Alexander mMcQuen "jenius" or just charismatic

Reading the reports of Alexander McQueen’s death you would think we had lost an Oscar Wilde or a Jimi Hendrix. “He was a genius,” says Katharine Hamnett. “What a terrible tragic waste.” “His brilliant imagination knew no bounds,” says Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. I’m always skeptical when the word “genius” is bandied about by the fashionista — more or less everything is “genius” in their world, as in, “Love that belt, darling. It’s genius.” I oversaw an Alexander McQueen fashion shoot for Vanity Fair’s Cool Britannia issue in 1997 (styled by Isabella Blow) and the thing that really stood out was the cult of personality he had managed to create around himself. He wasn’t a conventional Alpha male, but he was one of those people who used his shyness as a weapon — a form of passive aggression. When he finally appeared on set, at least two hours late, he was surrounded by flunkies and skulked around at the edges of where the models were posing, radiating hostility. The impression he gave was that participating in a photo shoot for Vanity Fair — a privilege that would vastly inflate the amount of money he could extract from credulous advertising agencies — was a colossal chore, far beneath his dignity. He was a rock star. Everyone else was a groupie. As a mere employee of the magazine that was paying him tens of thousands of dollars to secure his services I wasn’t entitled to speak to him. Instead, all communication had to be relayed through some ghastly major domo — a sort of Osric figure. Nine times out of ten, I would pose a question — “Is it okay if we pin the dress at the back because, er, it doesn’t quite fit?” — and get no reply. At the time I resented this, but after I become a bit more worldly — several fashion shoots later — I realised that McQueen’s behaviour was inextricably bound up with his reputation. Had he been a little less prima donna-ish, he never would have become acclaimed as the Greatest Living Designer in British fashion. It took a while, but I finally realised that there’s no such thing as talent in fashion — at least, not in the sense in which it’s normally understood. Unlike literature or music, it simply isn’t clear which designer has talent and which hasn’t. One person puts together a collection in which the models appear in dustbin liners, another in which they’re sporting sackcloth, and who’s to say which collection embodies the “zeitgeist”? To the outsider, both collections look equally idiotic. Before I become involved in this world, I assumed that the reason I couldn’t tell which designers were good and which mediocre was because I lacked experience — I didn’t have any “taste”. But after working in fashion for several years, I realised that “taste” is just a euphemism for the collective wisdom of the fashion elite. And their standards change from week to week — sometimes day to day. Clearly, there were no hard and fast rules, no “canon” which the arbiters of fashion could refer to. So what dictated who was “in” and who was “out”? What prompted the grandees of the fashion world — Anna Wintour, Suzy Menkes, Grace Coddington — to declare one designer a “genius” and another “so ten minutes ago, darling”. It’s not just one thing, obviously. Up to a point, you can tell which designers possess some creative flair — and McQueen clearly had that in spades. Originality counts for something, too, provided it’s within the acceptable parameters. Technical skill — “craft” — is also something the Lord High Executioners of the Catwalk like to cite from time to time, pretending they know something about the stitching techniques used in Indonesian sweatshops. But, overwhelmingly, it’s about the charisma of the designer in question. How much force of personality does he or she possess? Typically, a top designer secures an audience with the high arbiters of international style before he unveils his collection and that is his chance to impose himself, to convince the panel of judges that he’s in possession of some supernatural connection to the sturm and drang of contemporary culture. How does he do this? Sometimes by being emphatic and stern-faced, like Karl Lagerfeld: “Achtung! Achtung! Pink is the new blue.” But it’s often more effective to be quietly confident, shy yet sure. You pronounce with total conviction that, for instance, skulls on scarves are going to be Next Big Thing, and the skull-faced Sybils nod along with great sagacity. The lower the volume, the more convincing the case. Not much to do with talent; mainly to do with personal charisma. So that’s my verdict on Alexander McQueen. Not a “genius”, unless by that you mean a gift for self-presentation. But someone who managed to survive at the top of a very competitive game for over 10 years through sheer force of personality.