Image of Susanna Brown on the Joan top

Susanna Brown on the Joan top

Transcript

The medium of photography played a really crucial role in McQueen’s creative process. He worked very closely with contemporary photographers on shoots but he also had a great knowledge of the history of the medium and was inspired to a great extent by photographic images in his own collection and in the books that he owned. He collected some fantastic photographs, which were hung and displayed with great sensitivity in his own home. Moreover, photographic images often provided the starting point for his spectacular catwalk presentations. I suppose that VOSS, the presentation in 2001, would be the clearest example of that. The starting point for that theatrical show was a famous photograph called Sanitarium by Joel-Peter Witkin.

The object that I’d like to talk a bit more now is one of many examples from McQueen’s career in which photographs, either historic or modern, were printed on garments often in very experimental and complex ways. He first began experimenting with photographic print techniques in 1996 for the collection, Dante, which featured photographs by his friend and one of the World’s most famous war photographers, Don McCullin; images made in Vietnam, as well as 19th century photographs from a colony for the blind. This garment – a cotton and sequin T-shirt – is from a collection in 1998 called Joan. The starting point for that collection is the historical figure of Joan of Arc, who was burnt at the stake in the 15th century and those themes of martyrdom and execution take centre stage in the collection. Joan was the last of the London Fashion Week presentations and comprised ninety-one different designs by McQueen. And in the T-shirt, as you can see here, he uses a photographic print of three children, three young girls, from the Russian Imperial family the Romanov family, who along with their parents and their two other siblings were executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. The family were awoken in the middle of the night, they were told that they were being taken to a safe location but in fact they were corralled in a basement room of the house and all shot together. This is a very melancholy image, I think, of these innocent, unsmiling faces; a photograph taken several years before the family’s execution. But because of the way McQueen has designed this piece and the very shimmering effect of the sequins across the whole surface of the garment, these figures appear to me almost as if they’re underwater, somehow out of reach from us as the viewer. When I was learning more about this particular collection and the story of the family, I was interested to discover that in the news in the 1990s there was a sort of resurgence of interest in the history of the Romanov family because their bodies were discovered in the early ‘90s. And it wasn’t until 1998 – the same year that this garment was showcased – that they were given their sort of proper Christian burial in Russia. So perhaps McQueen, I expect, would have been aware of their story and the news surrounding these events in the 1990s. And to me it is a particularly extraordinary piece from that particular collection but there are many, many other examples throughout McQueen’s career of using photographs in exciting and experimental ways within his garments.