記事 New York Times: Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen

Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images

Alexander McQueen, a British fashion designer, was found dead at his London home on Feb. 11, 2010. He was 40 years old.
Mr. McQueen was a showman with very high expectations for fashion. He knew how to cut a dress, a jacket and a pair of pants with the best of them, but that wasn't not enough for him. He also wanted fashion to have weight and content and depth, so he put on presentations — spectacles, really — of his collections that aimed to have the punch of art and that were sometimes political, sociological, shocking and scary.
''I believe in depicting what's going on,” he once said. “I'm a big anarchist. I don't believe in religion, or in another human being wanting to govern over someone else. The themes that go through my shows will continue to.”
Some of this content carries over to the clothes themselves, either literally or in their aura. But in general their distinguishing features are beauty; a sense of craft; a strong, confident silhouette; and the marriage of tradition with the avant-garde.

Read More...

Mr. McQueen was born in London in 1969, the youngest of six children and the son of a taxi driver. His is the classic story of the kid from the other side of the tracks making it big. As a young boy of Scottish descent growing up in England, he showed a passion for fashion by the age of 3. He was called ''McQueer'' in school, and his father expected him to become an electrician or a plumber like the rest of the lads. Then one day his mother gave him a present that changed everything — a book about people in fashion — and it suggested to him that his dreams could come true.
He left school at 16, ending up on Savile Row, where he apprenticed at the most revered tailors, first at Anderson & Sheppard, and then at Gieves & Hawkes, learning everything about construction, tailoring and pattern cutting.
He then worked for the theatrical costumers Angels and Bermans. At 20, he got a job with the designer Koji Tatsuno before going to Milan as design assistant for Romeo Gigli. Returning to London, he earned a master’s in fashion design in 1994 from St. Martin’s; the designer Isabella Blow bought his entire degree collection.
From 1996 to 2001, he was chief fashion designer for the French couture house Givenchy. In 2000, his Alexander McQueen label was bought by the Gucci group; he was the group's creative director.
According to alexandermcqueen.com, he now has flagship stores in New York, Milan and London, and his collections, which include both women's and men's ready-to-wear, are distributed in about 40 countries. — From “Why We Love Fashion: Its Genius, Alexander the Great,” by Ingrid Sischy, The New York Times, Feb. 23, 2003, and Mr. McQueen’s official biography, at alexandermcqueen.com