Alexander McQueen: Why Scotland was 'everything' to the designer

McQueen grew up in London, the son of English parents. His mother, Joyce, was a keen genealogist who had tracked the family’s ancestry back to their origin on the isle of Skye. The legitimacy of this alleged heritage was never proven, but belief can be a powerful thing. McQueen was raised hearing stories of the Jacobite rebellion and rugged island life, believing his own ancestors played a role in this period of history. “His mum asked him what his Scottish roots meant to him,” recalls Andrew Wilson, writer of the biography Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin. “He said ‘everything’.”

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This fascination with Scotland stuck with him throughout his life and inspired him to design two of his most talked-about collections. Not long into his career, McQueen made waves with autumn/winter 95/96’s Highland Rape.

A feather headress from McQueen's acclaimed Highland Rape show

The collection, an example of one the designer’s many extravagant presentations more closely linked to performance art than fashion, was rooted in tartan and lace but, in what McQueen felt was a rejection of the romanticised Vivienne-Westwood approach to Scotland’s national dress, not in the traditional sense. Dresses with shredded hems trailed behind the models and skirt waistlines were cut so low that the women’s buttocks were exposed. Models with black eyes, pale skin and uncovered breasts staggered down the runway. Members of the London press interpreted the collection as being about the literal rape of women and branded him a misogynist, but the clue was in the title.

“The collection was more about the rape of the Highlands and the Clearances than the physical act, echoing with the rips and tears into the garments,” explains Vixy Rae, Secret Life of Tartan author and creative director at Edinburgh-based Stewart Christie & Co. “But the press, as usual, dug no deeper than the face value, which was perhaps what McQueen expected and wanted at that time – to shock and challenge.”

Despite the outrage, Wilson says, Highland Rape firmly planted McQueen into the fashion world. “He changed the silhouette of fashion, that’s what fashion historians talk about,” Wilson explains. “There are a number of fashion designers that have done that in the 20th century, like Chanel, Schiaparelli and Dior. McQueen is certainly one of them.” The designer’s invention of the “bumsters” – trousers and skirts with very low waistlines as seen in the Highland Rape collection – achieved that feat.

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Rae says she was “lucky enough” to see pieces from the collection at the V&A’s Savage Beauty, a retrospective of McQueen’s work and the museum’s most visited exhibition ever. “It took tartan to a new level,” she remembers.

“The historic romance of the Highlands was re-invented for a new generation ... It evoked memory and desire, bloodshed and sensuality. They say good art should evoke emotion, so perhaps this like much of McQueen’s work was beyond fashion.”

Evoking emotion was one of the pillars of McQueen’s work. While there were beautiful garments, beauty was not at the centre of his ethos. “He said he’d rather people vomited after seeing his collections,” Wilson says. “He didn’t want a cocktail party. He wanted ambulances.” McQueen’s extravagant runway shows – like the Highland Rape, Voss and the Horn of Plenty – allowed him to shock and repulse his guests.

An example of McQueen's softer Widows of Culloden collection

McQueen’s next collection to take its influence from his Scottish heritage was 2006’s Widows of Culloden. This show imagined the models as the widows of Scots men who had died at the final confrontation of the Jacobite rebellion. While still expressing anger over Scotland’s suffering at the hands of the English, the designs were softer.

Dresses were lain with pheasant feathers and organza while deer antlers wrapped in chiffon acted as headpieces, in a more poetic, ghostly presentation of a sombre period in Scotland’s history. Like much of his work it also provided a mirror into his own troubled life, after struggles with drug addiction, mental health and abuse. “He admitted himself that he was in a much clearer head space in the later collection, and it had a focus of extreme technicality matched with richness of imagery with ideas taken directly from Scottish costume,” Rae recalls.

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A year later, McQueen and his elder sister Janet visited their ancestral home of Skye for the first time. During the trip, he visited the graveyard in Kilmuir where Flora MacDonald, who helped Bonnie Prince Charlie evade capture following the Battle of Culloden, was lain to rest. “Bizarrely he also saw a grave bearing the name Alexander McQueen,” Wilson says. This “intrigued” the designer, who was fascinated by death and the gothic.

This cemetery, which looks out over the Western Isles, is now McQueen’s own final resting place. Following the designer’s tragic suicide in 2010 his ashes were scattered there as per his wishes, and later a large grey head stone, engraved with a Shakespeare quote which McQueen had tattooed on his arm, was placed in the graveyard. His family visit the spot every year, Wilson says.

McQueen's gravestone at Kilmuir on Skye

McQueen was a complicated man and often a controversial figure in the fashion world – not only for his provocative runway shows. He claimed to have written obscenities inside the lining of a tailored jacket for Prince Charles while working as an apprentice on Savile Row (though the company employing him at the time have always denied this) and expressed few affections for the British establishment in his work. Despite that, he accepted his CBE in 2003 while sporting full Highland dress.

The controversies, like the stories of Scottish rebellion McQueen was told growing up, have gone into the mythology of who the designer was and the influence he has wielded across fashion and pop-culture.

McQueen’s legacy in Scotland cannot be overlooked. Rae points out he had respect for Scotland’s history and tradition, opting to use his family cloth in his designs and have the pieces woven in a historic mill. “He felt a sense of pride in being able to use his own family cloth in his designs, which made them more personal to him and his family history,” she says. “Unlike many designers of the time, who chose their tartans out of what worked best with the colours in their collections, giving a less authentic edge to their stories.”

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Rae continues: “Each generation has its handful of designers and creatives whose work challenges and evokes a passion for their craft and their ideas ... When I have set projects at colleges and universities his name and work is used as a benchmark for the wonderful possibilities of the use of tartan, still inspiring students to this day.”

Many commentators feel fashion – like many of the creative industries – has been playing it safe of late. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that fashion is cyclical. While Sarah Burton continues to run McQueen’s label and create beautiful garments, there is space in the industry for someone disruptive – a designer unafraid to make bold political statements, to disregard the rules of fashion and force those with no interest in design to think about clothes. McQueen was known by the fashion media as the “enfant terrible”. In the current political climate, it’s only a matter of time before a new one is born. Regardless of when that day comes, McQueen’s legacy will live on in Scotland, and around the world, forever.

To read Andrew Wilson’s latest series of novels, visit www.andrewwilsonauthor.co.uk. Vixy Rae’s The Secret Life of Tartan is available at www.blackandwhitepublishing.com