me to write this piece. You and your genius will be

forever missed by your fans, including myself and as Margrette has noted Lady Gaga.

Documents

Lee the Grotesque is Beautiful