The world is not ready for the "real" McQueen

Sean McGirr has had an unenviable task this season: proposing a new creative vision for Alexander McQueen, one of the most elusive and multifaceted brands of all time, a brand whose most authentic aesthetic had remained untranslatable even for Sarah Burton, who was the right hand of the founder. The fact is that McGirr's debut collection for Alexander McQueen presented last Saturday and prepared in just three months was a patchy result, inspired by the founder's early shows, Banshee and The Birds, but certainly closer to regular ready-to-wear than to the original figurative and dramatic power of the “true” McQueen. Now, practically everyone's desire is not to see the Alexander McQueen brand change the course of fashion history, but simply to return to those symbolic, mystical collections, rich in fantasy and romanticism but also so brutally modern – collections that were often poorly received at the time and have been retrospectively rehabilitated but were not without creating huge controversies. The problem is precisely this: as a fashion industry and as a society would we be able to accept McQueen if he were to return today with the same shows and the same looks?

Let's say it outright: if McQueen's shows were to happen now, online activism zealots would have more than one field day. Let's recall, for example, last September when Undercover's SS24 runway, beautiful, ended with three looks composed of lantern dresses whose billowing skirts housed illuminated terrariums with flying butterflies. The butterflies came from ethical and recognized breeders and were released immediately after the show – which did not prevent PETA from raising a fuss for which Jun Takahashi had to apologize by letter, promising not to use animals in his shows and sprinkling ashes on his head. But we have web users who got outraged over a Zara campaign with packaged statues and debris, Elena Velez's runway ending up in a puddle of mud, Marc Jacobs models falling down stairs for a campaign, fake lion heads at Schiapparelli's Haute Couture glorifying hunting, Burberry's 2019 show with hoodie laces tied in a slipknot, and a jewelry piece resembling an anal form appearing at Givenchy's 2021 show. And let's not even start on the time Alessandro Michele included straightjackets for Gucci's SS20 and the controversial Balenciaga advertisement from which the brand has yet to recover. We're lucky there weren't protests over the “fake naked” corsets and underwear seen at the Maison Margiela Artisanal show, but, well, these and other examples demonstrate not so much that we're more sensitive as a society, but that the consequences of controversy can be much more disastrous today – which leads many designers to avoid them altogether and apologize profusely.

Now, in his lifetime McQueen has rained yellow water resembling urine on a catwalk, made a model wear a bodysuit full of live worms, made up and dressed models as brutalized victims for a show named Highland Rape, heavily drawn from Islamic culture for several fairly sexualized looks, organized a show entirely centered on the imagery of a mental asylum like Voss which concluded with the release of hundreds of moths, encaged models, decorated looks inspired by bullfighting creating the illusion of a model impaled by two lances, sewn hair locks into garments as a reference to Jack the Ripper, once even dropped his pants instead of bowing at the end of a show while a black hat adorned with a silver skull from FW01 closely resembled the Totenkopf of the Nazi SS, elsewhere a FW98 jacket was decorated with prints of the Romanov family's children killed by Russian revolutionaries in 1918. Always for the Golden Shower show, Gisele Bundchen who was only 18 at the time was practically forced to walk topless and the photos of the crying girl advancing on the runway while her makeup melts off have remained famous; for the SS09 show, Abbey Lee Kershaw, then 19, fainted just after the show because her corset had been excessively tightened - today incidents like these would be enough to end a designer's career.

And all this without mentioning the various rather controversial behaviors that today would either be brushed under the rug or earn him serious trouble at work: from heavy drug use (according to the Daily Mail, the average was six hundred pounds of cocaine per day) and other habits best left unmentioned that have already filled various articles and video essays. It's true that McQueen's “wrongness” level had diminished over the years, that the provocations had greatly dwindled – but could the designer's career survive media scrutiny , conspiracy theories, and enormous internal pressures aroused by one of his gimmicks? Everyone wants the old McQueen – but we're not sure everyone would be ready for the “true” McQueen.