Was alexander mcqueen gay

While growing up in East London, McQueen joined the local team, “the lone boy among forty girls,” Thomas writes. A vastly overlooked area of McQueen as a designer is his menswear collections. When finished off with bondage style straps and masks, this gave off the impression of a highly sexualised, yet subdued, woman.

With the 13th anniversary of his death in February, followed by his birthday last week, I felt inspired to revisit this piece of writing. McQueen says he was aware of his sexual orientation when he was six years old. Destabilising both the work of his competitors as well as the traditionally prominent role of the man, the film shows McQueen slowly altering the outfit of a male model wearing a suit by Yohji Yamamoto, a shirt by Jean Paul Gaultier, and a tie by Hugo Boss all male run labels.

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. There must have been pressure on McQueen to impress his new investors and a Parisian audience—sending an impaled model down the runway was sure to keep tongues wagging and media interest at a high. The year-old was renown for dressing stars such as Kylie and Lady Gaga and had once described himself as the “pink sheep” of his family.

The final product is much like a man turned into a repressed and bound bride. I was however keen to examine: the power of shock value, how true artistry can co-exist with commerce and sales, gender roles and gender within fashion, sexuality, who empowering dressing is really for , and the male versus the female gaze.

Alexander McQueen, the gay fashion designer, has died by suicide. It is this gay designed version of femininity, I suggest, that male gay designers project onto women. Film was another way in which McQueen explored the male form and sexuality. In the documentary McQueen, his boyfriend and assistant designer in the early days, Andrew Groves, said that McQueen dictated that they could only show him from behind to avoid being identified and losing his unemployment benefits – his only significant means of income at that time.

This insinuates that, since he is gaining no sexual excitement out of sending his models down the runway in towering heels, he is doing so to exercise his inner torment and insecurities. Just to be crystal clear, I never felt like McQueen was a misogynist. “I can’t wait to go,” says Alexander McQueen, known as Lee to everyone who wasn’t in fashion or working for the dole office (the reason he used Alexander – his middle name – was to avoid investigation).

However, it was not until he was eighteen that he came out to his family. Being a master of tailoring and structure, his garments fitted the body like a second skin and were often made to look constricting. “For one of his performances, he had to wear a grass skirt.” His brother Michael.

So, how does this essay stand up almost 11 years later? In my third year, I went on to write my dissertation about his work, choosing to explore the idea of whether or not he was a misogynist, as he had so often been branded by the press in his early years. Whilst McQueen started his career designing for a female market, he was a gay man who likely harboured no sexual desires for women.

McQueen described himself as the ‘pink sheep’ of the family, knowing he was gay from the age of six, before coming out to his family aged 18 and to the public a year later in an issue of i-D magazine. McQueen often used masks or garments that constricted or obscured the face during his womenswear shows but it was an aspect that he carried over to feature in his menswear as well.

The shoes made headlines around the world, and long-time McQueen models Abbey Lee Kershaw, Natasha Poly and Sasha Pivovarova refused to wear the precarious pairs and were therefore cut from the show. McQueen was openly gay and said he realized his sexual orientation when he was six years old.

In his show notes, McQueen wrote that the melted and twisted plastic of the shoes were meant to evoke a post-nuclear-apocalyptic landscape after the ecological meltdown of the planet. McQueen relished in unsettling an audience. It also goes on to discover how McQueen grew as a designer over time—the longer he worked in the industry and the more established he became, he lost some of the initial anger and rawness with which he had when first entering the fashion world.

He entered into a civil partnership. Here she is saying that gay men, who are not considered masculine by their straight male counterparts, form an allegiance with all things feminine because it is the binary opposite to their persecutors. The social commentary for this short film could be endless.

Let me know your thoughts…. [40]. [2] He told his family when he was 18 and, after a rocky period, they accepted his sexuality. A scuba-diving fanatic, McQueen was openly gay, describing his coming out at a young age as going "straight from my mother's womb on to the gay parade".

Having grown up in a working class environment, he feared how his family, especially his father and older brother would react. He committed suicide when I was in my first year at university—I remember the news breaking whilst being at an afters. So much of the focus was, and still is, placed on his womenswear, that the controversial elements which were carried over into his menswear designs are not often recognised.