In true Alexander McQueen fashion, the designer’s whimsical collection was presented posthumously, in what would be his last showing, as part of Paris Fashion Week on Tuesday.

His final collection was the culmination of a career of pushing the fashion boundary and using style as social commentary. Models paraded in gold-crusted Mohawk haircuts and gowns inspired by Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Paired with a futuristic silhouette, McQueen took religious symbolism and morphed it into a romantic 15-piece collection.

McQueen committed suicide Feb. 11 in the beginning of New York Fashion Week 2010, leaving the fashion world in shock and dismay. A month later, Syracuse University fashion design students and professors are still reeling from the famed designer’s death.

Kitiya Phongsuwan and Milly Diaz, both junior fashion design majors, were waiting for a downtown train in New York City to go to their internships at New York Fashion Week when their friends sent them text messages about McQueen’s death.

‘My mouth just hit the ground. I checked Twitter and Style.com to confirm the news, and I still couldn’t believe it,’ Phongsuwan said. ‘I thought to myself, ‘This is insane, this can’t happen.”

Even after a month after hearing the news, Diaz said McQueen’s death is still very surreal. ‘Everyone will still look at his collections 10 years from now,’ she said. ‘He will be talked about as a designer, but now that he’s gone, there’s no one to look forward to anymore. I don’t think there’s anyone else like McQueen right now, and I don’t think anyone could replace him. He has to be the most extreme designer I’ve ever seen.’

Since his death, all McQueen’s clothing samples lent to magazines and stores have been called back.

His fall 2010 collection will show in Paris as planned.

Royce Russell, a junior art history and fashion design major, was in class when he received about 15 text messages from friends. After class ended, he confirmed McQueen’s death by looking through online articles.

He said that though McQueen’s fashion is not always practical, his clothes transport people to a different time and place. ‘I always want my design to make people feel like they’re removed from reality. The fanciful side of fashion is something McQueen and I love.’

McQueen, dubbed ‘the bad boy of British design,’ wasn’t afraid to be creative, extreme, satirical or political. His designs and runway productions often painted a bigger picture than beautiful clothes and intricate tailoring.

Fashion design professor and McQueen fan Karen Bakke had the privilege of hearing the designer speak at London Fashion Week in the early 1990s. He said that while the designer was not eloquent, he was a ‘star for eccentric ideas in fashion.’

‘We know he’s going to have something interesting to look at,’ Bakke said. ‘10,000 people are going to look at what he did, what he has done with the hair, what the models look like and what the theme is. It’s always something memorable. It’s never a boring show.’

1996 – McQueen’s fall collection, ‘Highland Rape,’ made a fashion and political statement about England’s occupation of Scotland. The models wore opaque contact lenses and were made up to look brutalized while their tattered, tartan dresses were ripped open to reveal lacy undergarments.

1998 – McQueen caused a huge stir with his fall collection and a show that included a hybrid between cars and robots spraying paint onto white cotton dresses and model Aimee Mullins, an amputee, striding down the catwalk on intricately carved wooden legs.

2009 – After opening his fall collection, McQueen’s opened up conversation about consumerism and a collapsing fashion industry. His runway was strewn with garbage and props from past productions. His clothes parodied classic Christian Dior and Chanel patterns and made a statement that the fashion industry doesn’t know how to move forward.

2009 – Lady Gaga wore McQueen’s famed 10-inch heels in her music video for ‘Bad Romance.’

jwong04@syr.edu

Published on March 9, 2010 at 12:00 pm