The Birds (Alexander McQueen collection)
Typically for McQueen in the early stages of his career, the collection centred on sharply tailored garments and emphasised female sexuality.
Like his previous professional shows, The Birds was styled with imagery of violence and death; some models were covered in tyre tracks and others wore white contact lenses.
Seán McGirr heavily referenced The Birds for Autumn/Winter 2024, his debut collection as creative director for the Alexander McQueen brand.
[2][3] During his nearly twenty-year career, he explored a broad range of ideas and themes, including historicism, romanticism, femininity, sexuality, and death.
[4][2][3] He began as an apprentice with Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard before briefly joining Gieves & Hawkes as a pattern cutter.
[7] In October 1990, at the age of 21, McQueen began the eighteen-month masters-level course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (CSM), a London art school.
His graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, was bought in its entirety by magazine editor Isabella Blow, who became his mentor and his muse.
[14][23] According to Ungless, the design echoed the rationale behind McQueen's use of dead locusts on garments in his earlier collection Nihilism: "Complete chaos and human vulnerability in the face of nature gone wrong".
[10][26] Ungless laid out a concept based on McQueen's request to have a print with "garden birds", but described the result as "awful – like a Christmas card gone wrong".
[14] Groves was asked to replace it, coming up with a print of black silhouettes of swallows in flight, a popular motif in classic skinhead subculture and nautical tattoos, representing endurance and courage.
[1] Fashion historian Alistair O'Neill saw the print as depicting swallows mid-dive, which he believed was a reference to a scene in Hitchcock's film where birds invade a home by diving down the chimney.
[18] McQueen's bumsters, an extremely low-cut trouser that exposed the top of the intergluteal cleft, made an appearance in several outfits, including in wet-look black for Look 43.
Groves described watching him create an entire dress on the stand in approximately an hour, working from raw materials, without any realisation that this was a highly unconventional method.
[37][38] McQueen found a stylist to help him oversee the models' looks for the runway show: Katy England, then working for British magazine Dazed & Confused.
[35] Look 35, the clear pallet wrap dress, was worn with nothing but black bikini underwear, and the model's upper thighs were tied with string to create a pencil skirt effect.
[36] Souleiman decided to have the models' hair blow-dried straight and the ends crimped to fluffiness, creating a floating effect while they walked the runway.
"[49] Corsetmaker Mr. Pearl, who had met McQueen at a King's Cross club, walked the runway in Look 40, a tailored short jacket, shirt and tie, and tight red pencil skirt with the swallow print.
[53] It was, quite simply, astonishing and one of those electrifying moments when you realized that a designer had arrived possessed of the single-minded vision and passion and talent to challenge the paradigm.
[55] In a short review for The Globe and Mail, David Livingstone wrote that McQueen had "achieved heights of lowdown style", with "attitude anchored in skill".
[45] In a 2015 retrospective, Vogue highlighted the aesthetic of destruction in the collection and noted it had been a recurring theme in McQueen's fashion throughout his career.
[1] Much of the critical analysis of The Birds revolves around the depiction of women as apparent victims of violence, especially in light of the sexualised styling of the clothing.
"[50] Ungless stated that McQueen's object was to depict a beautiful woman "put at extreme risk but winning in the end".
[59] Guerrera believed the indicia of violence – torn clothes, white eyes, and tyre tracks – made the models intimidating, and therefore showed that McQueen was positioning women as empowered survivors rather than as powerless victims.
McQueen referenced several of the director's films throughout his career, exploring what O'Neill called "representations of femininity and how they are challenged through transformation scenes".
[68] The money from the deal with Bocci gave McQueen the funding to stage his next show, Highland Rape (Autumn/Winter 1995), the collection which effectively made his name.
[38] Val Garland styled makeup for several future shows, including The Dance of the Twisted Bull (Spring/Summer 2002) and In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem 1692 (Autumn/Winter 2007).
[76][77][78] Cinema also remained a significant influence; future collections such as Deliverance (Spring/Summer 2004) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (Autumn/Winter 2005) took direct visual cues from the films which inspired them.
[19][79] One look from The Man Who Knew Too Much is a clear duplicate of Tippi Hedren's outfit from The Birds, a reference he had avoided making in the eponymous collection.
[80] When early McQueen employee Ruti Danan auctioned her personal archive in 2020, an invitation to The Birds sold for a reported $625 USD.
[43][86] Seán McGirr heavily referenced The Birds for Autumn/Winter 2024, his debut collection as creative director for the Alexander McQueen brand.
