T-Magazine - Mens Fall Fashion 09

[Faust]

Have fun. Didn't look through it yet, but there is a small Rick Owens profile, besides other things.

[DamageX]

Thanks Faust, it looks very interesting, I'm checking it out now!

[ultimaratio]

It's interesting, though the video is a little aesthetically offensive...

Also, when did Michael Fassbender get so hot? I've never seen Julius leather so sexualized!

[lowrey]

I don't get why they had to make the magazine so hard to browse. the content is simple, photos and little text, why ruin it with annoying flash gimmicks...

that Rick video though, lolwut??

"don't be fooled by the shades of grey, underneath the Paris-based designer is an extremely colourful guy"

[Faust]

The ad overload makes browsing annoying. Going to steal the hard copy from my friends who don't read it anyway. The RO video is a serious case of WTF

[raddy]

Yeah, I about broke my mouse in frustration trying to read the RO piece. I like the "I also enjoy a tiny bit abusing the beautiful boys."

[mrbeuys]

I don't get why they had to make the magazine so hard to browse. the content is simple, photos and little text, why ruin it with annoying flash gimmicks...

I actually make my living making stuff that's hard to browse, but I am so with you on this one, I would guess it's about a day each of a flash guy and an after effects guy wasted on the piece and video respectively... Should have put the whole mag layout into the google maps engine and I would have been a happy guy.
Love the family portrait and the pic of the baptism tho.

[Faust]

I think the Alexander McQueen article by Cathy Horyn is worth reposting.

General Lee
LEADING A CHARGE INTO MEN’S WEAR, ALEXANDER MCQUEEN WON THE BATTLE FOR FALL. CATHY HORYN ON THE COCKNEY REBEL.

Part 1

Alexander McQueen sleeps under a portrait of himself in a rented flat in Mayfair, the London neighborhood that is also home to such fashion luminaries as Valentino and Tom Ford. It’s easy to see why McQueen favors this particular portrait, to a self-reflecting degree, and chose to frame it as elaborately as a religious icon and place it on the same wall as photos of his beloved dogs — Minter, Juice and Callum — as though all four beings are inseparable.

As a well-off man of 40, with a newly purchased home down the block under renovation and a country house in Sussex, McQueen doesn’t lack for serious art. His friendship with artists like Sam Taylor-Wood and Jake and Dinos Chapman go back years, and examples of their work are displayed in the two-level flat. Yet the portrait captures a moment of truth that feels savored. Taken by David Bailey in 1996, it shows a fleshy and tentative McQueen staring into the camera. ‘‘I’d been up all night partying,’’ he recalls.

More to the point, he had just been hired by Givenchy, the French couture house owned by LVMH Möet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, whose chairman, Bernard Arnault, was prepared to pay huge sums for raw British talent. Openly gay, with a Cockney swagger that seemed to embolden him even as it made his insecurities transparent (the stylist Isabella Blow once remarked that his teeth ‘‘looked like Stonehenge’’), McQueen had already left a mark with his bumster trousers, a style that set off a decade-long fashion for low-rise jeans. McQueen was then 27, living in his studio in Hoxton Square, in the East End, and wondering where his next quid was coming from. On the morning that a LVMH executive called with the Givenchy offer, he was in bed with his boyfriend, and, as he said later, he went to the toilet ‘‘to have a think.’’ When he emerged, he got on the phone and accepted, but it was without enthusiasm. The arrival of Champagne and caviar from Paris didn’t soften him. He was, and remains, not so much an enfant terrible as an enfant sauvage, guarding against the loss of his own innocence. That’s what the portrait shows — the watchfulness lurking in the haze of a London all-nighter.

Although McQueen would probably resist the idea that he has mellowed, there are signs recently of greater self-acceptance, not least in the move to establishment Mayfair. ‘‘Ten years ago I would have never thought of moving to this area of London,’’ he says. We have left his flat and walked around the corner to Scott’s, the Mount Street fish restaurant that now serves as his local canteen. At lunchtime the place feels very jolly. Steve Martin enters, scans the room and heads to the back. McQueen, who is almost universally known as Lee, is given a large booth near the door. He orders dressed crab and smoked haddock, and then continues, ‘‘It was all about Lee the Cockney oink and Hoxton Square. But now it’s about a company and peace of mind. I can still rock ’n’ roll, but I can do it here and I can do it safely.’’

Some people might find this choirboy confession hard to take or, anyway, hard to believe. McQueen, whom I first met in 1997, is famous for winding people up. He is wily. He knows how to clock someone else’s needs and adjust his responses accordingly, and not in a manner that feels slick or insincere, but certainly there’s a large amount of obfuscation involved. Yet now when we speak he is forthright on a number of topics, including his close friendship with Blow, who committed suicide in May 2007, about which he had said little publicly. At the same time, collections like the 2008 ‘‘Girl Who Lived in the Tree’’ and this fall’s men’s show, a well-crafted ode to men’s sexual nature (forget the Sherlock gloom; focus on the attenuated cut of the trousers, the oiliness of the butchers’ aprons), are among his best. McQueen, who comes up with the concepts for all of his shows and still cuts most of the patterns himself, describes these 15-minute performances as ‘‘the culmination of everything that goes around in my mind.’’ And though one might not think to place him in the same category as Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, whom he admires, his clothes, like hers, have the power to open us up. In their hands, fashion is not meaningless. But as for opening himself up for understanding, McQueen would probably say, with a grunt, ‘‘I can’t be bothered.’’

There is no doubt, however, that the sense of control in his shows is reflected in his personal life. Two years ago, following Blow’s death, McQueen ended a long relationship. ‘‘I had been in India for a month, and when I got off the plane I went straight to my partner’s work and I said, ‘We’re over,’ ’’ he recalled. ‘‘I finished with him, and I started cleaning up my business. And I’ve never been happier. I work much harder.’’ Later, when I repeated the conversation to Jonathan Akeroyd, McQueen’s chief executive for the past five years, he said, ‘‘I think Lee sells himself short, to be honest. He’s not one of these guys who brings little publicly. At the same time, collections like the 2008 ‘‘Girl Who Lived in the Tree’’ and this fall’s men’s show, a well-crafted ode to men’s sexual nature (forget the Sherlock gloom; focus on the attenuated cut of the trousers, the oiliness of the butchers’ aprons), are among his best. McQueen, who comes up with the concepts for all of his shows and still cuts most of the patterns himself, describes these 15-minute performances as ‘‘the culmination of everything that goes around in my mind.’’ And though one might not think to place him in the same category as Rei Kawakubo, of Comme des Garçons, whom he admires, his clothes, like hers, have the power to open us up. In their hands, fashion is not meaningless. But as for opening himself up for understanding, McQueen would probably say, with a grunt, ‘‘I can’t be bothered.’’

More slowly, McQueen has come to terms with the tragedy of Blow, one of the great English eccentrics and — despite a genuine funniness — a woman with paralyzing insecurities. It was Blow, a stylist and editor, and a member of the Delves Broughton family, who gave an early boost to McQueen’s career by wearing his clothes and talking him up. Two portraits of her hanging in McQueen’s living room — a gift from the photographer Steven Meisel — capture her beaky, Sitwellian beauty.

‘‘It was the most valuable thing I learned in fashion, her death,’’ McQueen says. He acknowledges that some people think he did not do enough to help Blow — ‘‘You’ve got to let someone like that be herself’’ — and he says there are things that he and others did that he will never discuss. He calls Detmar Blow, her husband, ‘‘the bane of her life,’’ adding, ‘‘Isabella was so strong in her public image but couldn’t stand her ground in her personal life. I know the other side. She would say that fashion killed her, but she also allowed that to happen in a lot of ways. She got herself some good jobs and she let some of them go. You could sit Isabella down and tell her what she should do with her life. But she would never understand that all it came down to, ‘You just are, Isabella. And that is your commodity.’ ’’

[Faust]

Part 2

ON THE MORNING THAT I MEET McQueen in his office, a modern building on Clerkenwell Road, he is in his top-floor studio with Sarah Burton, his design assistant for the past 13 years, and the stylist Camilla Nickerson. Sunlight pours through the glass roof. The spring 2010 men’s show, which featured paint-splattered trousers and which he did, like all his men’s collections, with the assistance of Daniel Kearns (‘‘He’s Irish, straight, a gentle soul’’), was behind him, and work had begun on the women’s spring line. McQueen was experimenting with making soft fabrics look hard and blurring the line therein. Two years ago, the company, which has been part of Gucci Group since 2000, became profitable, with a sizable proportion of sales coming from accessories, the McQ sportswear label and men’s wear, begun five years ago. According to Akeroyd, men’s accounts for 20 percent of total sales — a robust share given that McQueen is mainly known for his women’s designs. That picture is likely to change in a year or two when the company opens a shop on Savile Row.

Gucci executives have never interfered in McQueen’s shows — ‘‘that’s all I’ve ever asked’’ — but the demand for profitability has surely given purpose to his creativity. Both collections are more absorbing, more speculative about the future of dress since the company began making money. The fall men’s show, a high point in Milan, was a hard-core view of sexuality presented in a romantic envelope of Victorian darkness. McQueen, who has never shied away from expressing his sexual tastes — almost vulgarly so — says the show was based on the subculture of rent boys that brought together Oscar Wilde and the son of the Marquess of Queensberry: ‘‘The cut is really all about, and accentuates, what I personally find attractive and sexy.’’ Yet, for all that, the clothes are not limiting.
I ask McQueen what he’s learned from doing men’s wear. He answers quickly: ‘‘Forget about the impact of the conceptual and think about the bigger picture.’’

McQueen started as a 16-year-old apprentice on Savile Row. It remains the locus of his designs: all things lead back to the ideal of fractional changes in cut. And in his view, most designers don’t pay enough attention to men over 30. ‘‘Somehow, you have to fit yourself into a bracket that doesn’t require a waif body but doesn’t look like a bag of spuds.’’ He laughs. ‘‘I’m 40 now, and I know what I’m capable of wearing.’’

It could be said that McQueen is an incurable romantic. His clothes, after all, frequently make reference to the 18th and 19th centuries. When he tries to do something futuristic — clothes with winged shoulders, say, or the illusion of morphing — journalists slap him down. I remind him that he had once told me he wanted to be as revolutionary as his hero Kawakubo. He wanted to be known as a 21st-century designer. He nods. ‘‘Five years ago, designers like myself would look at Rei and pay homage,’’ he says. ‘‘Today we’re thinking faster than Rei. You have no choice.’’

The truth is McQueen tends to think in three dimensions. That’s partly because, unlike many of his contemporaries, he actually knows how to cut fabric. But it’s also because he wants to push the physical limits of fashion. This desire was never more evident than with a 2006 show that ended with a hologram of his friend Kate Moss. Filmed with four cameras and shown within a huge pyramid, the images of Moss looked amazingly lifelike. McQueen says he was intrigued by the thought of people being able to view an entire show within a little pyramid mounted on their desks. ‘‘And I’d just send it to you over the Net,’’ he says with a giggle. ‘‘I’m talking fantasy, but I don’t think it’s that far from reality. Five years.’’

His latest obsession is to do a live stream of a show over the Web, while offering a handful of commercial looks for immediate sale. In his view, digital technology allows designers to move away from the narrative form and, inevitably, the runway itself. Or, as he puts it, ‘‘you can’t keep rehashing the same concepts of the good, the bad and the ugly.’’

McQueen may just be winding me up. At one point, discussing the 15 minutes of transcendent joy that a show gives, he says, ‘‘God, I sound like I’m contradicting myself, but that’s me all over.’’ Still, he knows that for farsighted designers like himself — Nicolas Ghesquière and Raf Simons, to name two — the real hurdle to progress isn’t money or balky corporate honchos. It is creating a fabric that can produce a new, 21st-century silhouette.
Before us are some prototypes that very nearly, magically, appear to do just that: swirls of fabric suddenly blurring into a carapace. McQueen, though, isn’t satisfied: "Yeah, but what’s in my head isn’t feasible at this time. I’m trying to weave a fabric that goes from a structure into a chiffon, but the loom doesn’t exist. We’re all thinking about it.”

McQueen is now in midlife. He has achieved conventional success — the brand, the Mayfair address — but the inherent need to guard against his innocence is still there. Fifteen years ago it was all about rawness summed up by the bumsters. Today it’s all about technology, and McQueen has turned his passion there.

[zamb]

very good read............
Dumb question, was it a part of the magazine?

[Faust]

Yes, it was.

[lowrey]

just showed my girlfriend the Rick video and she agreed - total mindfuck