It was an extra-ordinairy Alexander McQueenshow, streamed live onto the Internet. Nick Knight was the director of this presenation – called Plato’s Atlantis – and did a great job. The staging was impressive: two cameras mounted on rolling cranes in the middle of a sparkling white, bio-lab runway. On a screen in the backround, the models were projected, with the cranes being part of the image. It looked like another planet.
Inspiriation for this dazzling collection came from Darwin, the natural world, underwater aliens and technology. In a pressrelease the designer explained he was casting an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdwon of the world. We may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves. McQueens fantasy goes beyond borders . The dresses were molded and shaped, had engineered (reptile)prints and jacquards and came in breathtaking whorls of colors (greens, browns, aqua and blue). The platform-shoes were alienating. In a section in which it looked as if McQueen was envisaging a biological hybridization of women with sea mammals, there were trousers whose bulbous flanks mimicked the skin of sharks or dolphins. Some dresses and tops looked like large bubbles of water.
The way McQueen is embracing new computer technologies and the drama of the moving image puts him at the leading edge of change.
