Angels and Demons (Alexander McQueen collection)
Aesthetically, the collection drew on religious paintings of the afterlife from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as the imperial dress and art of the Byzantine Empire.
Polina Kasina, McQueen's longtime fit model, wore the collection's final and most well-known ensemble, a gold feathered coat over white tulle skirt.
[3][4] During his nearly twenty-year career, he explored a broad range of ideas and themes, including historicism, romanticism, femininity, sexuality, and death.
[b][8] Although he worked in ready-to-wear – clothing produced for retail sale – his showpiece designs featured a degree of craftsmanship that verged on haute couture.
He spent the next several days making gestures like giving away possessions and telling people he loved them that, in retrospect, have been taken as him setting his affairs in order.
[36][12]Visually, the collection relied heavily on religious paintings of the afterlife from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, as well as the imperial dress and art of the Byzantine Empire.
[32][39][40] For Angels and Demons, McQueen intended to pivot to an emphasis on hand-crafting, which he felt was disappearing from the fashion industry and broader culture.
[37][42] Despite the emphasis on tradition, McQueen continued his experiments with digital printing with Angels and Demons, creating what Burton later described as a "juxtaposition of the old and the new".
[32][38] In many ways, the collection encapsulated McQueen's entire career, incorporating the tailoring and dressmaking techniques he had learned early on, as well as his tendency to experiment with shape and style.
[8][10] The finished collection featured elaborate showpiece designs were planned in a palette of gold and red, with rich fabrics like brocade and silk.
The bodice of this look was printed with details portraying Hell and demons from three separate paintings by Hieronymus Bosch: The Last Judgment (c. 1482 or later), The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500), and The Temptation of St Anthony (c. 1501 or later).
She notes that on the rear of the garment, a hellish bagpipe from The Last Judgement is positioned "at the base of the bodice, immediately above the wearer's anus".
Look 4 is a belted gold brocade minidress with an asymmetrically pleated hem, worn with a statement choker and matching oversized bracelets in what appeared to be stained glass.
[63][64][50] Andrew Wilson felt it drew on the sculptural work of Grinling Gibbons, whose carvings can be found in St Paul's Cathedral, London, as well as Icarus, a figure from Greek mythology who is said to have flown too close to the sun.
[44] The ensemble may have been a reference to the gold and white palette of McQueen's first haute couture collection for Givenchy, The Search for the Golden Fleece (Spring/Summer 1997).
[10][37] Angels and Demons was originally scheduled to be presented on 9 March 2010 at La Conciergerie in Paris, but the full-scale show was cancelled after McQueen's death.
[71][72] In this collection Alexander – Lee – McQueen showed his sensitivity to history, his powers of research, his imagination, his technical skills and his love of women, often misinterpreted or misunderstood, but here evident in every fold and feather.
[74] Sarah Mower of Vogue thought that the restrained presentation may not have been what McQueen would have chosen, but felt it allowed those who knew him a space to grieve.
[33][73] Suzy Menkes highlighted the digital prints of old paintings as exemplifying McQueen's "exceptional reach from historic past to cyberspace future".
[11] Similarly, Cathy Horyn of The New York Times emphasised the hand-crafting in Angels and Demons as compared to the technological emphasis of Plato's.
[73] Considering the collection several months after release, Hamish Bowles, also from Vogue, called it a "poignant coda to a career characterized by ceaseless invention, curiosity and lightning flashes of absolute brilliance".
[8] At McQueen's memorial service, Vogue's editor-in-chief Anna Wintour described the collection as "a battle between dark and light".
[37][72][79] Viewing the unfinished collection for the first time following McQueen's death, his close friend Sebastian Pons described it as "a requiem.
[53] For Khan, McQueen's death, and the posthumous presentation of Angels and Demons, signalled the end of an era in which a designer's personality was "central to the way fashion establishes meaning".
[84] Philosopher Chris McWade picked up on Khan's analysis to argue that McQueen's entire legacy was defined by the spectral – what he called "an air of ghostliness".
[86] Similarly, Juliana Luna Mora and Jess Berry also considered McQueen's association with the spectral in a paper about how luxury fashion houses maintain continuity after the deaths of their founders.
[89][35] In this way, for Mora and Berry, she was participating in the commodification of imagery associated with McQueen's death in order to perpetuate his fashion house.
[90] The Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) in New York City own three ensembles from Angels and Demons: Look 1, the red and gold bodice and skirt combination; as well as two other unspecified looks.
[91][92][93] The Victoria and Albert Museum in London owns copies of Look 2, with the Hieronymus Bosch print; Look 5, a one-shouldered dress; and Look 11, a light grey gown.
[102] Three items from Angels and Demons appeared in the 2022 exhibition Lee Alexander McQueen: Mythos, Mind, Muse: the top from Look 7, a retail version of the dress from Look 2, and a pair of shoes.
