Men's fashion according to Alexander McQueen The forgotten history of menswear created by fashion's enfant terrible

«Menswear is about subtlety. It's about good style and good taste», Lee McQueen once said. Words frankly too vague to represent an entire poetics. If the British designer wanted people to be scared of the women he dressed, the same cannot be said of men - a category for which he rather wanted to «demolish the rules but to keep the tradition» and which, at least for the collections from '96 to '98, in which there was a minority of male looks, were almost an extension of the much more daring womanswear concepts. And even when McQueen officially launched a proper menswear line in 2004, setting up residence at Milan Fashion Week, everyone's attention remained fixed on the women's collections. It was after the brand reached considerable stature, and after McQueen's own death in February 2010, that the two lines, men's and women's, settled on a more common and commercial lingua franca - before then, McQueen's 'canonical' collections were still only considered women's. Yet, McQueen had cut his teeth among the discerning tailors of Savile Row, Anderson & Sheppard and Gieves & Hawkes, who even produced suits for the men of the royal family (McQueen once recounted having sewn the phrase 'I am a cunt' into the lining of a jacket of the current King Charles III) and then modelled theatrical costumes in the tailor's shop Angels & Bermans. And it is clear that while women's clothing was for him an unprecedented field of artistic experimentation as well as a form of escapism, men's clothing represented a more directly biographical project, anchored in reality, subject like everything to «the fragility of romance».

As mentioned, however, much of this vast menswear heritage has now been, if not forgotten, at least overshadowed by the magnitude of the spectacle brought to the catwalk by the women's collections. Soon after McQueen's death, Sarah Burton composed a collection inspired by historical English costumes that still bore a trace of the aesthetic to which the designer had accustomed the public. But the desire to shock was gone, as was that sense of shameless irreverence that, in the aftermath of the acquisition of the Gucci Group (which would later become Kering), led him to respond to those who wondered if he would become more commercial: «It's never become more commercial; it's always been the same. Nothing affects me». Of course, McQueen himself believed in mixing high and low, after all it was he who launched McQ, the brand's diffusion line that still exists today. Nevertheless, it is not hard to believe that a designer so opposed to the establishment and the hypocrisy of marketing would have reacted to the hyper-commercialisation of his menswear and his brand, which, by the way, also ended up producing Kate Middleton's famous wedding dress for the British royal wedding - just think that in his lifetime McQueen, a Scotsman for whom England had literally raped his homeland, had turned down a formal invitation from the Queen of England to a state dinner with the Emperor of Japan. A classic case of «You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain».