What no museum retrospective or cable documentary will ever tell you is, that every artist you’ve ever worshipped spent at least one afternoon sitting somewhere humiliating, in front of people who can smell desperation through cigarette smoke and Comme des Garçons silhouettes, with a weak portfolio, a half-empty CV, and the very specific fear that maybe they were, in fact, delusional. Fashion’s lesson is how you stay in that room. Getting into it in the first place usually comes down to whether somebody influential decides you’re interesting before the market does.
For Alexander McQueen, that person was Isabella Blow. For Blow, that person was Anna Wintour, before it became André Leon Talley. Picture the creative leaving her desk, after famously cleaning it with a bottle of Perrier, putting on black organza horns on her head (she had a particular weakness for headpieces, the woman was buried with a Philip Tracey hat) and heading to Central Saint Martins. There, she would watch the 1992 MA Graduate Show, including McQueen’s collection, which she would later purchase entirely for £5000, paying the designer £100 a week to exist inside the system she had just cracked open for him. The story is well known, McQueen even more so.
And if it’s not familiar, a short film centred on their relationship is on the way, literally. The short will follow Russell Tovey as Alexander McQueen (kind of freakishly on point) and Olivia Colman as Isabella Blow on a road trip. Wild Bird is set to be directed by filmmaker Andrew Haigh and produced by Susie Hall as part of a HATO Pictures and WePresent collaboration, while costume design falls to Sandy Powell.
