Givenchy Autumn-Winter 1997 Haute Couture

I'm a relatively new fan of the late Alexander McQueen, not having noticed him until his Autumn-Winter 2009 collection. As a result, I don't know very much about McQueen before the 2000s, when the internet made storing and recording images and videos that much easier. So it was a real treat for me to find a full (barring some skips) recording of one of his early shows with Givenchy, and an haute couture show at that!

The show and its history very clearly appeal to my sensibilities:

"...combined the late Victorian costumes... with a series of animated skeletons and muscle men from the sixteenth-century anatomical plates of Andrea Vesalius... the cut of some of the dresses in the collection was influenced by the figures from these anatomical plates in which the skeletons appear to 'vogue' or model their own bodies. The concept behind the show... a fin-de-siècle surgeon and collector who travelled the world collecting exotic objects, textiles, and women, whom he subsequently cut up and reassembled in his laboratory. The 'scenario' of the catwalk show staged the return of these gruesomely murdered women who came back to haunt the living" (Fashion at the edge: spectacle, modernity and deathliness 154).

The show undoubtedly has a late 19th-Century Decadent bent, with its references to prostitution, conflation of death and sexuality, the rampant exoticism and Orientalism, the styling of the women as the dangerously confident and sexual femme fatale. But most of all, it's just pretty. Not so sure about the drag queen hair, though.