Thursday 11 February 2010

ALEXANDER McQUEEN (17 March 1969 - 11 February 2010)



Genius, ever a fragile commodity.  

Poor Alexander McQueen, devastated by the death of his mother whose funeral was arranged for tomorrow. But one thing I've learnt is that you cannot find an easy answer to why people choose to depart this life, leaving us all behind bewildered and bereaved to a greater or lesser extent. In that childish way that we learnt to make sense of death,  let's hope he's reunited with her and with his close friend and muse Isabella Blow, who died by her own hand in 2007 .  



Isabella Blow in a creation designed by McQueen with Philip Treacy.  

I was in a restaurant when Isabella Blow piled in just after us, squeezing past the tables to hang up her coat in the closet.  I made an excuse to enter the closet so that I could see who she was wearing. (What a terrible admission!)  The label said Alexander McQueen. Of course.  

Images from The Guardian website.  Read McQueen's obituary here.

8 comments:

  1. I hadn't realised that Isabella virtually launched McQueen's career by buying all of his first collection.

    As you say, suicide is always vary hard on those left behind.

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  3. oh Blue, I think many of us have one of those. It's all so complicated though.

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  4. While I believe people have the right to end life on their own terms, it is profoundly sad when people do. When I did pr in the mental health world, I thought that suicide, particularly in the young, is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Hope this death does not set off many others, which, unfortunately, often happens.

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  5. Home, thank you for keeping this conversation going. I don't know if one is ever any the wiser but it never harms to talk about it.

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  6. I've only known people who had to live in the direct wake of a suicide. I have never been personally acquainted with someone who took their life, so I don't know whether A. Alvarez' book "The Savage God" holds up under either a survivor's or a health professional's scrutiny. It did awaken me somewhat to the kind of anguish the suicide is struggling to end. There are some brutal phantoms wandering the world.

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  7. rurritable, you've recovered your identity! I should read The Savage God perhaps but it's hard to get in the right mood. I knew someone who commited suicide personally, not terribly well but enough to wonder if it was anything to do with me. It always has that effect. I was shocked by the residual anger of his closest friend.

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