Voss is the seventeenth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, released for the Spring/Summer 2001 season of his eponymous fashion house. The collection drew on imagery of madness and the natural world to explore ideas of bodily perfection, interrogating who and what was beautiful. Like many of McQueen's collections, Voss also served as a critique of the fashion industry, about which McQueen was often ambivalent. Voss featured a large number of showpiece designs, including dresses made with razor clam shells, an antique Japanese screen, taxidermy hawks, and microscope slides. The collection's palette mainly comprised muted tones; common design flourishes included Orientalist and surrealist elements. The collection is named for Voss, a Norwegian district well-known as a wildlife habitat.
The collection's runway show was staged on 26 September 2000 at the Gatliff Road Warehouse in London, as part of London Fashion Week. The show was staged inside a room-sized mirrored glass cube, with the audience seated outside. McQueen deliberately started the show an hour late, which forced the audience, composed largely of industry professionals, to watch themselves uncomfortably in the mirror. When the show started, the cube became transparent to the audience, revealing a space designed to look like a padded room in a stereotypical mental asylum. The models were styled to look unhealthy, with hair covered by bandages. They were directed to act as though they were having a "nervous breakdown" while walking. Seventy-six looks were presented, followed by a finale in which a glass cube at the centre shattered to reveal Michelle Olley, fat, nude, and covered in moths.
Critical response was positive, especially towards the showpiece ensembles and the performance art aspect. The show is regarded as one of McQueen's best, and has attracted a large amount of academic analysis, particularly pertaining to the collection's imagery of human-animal hybridisation and interrogation of beauty standards. Several models who walked in the show have discussed their experiences as challenging but positive. Ensembles from Voss are held by various museums and have appeared in exhibitions such as the McQueen retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.
Background British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was known for his imaginative, sometimes controversial designs, and dramatic fashion shows. Over the course of his career, which lasted from 1992 until his death in 2010, he explored a broad range of ideas and themes, particularly sexuality, death, violence, romanticism, and historicism. McQueen began his career as an apprentice on Savile Row, earning a reputation as an expert tailor. From October 1996 to October 2001, McQueen wasin addition to his responsibilities for his own labelhead designer at French fashion house Givenchy.
McQueen frequently experimented with unconventional materials and references to nature in his collections. He often used animal parts, both natural and imitation, in his designs. Avian symbolism and imagery was a recurring theme throughout his career. His fifth collection, The Birds (Spring/Summer 1995), was dually inspired by ornithology, the study of birds, and the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds, for which it was named. Moths and butterflies were another repeat motif.
McQueen had a difficult relationship with the fashion industry and the media. Early in his career, journalists often framed him as a working-class trespasser in an upper-class industry and preyed on his insecurities about his weight and looks. His Givenchy collections were poorly received; distressed, he resorted to smoking and drug use to deal with the pressure he felt to satisfy management and the press. McQueen was often ambivalent about continuing his career in fashion, which he described as toxic and suffocating. Several of McQueen's collections, including Voss, were intended as critiques of fashion. In It's a Jungle Out There (Autumn/Winter 1997), McQueen used the short lifespan of the Thomson's gazelle as a metaphor for the "fragility of a designer's time in the press." What a Merry-Go-Round (Autumn/Winter 2001), which followed Voss, depicted fashion as a circus. At the end of his career, McQueen lashed out again with The Horn of Plenty (Autumn/Winter 2009), which satirised the concept of a runway show and the wastefulness of the industry.
Concept and collection
Voss (Spring/Summer 2001), stylised in all capitals and sometimes informally called the "asylum show", is the seventeenth collection McQueen created for his eponymous fashion house. McQueen intended it as a critique of the fashion industry in several ways, framing it as a "mental asylum" in which designers were treated like lab animals to be observed and harassed. The unusual designs and materials were intended to challenge conventional ideas about what could be seen as beautiful.
The palette mainly comprised muted tones: white, grey, beige, light green, and soft pink, as well as black and flourishes of red. McQueen said he sought to make a collection that would be broadly palatable at retail, so he included stylish suits and "simple black dresses". Many items had pintucks and ruffles. Another repeated motif was faux-"Oriental" fashion, which appeared in the form of roundels stylised like chrysanthemum flowers, a grey ensemble with Asian-inspired embroidery, and the use of an antique Japanese silk wall screen. These items also exemplified McQueen's love of traditional handicrafts like embroidery. A half-completed jigsaw puzzle of a castle used as a top and a model sandcastle worn as a shoulder-piece provided a touch of surrealism.
The collection is named for Voss, a Norwegian district well-known as a wildlife habitat; accordingly, McQueen made extensive use of unconventional natural materials for the clothing. Most prominently, Voss features garments covered in the shells of razor clams, mussels, and oysters. Some four thousand seashells were sourced from beaches on the coast of Norfolk, with the rest coming from Billingsgate Fish Market in London. McQueen's love of birds was represented in feathered skirts, avian-themed embroidery, and a dress made with taxidermied hawks positioned as though attacking the model.
Equally, the collection drew on the aesthetics of madness, imprisonment, and medicine. McQueen was a cinemaphile and may have been drawing on cinematic depictions of insane asylums and prisons, such as those from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), set in an asylum, or The Green Mile (1999), which depicted inmates on death row. Vermillion accents evoked blood; one dress, modelled by Erin O'Connor, had a bodice made from microscope slides painted red. Some items may have been referencing nurse's uniforms.
There was a heavy emphasis on tailored items with reimagined menswear elements, such as Look 13, a bodysuit modelled on a suit jacket, or Look 20, an off shoulder dress whose upper bodice was made to look like a man's dress shirt and collar. Several items had halter tops structured like attached neckties; sometimes the entire garment was made from the type of silk fabric typically used for ties. Textile curators Clarissa M. Esguerra and Michaela Hansen identified this style as an example of McQueen's clever "deconstruction of form and function".
Showpiece ensembles
Voss included a large number of showpiece ensembles: elaborate designs meant to convey the idea of a collection and never intended for mass production.
The razor clam dress worn in Look 33 was created from approximately 1,200 razor clam shells. They were chemically stripped and re-varnished, then drilled and sewn to the canvas base with monofilament. McQueen was inspired to create the dress after seeing thousands of the shells on the coast of Norfolk while walking with a friend.
Look 63 is a feathered minidress with a conical silhouette which thrusts forward in the front, styled on the runway with a pair of light pink mules with industrial screws for heels by Benoit Méléard. Fashion theorist Harold Koda identifies this style, which completely obscures the waist, as highly unusual in shape for Western fashion.
Look 65 is a dress made from the Japanese screen, embroidered with flowers and birds, worn over an underdress of oyster shells. McQueen purchased the screen at the Saint-Ouen flea market in Paris. After shipping it back to London, he cut it off its frame and fused the crumbling fabric to cotton and silk to stabilise its shape. He hand-sewed the majority of the dress himself, with minimal pleating or-reshaping so as to properly display the workmanship of the original item. Its shape may have been modelled on kimono or the hanbok; traditional Japanese and Korean garments, respectively. The motifs and colours of the embroidery in this screen inspired similar embroidery for the dress and hat of Look 10. Look 65 was worn on the runway with a neckpiece of silver and Tahitian black pearl by Shaun Leane. The neckpiece had pointed silver branches which curled up and over the model's neck and face, forcing her to hold her head carefully so as to not be spiked.
Look 74 featured a hand-painted corset in red Venetian glass; Look 75 had a headpiece in the same glass. The corset was probably based on a body cast of Laura Morgan, McQueen's house model, who wore it on the runway. Glass production was handled by Columbia Glassworks of London. Theorist Caroline Evans noted that wearing the corset took a certain degree of courage, writing that a "model in a glass corset knows she cannot afford to fall".
The medical slide dress from Look 76 took six weeks of work to complete. Two thousand microscope slides, hand-painted red, were sewn onto the bodice of the dress. In an interview, McQueen said that the glass was meant to evoke a body being studied under a microscope. The slides were red because, in his words, "there's blood beneath every layer of skin".
Concept for finale
McQueen was interested in challenging societal norms of beauty with Voss. He wanted to show that things conventionally considered ugly, such as moths or an obese woman, "could be beautiful depending on perception". He told Women's Wear Daily that "It was about trying to trap something that wasn't conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within." He had been fat-shamed by the media and was well aware of what it would mean to present a fat, nude woman onstage at a fashion show, where the ideal body is tall and slim. The final visual was a recreation of "Sanitarium", a 1983 photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin. McQueen's version added several hundred moths fluttering around Olley.
Underground journalist Michelle Olley knew McQueen through mutual friends, and was recruited for the finale by his associate Sidonie Barton. Given McQueen's bent for the macabre, and aware of the way her body departed from the fashionable ideal – Olley described herself as "five foot three inches and the wrong side of a size 16 dress" – she anticipated being asked to perform a "visceral she-beast role". Although she had appeared in nude photographs before, Olley was apprehensive about being naked in a live setting while wearing a full-face hood. After some consideration, she agreed to appear, telling McQueen "I'm doing it for art". He replied "I thought we all were weren't we?" before awkwardly leaving the room. Olley's boyfriend felt she was being exploited, but Olley felt "a cheeky little buzz" from the idea of horrifying the fashion audience with her fatness, and ultimately concluded that she wanted "to be part of a ritual, however elegantly disguised".
Runway show Production details