Alexander McQueen — The Overlook — Fall 1999

Gabriel Alexander
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read
Alexander McQueen Photographed by Tim Walker

Alexander Mcqueen is a British designer. Most famous for his theatrical shows, and cutting-edge construction abilities. He’s been one of my favorite fashion designers since I first encountered his work on Bjork’s Who is It?. I intrinsically connected and understood his Romantic aesthetic right away. One of the first McQueen collections I saw was titled The Overlook, after the Hotel in the Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining. At that point, he was still the head designer for the Givenchy House in Paris. But, he had been working on his own McQueen brand for a few years, which The Overlook was a part of.
The most striking parts of the show for me were the way in which he translated the essence of the Kubrick film into the clothes and the overall atmosphere of the show. The makeup on the women’s faces, the haunting music, and the cold atmosphere instantly grabbed me and transported me to his vision.

Images from the show

Shows inspired by films, especially those of Kubrick and Hitchcock became a recurring theme for McQueen throughout his career. The show was staged in a large rectangular space. Inside it, there was a cubic box made of glass. So the viewers were seeing the show through this translucent barrier. The snow-covered floor, the dead trees, and the pastel-colored lighting inside, almost automatically transport you to the cold hills on top of which The Overlook hotel sits on the film.

The show begins by displaying short video portraits of the models. They show a closeup of their faces and their eyes as they are backstage. It also displays details of their makeup, and some accessories like their shoes, all while haunting music plays. As the video plays, flashes of two twin girls with red hair eating apples appear. This image is directly connected to the twins the main character, Danny, sees in the Kubrick film.

Mcqueen Show — Kubrick Scene side by side

The show lasts about thirty-four minutes and it’s divided into a few sections. The first section introduces the aesthetic and theme. The garments in the first section have a darker and more ominous palette. As the show progresses, some pastel and dark colors begin to emerge. The clothing becomes more tailored, with bolder structures. By the end, the palette becomes completely white and the clothes become softer and less tailored. After this section, there is an interlude where dance skaters all dressed in white enter the stage and choreographically move through the space revealing the iced floor. As they dance the lightning turns into what looks like black lighting, which makes the white garments shine in shades of blue.

As the dancers exit the stage, the lights return, snow begins to fall and the sounds of the wind and wolves in the night can be heard. A new woman appears from the darkness. Her blouse/top is completely covered in crystals of different sizes. They look as though they had been growing on her for centuries. As the last section of the show continues, McQueen’s goal seemed to translate the snow storm into the garments. Beginning with the crystallized top, then moving to dresses and long coats made out of white wools, and finally to skirts with patterns that looked like the structure of snowflakes.

At that point, I wondered what was the relationship between McQueen’s show and Kubrick’s film beyond the literal references? And I realized that beyond the immediate translations of the typewriter sounds in the music, the overall references to the hotel, and the twins image; McQueen’s connection to Kubrick was his Romantic view of nature. The most prominent theme in The Shining is the effect that nature has on its characters. The harshest being the isolating effect that the snow-covered hills have on Jack Torrance and his family as they are snowed-in the hotel. The relationship to McQueen is he translates Romantic nature into the feminine. He makes The Winter a woman and explores all aspects of it. The cold ones, the Romantic and finally the unknown. This can be seen most prominently in his color transition where we move from black to pastels to pure white. This exploration of the feminine in relation to nature is another of McQueen’s recurring themes. The biggest examples of this can be seen in Irere (2002) and Plato's Atlantis (2010) where we see serpents and the Spring take the stage.

The entire video of the show
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