alexander mcqueen | AW2012

I’ve always loved looking at fashion “movies” on YouTube, my favourite being Rodarte’s “The Curve of Forgotten Things” featuring Elle Fanning. We often see fashion depicted in the form of video clips of runway shows, writteninterviews with designers and photographsof their latest collection, but the dynamic medium of movie-making is one that is both wildly effective and vastly underused. Movies are a delicious infusion of the three most common forms of “digital fashion” that I listed above; it combines elements of animated visual stimulus with various audio supplements, and can be embellished with a multitude of special effects to create an artistic explosion which illustrates a concept more effectively than any individual method. Movies add new dimensions to fashion: context being one of them. Instead of browsing through a series of runway pictures, seeing an animated display of fashion sort of places it in context within the greater scheme of things.

I recently came across AlexanderMcQueen’s A/W 2012 campaign movie, and at first I didn’t know what to think of it. Fashionista.com described it as a “trippy fashion rave,” which sounds pretty accurate to me. Directed by David Sims and featuring Suvi Koponen, this psychedelic thrill-ride of electric hues and stop-motion style filming is certainly dizzying, to say the least. It’s unlike any other campaign Alexander McQueen has ever produced, and for a while I was tied between thinking:

1.     “Woah, look at this groundbreaking campaign! McQueen has never been so daring and extraordinary before – this is so awesome!”

2.     “I love the ideas behind this, and it’s definitely an authentic concept, but the video doesn’t really hit the spot.”

3.     “This is crap.”

I’ve attached some screen-grabs of the video, and the link to it is here, so I’ll let you judge this campaign video for yourself.

If you’re curious to know, I finally settled on an opinion regarding this video: It was utterly crap. I hate to say this because I’ll forever hold McQueen close to my heart as one of the best designers of all time, but that video really did suck. Admittedly, I haven’t had the chance to leaf through the collection itself, but as for the video, it was just disappointing – nothing more than a repeated clip of Suvi putting on and taking off a pair of metal goggles against a background of a fluorescent kaleidoscope. Kudos to Team McQueen for being adventurous and trying something new, but that video was laughably monotonous and terribly off-topic. But I still love you, Team McQueen – we all have bad days collections!

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