Life After McQueen: What Would He Have Wanted?
The sad death of Alexander McQueen might have left the fashion world mourning a luminary, but fans of the designer and his provocative style can look forward to Gucci Group CEO Francois-Henri Pinault’s decision to continue with the brand. The question is, what would McQueen have wanted?
The internet is atwitter this morning with a quote from a newly published Love magazine interview conducted before his death, in which the designer emphatically states that he’d want the show to go on.
“I’m 40 now, but I want this to be a company that lives way beyond me, and I believe that customers are more important to making that happen than press. When I’m dead, hopefully this house will still be going. On a spaceship. Hopping up and down above the earth.”
But a savvy Fashionista commenter dug up an interview from 2006 that CTV’s Fashion Television posted to YouTube shortly after McQueen’s February 11th death. In it, McQueen argues for the closure of fashion houses after a designer moves on — lamenting that otherwise it “all comes down to perfume.”
When asked if he’d ever “let somebody carry on the McQueen tradition or the McQueen brand if [he] weren’t actively involved,” the designer responded, “I don’t think so…Because that person would have to come up with the concepts for my shows. And my shows are so personal, so how could that be? Unless it turns into a sort of runway show of nonexistenceness [sic].”
But a true indication of McQueen’s thoughts may come from another portion of the interview, in which he seems to specify that the conflict occurs when a line continues on while a living designer plays no part — not unlike the problem-plagued Emanuel Ungaro. McQueen explains, “If I ever get that old, and I’m still around, and I ever leave my company, I’d just burn the place down.” [Emphasis ours.]
So maybe the issue, in McQueen’s eyes, is having to watch while their brand is bastardized by a new vision — and not actually whether a brand, after death, lives on in the vision they left behind.
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