Featured Article Summary #151

Voss was the seventeenth fashion collection by Alexander McQueen, released for Spring/Summer 2001. It used images of madness and nature to question what “bodily perfection” and beauty really mean, and it also reflected McQueen’s mixed feelings about the fashion industry. The collection included striking showpieces made with materials such as razor clam shells, an antique Japanese screen, taxidermy hawks, and microscope slides, and it mostly used muted colors with surreal and Orientalist influences. The runway show took place on 26 September 2000 at the Gatliff Road Warehouse in London inside a mirrored glass cube that made the audience watch themselves at first, then revealed a padded “asylum-like” space. Models looked unwell with bandaged hair and acted out a “nervous breakdown,” and the finale involved a central glass cube shattering to reveal Michelle Olley covered in moths. Critics praised both the showpiece designs and the performance aspect, and the collection has been widely studied, with some models describing their experience as challenging but positive. Alexander McQueen was a British fashion designer famous for imaginative, sometimes controversial designs and dramatic runway shows. Over nearly twenty years, he drew on themes such as history, romance, femininity, sexuality, and death, and started out as an apprentice tailor on London’s Savile Row. He later worked as head designer at Givenchy and often used unusual materials and nature imagery, especially animal symbols like birds, moths, and butterflies. McQueen struggled with the fashion industry and media, facing criticism that targeted him personally and pushed him into smoking and drug use to cope with pressure. Several of his collections were meant to criticize the industry itself, using metaphors such as the short life of a gazelle, fashion as a circus, and, in The Horn of Plenty, satire of runway culture and waste. Voss (Spring/Summer 2001), also known as the “asylum show,” was Alexander McQueen’s 17th collection and a critique of the fashion industry. He imagined designers as if trapped in a “mental asylum,” using strange materials and unusual design ideas to question what society finds beautiful. The collection used muted colors with touches of red and added details like ruffles and pintucks, plus recurring “Oriental” motifs inspired by traditional crafts such as embroidery. Named after a Norwegian wildlife area, it also featured natural materials, most notably garments covered in thousands of seashells, alongside bird imagery and even a dress made with taxidermied hawks. It further mixed themes of madness, imprisonment, and medicine through references such as microscope slides and possibly nurse-like styling, while many looks reworked menswear tailoring and “deconstructed” how clothing forms and functions. Voss included many showpiece outfits made for display rather than mass production, designed to express the idea of a collection through extreme, detailed craftsmanship. Examples include a dress covered with about 1,200 razor clam shells, a feathered minidress with an unusual forward cone shape, and garments built from repurposed artworks like a Japanese screen and painted glass corsets, as well as a medical “slide” dress made from 2,000 hand-painted microscope slides. McQueen used the finale with Voss to challenge society’s idea of beauty, arguing that things seen as ugly—like moths or a fat nude woman—could be beautiful depending on how people perceive them. He was influenced by his experience of being fat-shamed and staged the final look as a recreation of Joel-Peter Witkin’s “Sanitarium,” adding hundreds of moths fluttering around Olley. Michelle Olley, who expected to be cast as a “visceral” monster-like figure, worried about performing nude in a full-face hood, but agreed because she felt it was “for art,” ultimately viewing it as joining a ritual disguised as fashion.