Famous for his “bumster” jeans that became a uniform for boys across the country and the iconic skull motif, it was with great sadness that the fashion world learned last week of the death of Lee Alexander McQueen.
I know that a lot of fashion bloggers felt unable to make a real tribute to the designer and I know that I felt inadequate to do so, so instead I posted a series of photographs from his Spring Summer 2010 collection show at Paris Fashion Week last autumn. (You can see my post here)
But it’s Body Image Season here at BSB and that’s what this post is going to be about (in part!).
In 1998 McQueen caused controversy when he sent double amputee and Para Olympian, Aimee Mullins, down his runway. However, it was not intended to be controversial, merely to illustrate that everyone is beautiful. I came across the following quote when researching this piece and thought it encapsulated – v nicely – the idea behind the Body Image Season:
“It started after a speaking engagement at a conference one day, when a man said to me: ‘You’re really beautiful. You don’t look disabled.’ I wasn’t offended, but it made me think that he obviously didn’t really think of me as disabled, or he wouldn’t have said that to me. I obviously looked like his idea of ‘one of us’, rather than ‘them’.
“It struck me that people found me very sexy, but if you sat them down and said to them, ‘There’s someone over there who’s missing both legs from the shin down’, most people would never find that sensual. Yet when people saw me as a whole package, without realising, they felt all those things that aren’t supposed to happen. Modelling seemed a sneaky way to make a point about that.”
From the Guardian
Lee McQueen recognised the beauty in a woman who might not have been accepted as conventionally beautiful by the rest of society but his desire to see beauty where others might not is something that we need to embrace. It is something that the fashion industry needs to embrace. A beautiful woman with prosthetic legs walking down a runway at Fashion Week should not cause an outcry, in fact, in an ideal world, her legs, or lack thereof shouldn’t even make the headlines. Just as the size of a model shouldn’t make the headlines.
We – society and the fashion industry – need to embrace women (and men) from all backgrounds and of all shapes and sizes and no matter whether they only have one leg or two or none.
I just had to include these photos to show you just how beautiful the legs that McQueen designed for Aimee Mullins were.
From the Daily Mail
