Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims

Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims is the first collection by British designer Alexander McQueen, produced as the thesis collection for his master's degree in fashion at Central Saint Martins art school. The collection's narrative was inspired by the victims of 19th-century London serial killer Jack the Ripper, with aesthetic inspiration from the fashion, erotica, and prostitution practices of the Victorian era. The collection was presented on the runway at London Fashion Week with other graduating students, on 16 March 1992. Editor Isabella Blow was fascinated by the runway show and insisted on purchasing the entire collection, later becoming McQueen's friend and muse.

Pink frock coat with thorn print from Jack the Ripper at Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011)

Jack the Ripper remains an object of critical analysis for its violent concept and styling. Many of the elements featured in the collection resurfaced throughout McQueen's career, earning him a reputation for producing narratively-driven collections inspired by macabre aspects of history, art, and his own life. Items from Jack the Ripper, most notably a pink frock coat with a thorn print, have appeared in the retrospectives Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011 and 2015) and Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! (2013)

Background

British designer Alexander McQueen (born Lee Alexander McQueen) was known in the fashion industry for his imaginative, sometimes controversial, designs and dramatic fashion shows.[1] McQueen had a lifelong fascination with history, sexuality, violence, and death, which he translated into his designs from the beginning of his career to the very end.[2][3][4] In his early years, he often worked with cheap, unconventional materials as he was unable to afford high-quality fabric.[3]

The son of a London taxicab driver and a teacher, McQueen grew up in one of the poorer neighbourhoods in London's East End.[5] He began his career in fashion in 1984 as an apprentice with Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard before briefly joining Gieves & Hawkes as a pattern cutter.[6][7] His work on Savile Row earned him a reputation as an expert tailor.[1]

McQueen left Savile Row in 1988 to work briefly for the theatrical costumiers Angels and Bermans.[8] In 1989, at the age of 20, he was hired by experimental Mayfair-based designer Koji Tatsuno.[9][10] He then worked under designer John McKitterick, gaining experience with fetishwear; first at Red or Dead, then at McKitterick's own label.[3][9] McQueen sought further experience in the industry, and McKitterick recommended he try for an apprenticeship in Italy, then the center of the fashion world.[11] In spring 1990, McQueen left for Milan, where he secured a position with Romeo Gigli.[12] He resigned from Gigli's studio in July 1990, and had returned to London – and McKitterick's label – by August that year.[13]

Central Saint Martins

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.[14][15] Unable to afford the tuition, he borrowed £4000 from his aunt Renee to cover it.[16][17] McQueen met a number of his future collaborators at CSM, including Simon Ungless, with whom he later lived, and Fleet Bigwood, a print tutor at the school.[18][19][3]

CSM students at the master's level were expected to produce a graduation collection of at least six outfits as their thesis.[20] McQueen told Bobby Hillson, who had founded the CSM master's course in fashion, that he intended to present clothing that was distressed and stained, so the models would look like survivors of a violent attack.[21] Although Hillson was dubious about the idea, she agreed to mentor him; among other things, this meant quietly providing him quality fabric from the CSM stores, as he could not afford to buy his own.[22][21]

Students were required to provide a marketing report with their collections, outlining the rationale and business case for their designs.[23][24] McQueen instead presented a narrative which described how his mother's study of genealogy had led him to discover that a distant relative of his had owned an inn and rented a room to one of Jack the Ripper's victims, although his professors doubted the story.[lower-alpha 1][26][27][23] CSM professor Louise Wilson, with whom McQueen had a contentious relationship, told author Andrew Wilson that the cover of the report was decorated with McQueen's pubic hair.[28] The report was, at some point, stolen from Wilson's office; she suspected that McQueen himself was responsible.[24]

McQueen was not being shocking just to indulge himself. CSM's graduation shows were covered by the London press, and he wanted to exploit controversy to create publicity.[29] This was a common tactic for London's young designers at the time. The country's fashion industry lacked infrastructure to support newcomers, forcing them to rely on extreme showmanship to draw media attention in the hopes of attracting financial backers.[30]

Concept and collection

The collection's narrative was inspired by the victims of 19th-century London serial killer Jack the Ripper, leading to the collection's title, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.[22][31] The show notes described Jack the Ripper as a "Day into eveningwear collection inspired by 19th century street walkers".[32] McQueen took aesthetic inspiration for the garments from the fashion, erotica, and prostitution practices of the Victorian era.[33][34][35] His tight tailoring and sculptural elements echoed the Victorian style of shaping the body with corsets and bustles.[33][36] McQueen and his friend Simon Ungless had a mutual interest in the famous 18th century sadomasochistic novel The 120 Days of Sodom and the 1975 film adaptation Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which played into the collection's brutal aesthetic.[33][36] McQueen also found inspiration in the work of other designers. McKitterick recalled him being "obsessed" with fellow British designer John Galliano, whose work was known for being creative and theatrical.[37][38][39] To a lesser extent, he looked to Helmut Lang and Martin Margiela, who were then experimenting with a minimalist style that was avant-garde when compared to the maximalist styles of the 1980s.[40]

McQueen translated what he had learned from his various jobs directly into the collection: tailoring from Savile Row, complexity from Tatsuno, fetishwear from Red or Dead, and a decadent aesthetic from Gigli.[36] He combined historicist references to older styles such as frock coats with modern elements like asymmetrical pleating or twisted fabric, and played rich colors against transparent fabrics.[36] The collection's palette was primarily black and deep red, with red and lilac used for lining; the red in particular may have been an echo of the appearance of human flesh within the body.[32][41][42] Blood splatter was represented by red beads, yarn, and paint.[32] The garments were distressed with burn marks and other damage.[41][43] Some skirts were decorated with bricolage of photos from magazines, including a portrait of actor Johnny Depp.[41] Feathers, gathered from Ungless's country home, were used as trim.[37]

Victorian mourning brooch containing the hair of a deceased relative

Several garments, including a pink frock coat, were lined with fabric which had human hair encapsulated within.[24][44][42] For the clothing tag on the items, he encased locks of hair (claimed to be his own) inside of clear plastic squares.[42] The use of human hair referenced several historical practices: keeping a lock of hair as a memento or trophy, the Victorian-era practice of prostitutes selling their hair, and the Victorian use of hair jewellery for mourning.[45][46][47]

Runway show and discovery

Runway show

At the time, CSM presented its graduation collections in a single show at London Fashion Week.[48][49] That year, it was held at the Duke of York's Headquarters, London, on 16 March 1992.[lower-alpha 2][41][53] The clothing from Jack the Ripper was presented in the CSM show's second-to-last slot.[53] It was the day before McQueen's twenty-third birthday.[53] Both his mother Joyce and his aunt Renee attended the runway show.[54] The show was photographed by Niall McInerney.[32][55]

London artist Simon Costin loaned McQueen jewellery for the show, most notably his 1986 piece Memento Mori, made from bird claws, rabbit skulls, and synthetic jet stones.[41][56][57] Other Costin pieces included a piece made with lacquered dried fish, another with dried baby iguanas and thrushes' wings, and a collar necklace made of preserved bird claws.[58][59]

Students were expected to present a minimum of six outfits for a graduation collection; McQueen presented ten.[20][60] The first outfit featured a black beaded bandeau with an asymmetrical cut, paired with dark red skintight pants. The second was a shift in sheer black chiffon worn over a black bra and a black chiffon pencil skirt with feather trim, accessorized with a bird claw necklace by Costin. Next came a black satin frock coat with long pointed front panels and nothing underneath, worn over a photo collage hoop skirt; a tailored black jacket worn over a patchwork skirt; a red and black tunic dress over torn tights; a tailored pink silk frock coat with a print of black thorns designed by Ungless, over a black bra and black satin pants; a black tailcoat with red lining, with nothing underneath, worn over black satin pants trimmed with red beads; a sheer black open-back sleeveless top with tight black trousers, all trimmed with feathers; a black coat with a wasp waist and sharply jutting peplum, worn with a deep red beaded pencil skirt; and finally a sleeveless blouse in sheer dark red with black beaded epaulettes and high-waisted black satin pants.[33][41][60]

Discovery by Isabella Blow
Isabella Blow in 2005

Magazine editor and stylist Isabella Blow was in attendance and immediately found herself fascinated by McQueen's work.[61][62] She insisted on purchasing the entire collection; McQueen later recalled her as "this nutty lady" who "wouldn't stop badgering me" about it.[lower-alpha 3][62][41] Despite her aristocratic heritage, Blow lived in genteel poverty, and was forced to pay McQueen in cash installments.[50][62] Blow described the arrangement in a 2005 interview: "He'd bring an outfit in a bin liner, I'd look at it and then he’d come to the cash-point with me."[65]

The price Blow paid for the collection varies depending on the source. Author Judith Watt writes that Blow paid £450 for a single jacket and then £5000 in monthly installments for the entire collection.[66] Author Katherine Knox reports that she paid approximately £400 per item, but does not say how many garments she bought.[65] Journalists Maureen Callahan and Dana Thomas both say that the £5000 figure was unrealistic for a brand-new designer, but disagree on who was responsible for the myth: Callahan points at McQueen, while Thomas reports that it was Blow who liked to exaggerate what she paid.[50][63] Callahan gives the real price for the whole collection as £350.[50] Thomas reports that McQueen charged Blow £450, but is ambiguous as to whether this is for a single jacket or the entire collection.[63]

Following the purchase, Blow took it upon herself to promote McQueen's work, becoming a combination of mentor and muse for the early part of McQueen's career.[62][41][31] She wore his clothing around London and used it for photoshoots. When British Vogue produced a six-page spread about Blow's country house in November 1992, Blow and her husband were photographed in McQueen's clothing, including the pink thorn-print frock coat.[67][27]

Reception and analysis

In retrospect, those who viewed the show recall the collection as being strong, but not necessarily groundbreaking. Hillson felt he would have done better in a two-year program to give him more time to come into himself as a designer.[66] Jane Rapley, then the head of CSM, found Jack the Ripper interesting but thought "it wasn’t heart-stopping".[66] Designer John McKitterick, who saw the clothing before the show, thought it was a solid collection.[66] Rapley believed it was Blow's attention that allowed McQueen to succeed at that time, as it provided him networking opportunities.[66] Louise Rytter notes that the show received minimal press attention, but Blow recognised it as something unique regardless.[32] Fashion journalist Susannah Frankel recalled contemporary press attention mostly focusing on the clothing designs, saying that criticism of the violent imagery did not emerge until later "because the press were looking for something to say later on".[68]

Most critical response has focused on the collection's unusual, violent narrative and styling. Caroline Evans connected Jack the Ripper to McQueen's Autumn/Winter 1996 collection Dante, arguing that they were emblematic of his worldview during the early stage of his career: "a Manichean one of checks and balances, where everything – cruelty, beauty, sex, death, money, love – could be weighed, bought, sold, and pictured".[69] Judith Watt found a similarity between Jack the Ripper and the work of British designer John Galliano, whose 1984 degree collection from CSM had drawn on the violence of the French First Republic (1792–1804).[33] Theorist Mélissa Diaby Savané described McQueen's overall aesthetic as a "fantasy of ugliness", and noted that to this end, McQueen did not romanticize or beautify the prostitutes he was inspired by, instead presenting them "in all their vulgarity".[70]

Fashion theorist Christopher Breward felt that McQueen's decision to reference to Jack the Ripper could be read as unoriginal, considering the killer's persistent influence on popular culture, but argued that McQueen's work rose above the "banal misogyny and sadistic voyeurism" of which he was frequently accused in his early career.[71] He cited McQueen's homosexuality and his skill at tailoring as justification that McQueen's aesthetic of brutality "was not simply a heartless theatrical flourish, but a manifestation of the very practices that informed his distinctive style of creating a garment".[72]

McQueen's use of his own hair has also drawn critical analysis. Evans wrote that McQueen conceived of his use of his own hair as his way of "giving himself to the collection".[55] Academic Chris McWade wrote that it took "the idea of investing oneself into one’s work to a literal end", serving as a means for McQueen to live on through his work both metaphorically and in a lesser sense literally.[73] Writer Cassandra Atherton described using several McQueen collections, including Jack the Ripper, in a university-level creative writing course to teach a connection between poetry and fashion, particularly how one can inspire the other. She noted that many of the students became fascinated with McQueen's use of hair and the history of hair in clothing and jewellery.[74]

Legacy

What attracted me to Alexander was the way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them thoroughly new and in the context of today. It is the complexity and severity of his approach to cut that makes him so modern. He is like a Peeping Tom in the way he slits and stabs at fabric to explore all the erogenous zones of the body.

Isabella Blow, quoted in Harper's Bazaar, 1996[75]

Jack the Ripper was the only collection McQueen presented under his birth name, Lee A. McQueen. By the time he released his next collection, Taxi Driver (Autumn/Winter 1993), he had decided to design under his middle name, Alexander McQueen, which also became the name of his fashion house.[45][41][76]

Many of the narrative and aesthetic elements featured in Jack the Ripper resurfaced throughout McQueen's career. He earned a reputation for producing narratively-driven collections inspired by macabre aspects of history, art, and his own life.[3][24][33] Tight tailoring and unusual cuts became a brand standard, as did frock coats.[77][78] Frankel called "the big shoulder, the dropped waist line, and the exposed midriff" seen in the collection's runway show as an early-career signature silhouette that McQueen retained throughout his career in various forms.[79] The so-called three-point "origami" folded tail on the thorn-print coat appeared in later collections, and hair jewellery appeared again in Sarabande (Spring/Summer 2007).[80][81]

Two frock coats from Jack the Ripper, including the thorn-print frock, appeared at the retrospective exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (staged in New York City in 2011 and in London in 2015, respectively).[82] They were loaned by socialite Daphne Guinness, who purchased Blow's entire collection after her death in 2007.[83] Items from the Blow archive, including the thorn-print coat and other items from Jack the Ripper, appeared in the 2013 retrospective Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore! at Somerset House in London.[84] During the staging process for this exhibition, the thorn-print coat was discovered to have a cigarette burn in its side. The curators opted not to remove it during the textile restoration process, as they felt the burn "was a portal into exploring how Blow wore her remarkable wardrobe with such apparent disregard".[84]

The thorn-print frock coat was photographed for a McQueen retrospective that appeared in the Spring/Summer 2015 issue of AnOther. It was styled with a pair of bumster trousers and the crown of thorns headpiece from Dante.[85] When early McQueen employee Ruti Danan auctioned her personal archive in 2020, a pattern for one of the coats from Jack the Ripper sold for a reported $3,025 USD.[86][87]

In 2016, CSM student Tina Gorjanc presented her Master's thesis project, Pure Human, which proposed to use McQueen's DNA, sourced from the hair used in Jack the Ripper garments, to grow skin tissue that would be made into leather goods.[44] Gorjanc's project was strictly theoretical. Although she applied for a patent for the process which mentions McQueen's name, she never obtained his actual DNA, and all three prototypes she produced were made of pig skin.[88] McWade describes this project as part of the "ghostly quality" that defines McQueen's legacy, which alternately frames him as haunting or being resurrected.[73]

Notes
  1. Some sources incorrectly write that McQueen claimed to have been distantly related to the actual victim.[23][25]
  2. Some sources provide a date of July 1992 and list the venue as the Olympia London in Kensington.[33][50] It is unclear where this originated from, but it appears to be erroneous, as London Fashion Week in 1992 was held in March, and Central Saint Martins holds its graduation shows at Fashion Week.[51][52]
  3. Most sources say she purchased the entire collection. However, in her 2015 book Gods and Kings, journalist Dana Thomas reports that Simon Ungless told her, "with authority", that it was not the entire collection, although she does not elaborate.[63] In a 2015 interview, Susannah Frankel also states that it was not the entire collection.[64]

References
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  3. Fairer & Wilcox 2016, p. 12.
  4. Savané 2021, p. 98.
  5. Thomas 2015, p. 64.
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  50. Callahan 2014, p. 28.
  51. Morris, Bernadine (17 March 1992). "Review/Fashion; British Face Reality With Flair". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 5 March 2023. Retrieved 4 March 2023.
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  70. Savané 2021, p. 95.
  71. Breward 2015, p. 43.
  72. Breward 2015, p. 45.
  73. McWade 2021, p. 77.
  74. Atherton 2012, pp. 47–49.
  75. Evans 2003, p. 142.
  76. Watt 2012, p. 56.
  77. Wilcox 2015, p. 32.
  78. Knight 2015, 3:27–3:29.
  79. Knight 2015, 3:34–3:49.
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  82. Bolton 2011, p. 232.
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