McQueen, 1995

Alexander McQueen's Autumn/Winter 1995 show still has the unpleasant force of something fashion could not quite metabolise. It was presented in March 1995, with heather and bracken on the runway and women walking in slashed lace, torn tartan, exposed bodices, and the low-slung bumster line that made the body look newly vulnerable. The clothes did not ask to be admired first. They made admiration feel like part of the problem.

The misunderstanding arrived almost immediately. The title was read as an image of violence against women, helped along by the staging: battered-looking models, cut-open garments, a performance language that blurred fashion show and assault scene. The Met's account of McQueen and tartan is useful because it states the harder claim plainly. McQueen meant the word as the historical rape of the Scottish Highlands by English landlords, not as a fantasy of sexual violence. That does not make the show comfortable. It makes the discomfort more exact.

McQueen was not using tartan as a heritage print. The Met identifies the black, red, and yellow McQueen sett in the collection, while PatternVault notes that the show used Lochcarron tartan and lace found in Brick Lane. Those details matter because the work sits between clan history, market material, and London rag-trade improvisation. It is not a pure return to origin. It is origin cut up, bought by the yard, stitched into a jacket that refuses to close politely.

I like tartan least when fashion makes it cosy. A scarf, a school uniform, a Christmas tin, a version of Scotland packaged for people who want landscape without politics. McQueen would have hated that softness, or at least distrusted it. PBS quotes him, via Andrew Wilson's biography, rejecting what he called Vivienne Westwood's "fake history" of romantic tartan, and saying eighteenth- century Scotland was not beautiful women drifting over moors in chiffon. It is a sharp line because it also risks sounding ungenerous. Westwood had her own politics, her own rage. However, McQueen's point lands: romance can launder damage until the costume looks innocent.

The show was not tasteful, and I don't think it was trying to be. Taste would have made tartan decorative again. McQueen wanted it to accuse the room, to pull a textile out of tourist romance and put the violence back into the pattern. The nineteenth-century bodice references, the breast-exposing cuts, the broken lace, the heather underfoot: all of it pushed against the idea that history becomes harmless once it has become beautiful.

There is a line from this to the other mid-nineties runway arguments that kept attacking fashion's own manners. Margiela's playground show removed the front row and made the hierarchy look like furniture. Gaultier's Les Tatouages pulled body modification into luxury before it had become celebrity grammar. McQueen's move was harsher because it did not only rearrange taste. It made taste feel morally exposed.

Tim Blanks later called the show legendary and remembered it as an image-building exercise from a designer not yet making clothes in the ordinary commercial sense. That sounds almost too strategic, as if the shock were only branding. However, the surviving garments argue against reducing it to publicity. The McQueen house's own Barbican exhibition page identifies Look 06 as a fragile lace dress, hand-cut and dyed, with a latex-coated bodice and fishing-wire binding. A piece like that is not merely an outrage delivery system. It is craft under stress.

Maybe that is why the show keeps refusing to settle into a single verdict. It was exploitative and serious, theatrical and historically literate, a young designer's bid for attention and a real argument about what fashion does to national memory. The later archive has learned how to hold it, glass vitrine, museum caption, published essay, careful phrasing. I am glad those captions exist. I also hope they never make the show sound resolved.

Sources:

McQueen and Tartan — The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Alexander McQueen Fabric, Part 2: Tartan — PatternVault

Alexander McQueen's Controversial "Highland Rape" Show — Vogue

How Alexander McQueen's Grotesque Creations Wrecked the Runway — PBS NewsHour

McQueen at the Barbican — Alexander McQueen