Fashion | NEW YORK - LONDON
Lace can’t be cut on the circle, so it had to be cut out flower by flower and reapplied on a tulle circle, which was re-embroidered and then placed on the dress. The dress was from “Widows of Culloden” (autumn/winter 2006–07) — it was in gray lace, and the model wore antlers covered with a veil. But Lee always wanted boards featuring a million techniques. Maybe we’d use none of them, but he’d push you to do them in a completely different way than you would do traditionally. I miss that a lot, his modernity.
But it was modernity rooted in an incredible grasp of tradition. Completely. For example, the shapes in the “Horn of Plenty” collection were a take on Dior’s “New Look,” but the fabrics we used were based on trash luxed up to make couture: bubble wrap made from a silk synthetic mix, bin liners made from silk, and heavy bonded neoprene printed with houndstooth. The second look in the show used traditional houndstooth that had been lacquered.
Lee cut the jacket himself. He slashed it, cut an asymmetrical kimono sleeve, and took the collar off and recut it. He laid a piece of fabric on the floor and cut it to make just the right collar shape. It was incredible.
What was great about “The Horn of Plenty” was how Lee started with himself, using his own vocabulary. He worked very hard on that collection. The jackets were pure McQueen — he could do them with his eyes shut. In fact, the last couple of collections were almost like a pure concentrate of what Lee did.
Did the research ever involve having an actual vintage piece as a reference?
No, Lee didn’t really work like that. He loved Victoriana: Julia Margaret Cameron, Jack the Ripper, and the characters in Oliver Twist. He loved the structure of Victorian jackets, with the small shoulder, the short proportion, and especially the tiny waist.
Every time we did a fitting, he’d get a piece of grosgrain and pull the girl in, making the waist even tighter. It was always tighter, tighter. Lee was all about a waist. Quite often there were corsets under the garments. And there were always elements of old couture, but we’d never go out and buy vintage to copy. Some of the tailoring he’d start from cutting up jackets or cloth, and a couple of military-influenced pieces were based on vintage, but he’d always cut it up and change it. He didn’t do many research trips either. He didn’t like to travel that much. One exception, however, was to Salem, Massachusetts, for the collection “In Memory
“It was all about the vision and the head-to-toe look of it. When you saw the models lined up, it was so clear and so direct. Lee was a designer who was making a world and telling a story.”
of Elizabeth How.” His mum was really into genealogy, and she had traced one of their ancestors to the Salem witch trials. We went to the Salem Witch Museum and to the grave where his ancestor Elizabeth How was buried. It was a very personal collection for Lee, but then Lee always used to say that his work was autobiographical.
I always imagined a kind of emotional dialectic to his collections — there would be a thesis, an antithesis, then a kind of synthesis. The way, for instance, that the haute couture traditionalism of his posthumous autumn/winter 2010–11 collection followed on from the avant-garde technology of his spring/summer 2010 collection, “Plato’s Atlantis.”
With Plato’s Atlantis, Lee mastered how to weave, engineer, and print any digital image onto a garment so that all the pattern pieces matched up with the design on every seam. That was the difficulty with the collection that followed. Where do you take it? How do you move forward?
I know he would have taken it off on a completely different tangent. He wanted to talk about craftsmanship, about the old techniques that are being lost, and how people don’t do things with their hands anymore.
Did Lee ever acknowledge a “McQueen” in his own history? Someone who taught him to put in a zip?
I think he very much did it on his own, although he would talk about Romeo Gigli a lot.
Maybe working with Gigli was his real introduction to the “anything is possible” feeling he himself brought to fashion. Lee was a bit like an artist, writer or musician who goes back and teases out themes from his own past. When someone has created such a rich body of work to draw on, it’s not hard to revisit something and have it look new.
When I went through the archive a while ago, I realized, “God, he actually has done everything.” There were so many threads of ideas he started in each show, and then he’d go off in different directions. There were 10 shows of ideas in one show; it was endless. Like the “VOSS” collection (spring/summer 2001), his first after leaving Givenchy. He often went back to that one.
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