'Eclect Dissect' was McQueen`s second collection for Givenchy.
It was shown in Paris Medical School in july 1997.
For this show McQueen`s art director Simon Costin imagined a fictional surgeon and collector who travelled the world collecting exotic objects and women, whom he took apart and reassembled in this laboratory.
The runway show staged the return of these murdered women who come back to haunt the living.
The models embodied their ghosts, dressed in the exotic garments collected by their murderer on his foreign journeys.
Scottish tartan, Spanish lace, kimonos, Burmese necklaces and eastern folk dresses decorated with feathers and stuffed animals merge to outfits with a morbid aura.
The analogy between the designer and the surgeon is obvious.
McQueen acts like a surgeon himself here, dissecting the traditional clothes and reassembling them.
The japanese Obi, for example, becomes a corset and the Kimono becomes a tight skirt.
McQueen`s reassemblage didn`t make the women seem like victims but as vengeful ghosts.
He always wanted to empower women with his fashion and I think he succeeds with this collection.
The mix of cultures is extended beyond fashion; the show also makes references to his own, british, culture (in the 19th century): the dissecting-reference to Jack the Ripper (who also influenced his graduation collection) and the 'women returning from the dead' motif from the Gothic Novel.
Information credit: Book: 'Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity and deathliness' by Caroline Evans. Pages 154 - 156.
I LOVE this collection! It`s like an "early version" of 'Widows of Culloden' with an additional exotic touch. Not only is the tartan the same as in McQueen`s fall 2006 collection, the opening music of Givenchy was also played in his show!
McQueen is the only designer EVER to mix elements of Scotland, Spain and Asia - and it works! I love how the models act like victorian ladies, the Princess Leah hair and the Burka with the bird-cage on top! McQueen`s fantasy and courage to put traditional items into new contexts and mix cultures & times will be unrivalled for 100 years at least.
What is your favourite thing about this collection?
In “It’s a Jungle Out There,” shown in February 1997 in London’s Borough Market, McQueen meditated on the theme of the Thomson’s gazelle and its terrible vulnerability to predators.
He used the idea of animal instincts in the natural world as metaphor for the dog-eats-dog nature of the urban jungle, staging the show against a forty-foot-high screen of corrugated iron drilled with imitation bullet holes and surrounded by wrecked cars, adding dry ice and crimson lighting for drama.
In a television interview he said: “The whole show feeling was about the Thompson’s gazelle. It’s a poor little critter – the markings are lovely. It’s got these dark eyes, the white and black with the tan markings on the side, the horns – but it is the food chain of Africa. As soon as it’s born it’s dead, I mean you’re lucky if it lasts a few months, and that’s how I see human life, in the same way. You know, we can all be discarded quite easily … you’re there, you’re gone, it’s a jungle out there!”
Yet the design and styling of a hide jacket with pointed shoulders from which a pair of twisting gazelle horns stood up, worn by a model whose metallic contact lenses made her look like an alien, subverted the fatal passivity of the Thompson’s gazelle.
Though the animal was referred to in the model’s dramatic black and white face make-up, the horns, and the hide jacket, McQueen repositioned its parts and added the huge shoulders and metallic contact lenses to create a woman more like Rider Haggard’s She: predatory, scary, powerful, and only half human.
These were the characteristics of McQueen’s femme fatale, a figure who suggested the terrifying power of women rather than their soft vulnerability.
