An effortlessly gifted, peerless aesthete cursed by questionable organizational skills, a willful nature, and an extremely ill-advised lawsuit, Oscar Wilde died impoverished in a Paris hotel room at age 46. For this Alexander McQueen collection, Wilde’s decline from controversial toast of London’s literati as the author of Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest, and The Picture of Dorian Gray through to final decline proved an accommodating theme.
McQueen’s pagoda shoulder was reduced over slim long jackets and narrow or kicky pants in serge and jacquard, and double-breasted overcoats given texture by golden “bullion” embroidery (peacock feathers mostly, the recurring motif of the collection) and stone-studded silver jewelry. Afghan-esque shearlings in three lengths, guardsman’s red capes and coats with gold buttons, distressed knits, and a fuzzily embraceable dressing gown coat were all typically extravagant. Elbow-patched tailoring with tied waistcoats in punchy tattersall were as dressed down as this determinedly exhibitionist offering got, but still powerfully punchy. So, too, were bordeaux, blue, and yellow frock coats over skinny military flashed pants in velvet (historicized Teddy Boy wear) and a hand-frogged, shawl-collared smoking jacket gridded with paisley teardrops. Two pieces at the end, a golden peacock-embroidered evening cape and a voluminous carpet-texture jacquard topcoat, were especially easy to imagine Wilde swooping sensually about in. One of Wilde’s most famous bon mots was that, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Were he alive to see this collection, he doubtless would have added an exception to his excellent rule.
