La Poupee and Voss: Alexander McQueen's Heterotopias

Alexander McQueen, La Poupée (1997). Photo: Vogue

Alexander McQueen was born in 1969 in Lewisham, London. He grew up with his mother, a florist and a teacher, who had great impact in his fashion career. Since he was little he designed dresses for his sisters, and by 16 he became an apprentice in Savile Row and Anderson & Shepard. These brands taught him almost everything about tailoring and suits. After working with designers like Koji Tasuno and Romeo Gigli, he started studying in Saint Martin’s College of Arts and Design and in 1992 he graduated with his famous collection “Jack the Ripper Stalks his victims.” He took inspiration in the women murdered by Jack in 1888, mixing it with victorian culture and adding strands of his hair to all the clothing. This runway defined him as a controversial fashion designer and made all the eyes of the fashion industry turn to him. 

Throughout his fashion career, he produced over fifty runways and worked for a while in Givenchy before founding his own brand. His collections expressed different concerns of McQueen like sexuality, eroticism, nature, history, and gothic; but there was always a constant in all these concepts: the body and its possibilities. His starting point was the idea that clothing is an extension of the body, his focus was the way it performed in a social, cultural, and fashion space, and how these affected it. Alexander McQueen also experimented with the perception we have of the spaces in which fashion is presented, from runways to fashion institutions. He intended to emphasize the idea that fashion is always in the blurry lines between fiction and reality.

The career of Alexander McQueen started thanks to Isabella Blow [1], who discovered him and brought him into the fashion industry. He always knew that fashion is a space where rules are set and there are certain behaviors, aesthetics, and bodies that are allowed. However, he also knew that the only way to break through this was from within the fashion system. He expressed the body and took inspiration in concepts like nature and sexuality, two things that he found inherent to the human condition, and expressed himself through this by not following the rules. As much as I would love to talk about all of his runways, I found these ideas particularly present in two of his most iconic runways: La Poupée (1997) and VOSS (2001). 

In both of these runways, Alexander McQueen presented the tension that exists between reality and fiction from the idea that these two concepts are not opposed and that if there’s a line that divides them it’s blurry and can be erased through fashion. Throughout the essay, I talk more about how this relates to each collection, but we can start analyzing this from Foucault’s thesis of utopias and heterotopias. 

Alexander McQueen, La Poupée (1997). Photo: Vogue

A utopia is a fictional idealistic place that’s normally associated with the future and its existence is impossible. However, Foucault introduced us to the term “heterotopia” which is a utopian place that can actually exist, but in this space reality is perceived as a distortion. “Heterotopic sites are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside all the places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality, because this places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak out.” [2] So we can see that in a heterotopia there is an inherent tension between reality and fiction because fiction exists within the reality. If we think it through we can see that this is exactly what a runway is. It functions as an unreal space constructed by the designer in the reality in which fashion narratives are inserted.

For Alexander McQueen, the space in which his designs were displayed were very important and so was the concept of every collection. He always aimed to create spaces in which our own conception of reality and fiction came into crisis. La Poupée (1997) which means doll, presented the conflict between the real body and the unnatural, plastic body. VOSS (2001) represented the natural versus [3] the unnatural, the ideal body versus a transgressed body, and the sane versus the insane. These ideas could have not been expressed if it wasn’t from the heterotopic space that McQueen built. 

In both collections we can see some similarities in the designs, one of them being a constant presence of anamorphosis in the clothing and the body itself in the runways. Anamorphosis is an illusion, a new way of seeing a deformation, a visual unreality. This transcends the bi-dimensional space; we can see it in textiles, patterns, textures, materials, and objects, all which McQueen used to dress and distort the body. This anamorphosis created certain experiences in the public and since it is also a representation of the unreal, it can only exist in a heterotopic space.

But let’s talk about each runway and how both reflected the spirit of Alexander McQueen in the way his designs could reconfigure the body in the space of the runway with the most extravagant textiles, patterns, textures, and materials. La Poupée (1997) and VOSS (2001) transformed the fashion show in a way in which fiction and reality transfigured into a fashion heterotopia.

La Poupée (1997) 

In the late nineties, a young Alexander McQueen presented his Spring/Fall collection La Poupée [4], inspired by the artist Hans Bellmer, who fetishized dolls in his works of art. McQueen made this runway all about the fictional bodies of dolls through metallic objects and silk shining clothing.  This runway was iconic and talked about for months in the industry because McQueen was provocative, experimental and took the concept of a fashion show to the extreme. 

La Poupeé was presented in a rectangular space where the floor was made of water, aiming to look like a mirror floor. In the back, two white blocks surrounded the stairways from which the models emerged. After they made it downstairs, thanks to the reflection of the water, it seemed like the models were floating in a mirror.

The mirror is an important concept in this runway because it represents a fake reflection of the reality, a fictional space. For Foucault, the mirror is the place that opens behind a surface and it can mix the experience of fiction and reality into a heterotopia. The mirror makes real what is unreal, connects all the spaces. All of this intensifies as models made the runway walk. So the space itself is already a heterotopia because it is an unreal space within a real one. 

Alexander McQueen, La Poupée (1997). Photo: Vogue

Kate Moss opened the show with McQueen’s iconic bumster pants [5] which were to elongate the body as a very erotic motif — a concept that was center in La Poupée. The clothing had translucent textiles, moving dresses, triangle shaped suits; sculptures were designed for the hair and the face by Philip Treacy and Shaun Leane; the makeup was metallic and distort the face, it was iconic. It is in the metallic crowns, masks, necklaces, and corsets that made the body look unreal, where we can find the anamorphosis. McQueen designed the metallic structures so they would reconstruct the body alluding to the mechanics of dolls, they were not apart from the body, they were extensions of the body. This is utopia, but as it presented to the public in reality it transformed into heterotopia. 

The way McQueen asked his models to walk was very important in the runway. He would asked them to be performative in their bodies, to exaggerate the movements so that it would be uncomfortable for the audience. The silk suits, dresses, and pants against the lights seemed like metal which contrasted with the translucent garments. The metallic textile and its glowing texture mimic the water. As the runway reached its climax, and everybody was caught in the fiction, the doll became real. A model emerged with a metallic body. A square hold in her arms and legs while she was walking in a mechanic, uncomfortable way. The model was embodying the doll, falling, building, and dislocating in the water. The body was in its extreme limit, disembodied; the fiction merged with the reality. 

At the end, a model bounded to a polygon shape walked down the runway, a fragment of space inside the heterotopia and there she was, met by butterflies, like in a garden, McQueen brought his love for nature. The final walk-through happened around her. She was inside the heterotopia, in the counter-side of the runway, inverted. And once the runway ended we snapped back to reality, out of the simulacrum that is a fashion show, and as Alexander McQueen made his final appearance, we for a moment lose sight of what was real or unreal. Foucault said it: “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” [6] The real place; a runaway, became a playground where dolls were alive and a garden where butterflies flew, a fiction reflected by mirrors.

Alexander McQueen, VOSS (2001).

VOSS (2001) 

By the beginning of the 21st century, Alexander McQueen was one of the most famous designers in the fashion industry. Everyone knew him and wanted to assist during his shows. He would always amaze and shock audiences and fashion critics. McQueen loved this because he always declared how he wanted to generate in the public a strong reaction. He achieved this in a beautiful, eccentric and very à-la-McQueen way. In 2001, Alexander McQueen named his Spring/Summer collection VOSS, which is the name of a Norwegian town that is famous because of its wildlife habitat. This was related to the idea that the designs celebrated the concept of nature. 

VOSS (2001) was displayed in a large container, the public was seated outside this enormous cube with nothing to look at but their own reflections in the mirror cube. They waited for the show to start while listening to the sound of a heartbeat in the back. After an hour, the container lit up and revealed a glass box that looked like a psychiatric ward in a hospital.

Again, Kate Moss opened the show, walking inside the giant cube, behind her the models started following in a very performative way; they looked insane, their bodies moved like they were dancing, but also suffering. The clothing seemed like a second layer of skin moving with them. They could not see the audience or the space in the other side of the glass, they were in a fictional space isolated from the real one. This is important because the relationship with space of the models is different from the public and had different outcomes. 

This fashion show had the most accurate concept of beauty for Alexander McQueen. For him, beauty was uncomfortable and transgressive, but also transparent and organic. Beauty was in the fiction but also in the reality, and the space where they meet; in the sane but also the insane. Beauty was in the way the body became one with his designs. The vision of beauty that McQueen had is important because at the end, beauty is a fictional concept which we take as absolute reality. That is what McQueen wanted to transform, the way in which beauty was seen in fashion. 

Alexander McQueen, VOSS (2001).

The designs were skirts and dresses made from razor-clam and oyster shells; taxidermy birds were like crowns in some models, other designs were filled with feathers and moved with the body of the model like she was going to fly away. All the models had bandages in her heads, McQueen wanted them to look like they just had a clinical intervention. He was constructing a fictional narrative inside the cube. He played with the space which is our primary perception. Alexander McQueen built once again a heterotopic space: light, ethereal, transparent space, or again dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. [7]

Alexander McQueen took inspiration from madness and the mournful, both often were a theme in the designer’s collections. The walking was quite unnatural, against the collection which was inspired in nature. Through this contrast, McQueen “managed to achieve a fluidity of forms and enhance a sort of movement, leaving the impression that his clothes constantly fold, unfold, and refold.” [8] He treated the clothing as extensions of the models by reimagining the structures, symmetries, proportions and movements of the body. 

He brought into the fashion world atypical materials, redefining the relationship between fabric and flesh, opening the body to the unknown, to the nature of sea creatures and plants. [9]

At the end of the catwalk, the heartbeat that sounded in the back throughout all the exhibition, stopped, and a flat-line monotone made the way for the small box that was inside the cube to open slowly. Inside, butterflies started flying and a recreation of Joel-Peter Witkin’s Sanitarium (1983) opened for the public. The glass box revealed the voluptuous, naked figure of fetish writer Michelle Olley, reclining, her masked head bowed and attached to a breathing tube, the lights dimmed and left the audience to ponder the meaning of beauty. [10] The line between fiction and reality erased into an heterotopic space through a beautiful body, limpid, transparent, and always transgressed.  

“Alexander McQueen’s importance in fashion history resides not only on his controversial and extravagant collections, but in his own discourse of fashion: how it can be a political space and language that speaks through the body in the runway space.”

Alexander McQueen expressed what he saw in the limits of the body, how materials and clothing can affect the way a body exists in a space, and how it creates new relationships in fashion. In La Poupée (1997) and VOSS (2001), McQueen aimed to represent what happened when there is no longer a difference between real and unreal. Fashion is nothing but that, a space that is constantly in tension, controversial and finding ways to express the body through clothing. 

At the end, fashion is a heterotopia. McQueen showed us the elasticity of that heterotopic place, he pushed the boundaries and made it even more evident, that fashion is a place where the blurry line between reality and fiction disappears. And the way in which McQueen designs through anamorphosis in textile unveils a way of the body being in reality and fiction at the same time. He made the body emerge from the moment that natural materials in his design represented an extension of the body; feathers, oysters, glass, multi-textile, put together unwrap a new body in fragments as it walks in the space. His materials were always innovative, his patterns complex, forming a dialogue between the natural and synthetic materials.

Alexander McQueen’s importance in fashion history resides not only on his controversial and extravagant collections, but in his own discourse of fashion: how it can be a political space and language that speaks through the body in the runway space. Every fashion show had something from him. McQueen questioned symmetry and proportions as the canon and wanted to express his own vision of beauty through sensuality and vibration and new body structures. We can see a glimpse of this in both La Poupée (1997) and VOSS (2001). 

Fashion is a language that expresses complex ideas and concepts. It aims to challenge the way we experience clothing and goes beyond simply utility. Focused always on making complex designs and innovative materials, McQueen achieved the fluidity and dynamic in his designs, he set the body in motion in every collection through new shapes, lines, and outlines, redefining the relationship between textile and body, and took us to the unknown, breaking the boundaries of fashion.

Notes

[1] Isabella Blow was very important in the fashion industry in the 90s; she dedicated her life to it. She was an editor at London-based fashion magazine Tatler. She was eccentric and helped bring British fashion to the forefront by infusing it with elements of the island’s history and mythology.

[2] Michel, Foucault. “Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, (1984): 4.

[3] Versus not as an opposition but as a dialectic between the two concepts that goes back and forth, it gives and takes.

[4] “Doll” in French.

[5] Low-cut trousers that exposed either just a bit of the bum-crack or in other cases a bigger part of it. Alexander McQueen described them: “it wasn’t about showing the bum…I wanted to elongate the body, not just the bum. To me, that part of the body- not so much the buttocks, but the bottom of the spine- that’s the most erotic part of anyone’s body, man or woman.”

[6] Michel, Foucault. “Of other spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” in Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, (1984): 6.

[7] Ibíd, 3.

[8] Justyna Stępień. “Savage Beauty. Alexander McQueen’s performance of the post-human body ” in Internacional Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 13, no. 2 (2017): 15.

[9] Ibíd, 15.

[10] Kate Bethune. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. ‘Encyclopedia of Collections’ in Alexander McQueen, ed. Claire Wilcox, V&A Publishing, 2015.

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