The Hunger (Alexander McQueen collection)
Typically for McQueen in the early stages of his career, the collection centred around sharply tailored garments and emphasised female sexuality.
Like McQueen's previous professional shows, The Hunger was styled with imagery of sexuality, violence, and death, most prominently a corset of translucent plastic with real worms encased within.
[9][10][11] In October 1990, at the age of 21, McQueen began the masters-level course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (CSM), a London art school.
His degree collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, was bought in its entirety by magazine editor Isabella Blow, who became his mentor and his muse.
The resulting controversy is considered to be the launching point of McQueen's fame and has been credited with leading to his appointment as head designer at French luxury fashion house Givenchy.
It was inspired by the erotic horror films The Hunger (1983), which featured a love triangle between two vampires and a human doctor, and Cat People (1982), in which a young woman discovers she is a seductive werecat.
Some elements pointed back at his graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, including sharply-pointed collars, smears of blood, trimmings that imitated human flesh, and prints of thorns.
[45] The most significant piece from the collection is a moulded corset created from two layers of translucent plastic encasing real worms, juxtaposing sexuality with imagery suggesting decay.
[50] In response to criticism of Highland Rape, McQueen uninvited several fashion journalists to The Hunger, and relegated at least one other to an undesirable third-row seat.
[41] Looks 32 and 50, a midi-length dress and a two-piece ensemble, were made from silver mesh and paired with full-face coverings created by Treacy that resembled fencing masks.
[41][63][64] Look 35, a white midi-length dress, had a midsection roughly printed black, with its over-layer slit from breasts to navel; the overall effect has been compared to the vulva.
[a][4][63] At the end of the show, McQueen mooned the audience, which he later explained as a gesture of frustration with the high expectations and limited support given to him by the British Fashion Council and the press.
[31] The runway show for The Hunger was not well-received by industry personnel, especially in comparison to the success of Highland Rape, which had made McQueen's name as a designer.
[68] Iain R. Webb of The Times was similarly split; he thought McQueen "extremely clever" and possessed of "unique cutting skills", but was too deep in his "angry young man" persona.
[69] Sally Brampton at The Guardian felt the tailoring in The Hunger was an improvement over McQueen's previous two seasons, but wrote that he still needed to "curb some of his more childish tantrums" to be truly great.
She complained of the amount of bared flesh models showed and said that McQueen "should not have bothered" mooning the audience, calling him a "pale, slightly chunky boy".
[70] McDowell excoriated the season for lacking creativity, holding up McQueen as "spearheading the originality of thought" he felt British fashion needed.
[69] Critics praised some aspects of the show, most prominently the collection's throwbacks to punk fashion of the 1980s: hair styled in spikes or Mohican haircuts, bare breasts on women, and earrings worn as singles rather than in pairs.
[c][58][74] Jane de Teliga at The Sydney Morning Herald noted that punk revival appeared have "now become a tradition in English shows".
[58] Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Menkes highlighted McQueen's modernist use of lace – "laminated with car paint or sliced into abstract body-patterns".
[39][44] Veness felt that a younger McQueen would have covered the designs in blood to make his point, but in The Hunger, he had only "hinted at something nasty", demonstrating a newfound restraint.
She called this brutal aesthetic a "form of resistance" to mainstream fashion's reliance on unrealistic images of healthy, beautiful people.
[61] Responding to press accusations that the designs in The Hunger were misogynist, McQueen rebutted that most of the female models who walked in the show were lesbians.
[84] On the runway, the corset was styled with a tailored jacket whose shoulders and lapels were "drawn back like a surgical incision" to reveal the model's nude torso beneath.
[84] Evans found a visual resemblance to transi, or cadaver monuments, a form of tomb effigy which depicts a decayed corpse, but argued that the model's "aggressive vitality [...] asserts the right of the living to commandeer the iconography of the dead", which to her "suggests a robust defiance".
[86] She viewed the ensemble through the lens of the "abject", developed by cultural critic Julia Kristeva: the revulsion experienced during encounters with anything which "does not respect borders, positions, rules".
[86] Sociologist Henrique Grimaldi Figueredo refers to Spooner in his analysis of McQueen's runway shows, agreeing that the worm corset exemplified the abject as an "allusion of addlement of bodies".
[96] For the Givenchy haute couture Spring/Summer 1998 season, he showed a clear bodice filled with butterflies, which Caroline Evans likened to the worm corset from The Hunger.
[63][64] McQueen's collaborator Sarah Burton, who became creative director of the label following his death, referenced the vertically-slashed chest of Look 35 in her final collection for the brand, for Spring/Summer 2024.
In her review for Vogue, Sarah Mower likened this version to a religious artefact and called it "almost a holy celebration of the ultimate creative power of the female body".
