Inspiration of the week: Alexander McQueen

Tracing Alexander McQueen, without saying something shallow and ubiquitous, is a quest: his life and art are strictly interconnected, it’s almost impossible to talk about one without mentioning the other. He began serving an apprenticeship with Savile Row’s tailors, and learned rigour and orderliness (very important aspects for his methodic work and for his personal life), while finding shelter from his abusive father. His pursuit, as Creative Director for Givenchy and then with his own brand, was a journey into beauty, that disorientating beauty always on-the-line between light and darkness, tied among life and death (the death of his muse Isabella Blow was a fact he never accepted). Alexander McQueen fills the word “Fashion” with sense and reference qualifying it as a form of art: every show was a performance and a visual experience for the eye and mind, as the collection was only a mean to a further end. Just like the artist is eternally bound to its art, McQueen lived through his creations and as they became, year after year, darker and deeper, agony and depression pushed him to find timeless peace in the darkness of which he always tried to show as a mysterious beauty. While in London Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty, the largest retrospective of his oeuvre, just opened,we tribute his outstanding-groundbreaking career and life with this gallery.