A Favourite Fashion Brand
A Favourite Fashion Brand-Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen is a British luxury fashion house founded by designer Alexander McQueen in 1992. The original creative director Alexander McQueen was one of the most celebrated fashion designers of his generation, known for his highly original designs that married artistry with exceptional technical ability.
McQueen’s work was admired for its highly original blend of subversion and tradition, evident from the outset in his ‘Bumster’ trousers, sharp frock coats, corroded fabrics, slashed leather and shredded, flesh-revealing lace. Meanwhile, McQueen’s Savile Row training would inform his career: “Everything I do is based on tailoring”, he said. This background in precision tailoring, combined with the more improvised dressmaking and draping techniques he learned in the atelier (the highly skilled workshops of couture houses) at Givenchy – paved the way for his innovative experiments with cutting and construction.
The exploration of polarities – man versus machine, or nature versus technology – was a recurring theme in his work. His collections often featured fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world, such as the Mussel Shell Bodice from VOSS (Spring/Summer 2001), or the Bird’s Nest headdress developed by Mcqueen’s longstanding collaborators Philip Treacy and Shaun Leane for The Widows of Culloden collection (Autumn/Winter 2006)(V&A, No Date).
As part of the Kering Group, Alexander McQueen reduces its environmental impacts and advocates for social welfare through unprecedented innovation and industry collaboration (Panaprium, 2022). In addition to moving forward in sourcing sustainable materials, energy efficiency in operations, and supplier engagement, Alexander McQueen has pioneered the use of an innovative forensic technology with traceability expert Oritain in a pilot project to verify the provenance of leather and to trace the leather through the supply chain. The project is an important step in supporting a supply chain aligned with Kering Standards, with traceability and integrity and represents the brand’s utilization of innovation and technology to advance its sustainability goals.
The company is also relaunching the brand MCQ as a new business model with an innovative and collaborative platform, integrating fashion and technology, utilizing a unique blockchain which registers each item, allowing consumers to interact and engage with the MYMCQ platform via a tag located in each garment. The new MCQ is aiming to integrate circular economy by promoting the extended life and reuse of garments among a community of consumers to be connected through this MYMCQ peer to peer platform (Kering, 2020).
Citation
V&A (No Date) ‘Alexander McQueen – an introduction’. Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/alexander-mcqueen-an-introduction
Panaprium (2022) ‘ALEXANDER MCQUEEN – SUSTAINABILITY FACTS, RATING, GOALS’. Available at: //www.panaprium.com/blogs/i/alexander-mcqueen
Kering (2020) ’SUSTAINABILITY PROGRESS REPORT 2017 – 2020’. Available at: https://progress-report.kering.com/home/houses-in-action/alexander-mcqueen/