The Overlook (Alexander McQueen collection)
The inside, lit by thousands of candles, was dressed to look like a birch forest in winter, complete with artificial snow and an icy floor.
The coiled corset was the sole item from The Overlook to appear in the original 2011 staging of the retrospective exhibit Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.
[8][9][10] Early in his career, his runway presentations were violent and shocking, and audiences began to expect his shows to feature macabre dramatics.
[18] He had a light touch with collaborators, providing short creative briefs that permitted latitude for interpretation, and often did not see the work he had commissioned until right before the show.
The two met during their student years; Leane was trained as a classical goldsmith who worked in traditional formats, but McQueen encouraged him to branch out into other materials and shapes.
[23] Journalist Suzy Menkes suggested the emphasis on knitwork and embroidery may have been drawn from the Arts and Crafts movement, which had strongly influenced McQueen's previous collection, No.
[25][26][27] Although The Shining is known for its dark and violent subject matter, McQueen surprised the audience by instead taking inspiration from its wintery, isolated setting, while making several visual references to the film.
[23][24] Several celebrities attended, including Kate Winslet, Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, Grace Jones, and members of trip hop group Massive Attack.
[24][29] Industry figures in attendance included Nicole Fischelis, fashion director of the department store Saks Fifth Avenue, and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who was making her first appearance at a McQueen show.
[21] Jeweller Shaun Leane produced jewellery and metalwork, and product designer Kees van der Graaf returned to create a bodice made from rock crystal.
[43][44] The soundtrack mostly relied on orchestral music from The Shining, including the 1934 version of "Midnight, The Stars and You" with Al Bowlly and Ray Noble and his Orchestra.
[27] Because the vinyl release of the film's soundtrack was difficult to find at the time, sound designer John Gosling had to pull the music from VHS tapes.
'"[23]Models were styled with braided grey hair and silver paint over their eyes, eyelashes, eyebrows, and lower foreheads, resembling masks or stripes of ice.
[27][47][48] Fashion theorist Janice Miller felt that the connotations of transformation and concealment associated with masks made the makeup "strange, beautiful, and wistful".
The show opened with roughly a dozen outfits in black, including a sleeveless high-necked bodice of crocodile skin paired with a leather skirt.
[43] McQueen had requested that he interpret the neck rings traditionally worn by the Southern Ndebele people into an item that covered the entire torso.
[58] Fashion theorist Harold Koda argued that the restrictiveness of the corset was reminiscent of "the stiff hieratic imagery in Russian Orthodox icons".
[36] In The Sydney Morning Herald, Jane De Teliga wrote that the "show had a strange, edgy beauty" and called McQueen the "leading light of British fashion".
Several critics appreciated how McQueen subverted the audience's expectations by avoiding explicit horror and instead drawing inspiration from the film's unsettling atmosphere.
[10] The staff writer at Women's Wear Daily (WWD) said the collection "combined his new romantic mood with those trademark touches of the bizarre".
Lesley Downer found them "oddities" in an otherwise mature collection, and Hall complained that the coiled corset made its wearer look like she had been "been bound and gagged by Slinkies".
[32] An unbylined piece in the Scottish Daily Record complained that McQueen was only using fur to chase publicity, and doubted that it had much appeal for the average British consumer.
[37] She wrote that "some pronounced it his best show" but disagreed; although she found The Overlook aesthetically and narratively successful, she considered Voss (Spring/Summer 2001) – also staged in a clear plastic box – to be "the real magic".
[46] Fashion journalist Alex Fury argued that McQueen often staged spectacles that separated the audience from the models in a way that evoked screen-based media such as cinema, offering The Overlook and Voss as examples.
[28] Finally, O'Neill identifies Look 43 – a plaid wool dress – as referential to McQueen's prior collection Highland Rape (Autumn/Winter 1995) and his experience as an apprentice tailor.
[78] She identified the quartz crystal bodice in Look 54 as an example of what would be called "artificialia" in such a context: a man-made object which incorporated "a natural hardstone rarity".
[78] She likened the bodice to an artificial mountain commissioned in the early 17th century by diplomat Philipp Hainhofer as a gift to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.
[79] Fashion historian Ingrid Loschek regarded The Overlook as an example of how McQueen portrayed "traumata such as isolation and loneliness" through the medium of clothing.
[38] Shaun Leane published a retrospective of his career in 2020; discussing it with British Vogue, he selected an image of the model being screwed into the coiled corset as his favourite in the book.
[86] When McQueen and Leane participated in the Fashion in Motion series at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 2001, they presented the coiled corset as one of their featured items.
