Wilson ably and unsparingly portrays the heady, competitive, solipsistic world that celebrated, and ultimately doomed,...
The astonishing creations and tormented life of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen (1969-2010).
During his 18-year career, McQueen rose to the pinnacle of international couture, mounting shows that were notably surreal, shocking, and outrageous. Journalist Wilson (Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, 2013, etc.), draws on interviews with the designer’s friends, family, lovers, and co-workers, as well as published sources, to produce a richly detailed life of a man hailed as a genius whose suicide shocked the fashion world. Sexually abused as a child and bullied by classmates because he was gay, McQueen came to the fashion industry defiant and rebellious. After serving as an apprentice to Savile Row tailors, he enrolled at the respected Central Saint Martins art school, culminating his degree with a collection called “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.” Wealthy fashionista Isabella Blow was in the audience, mesmerized by McQueen’s audacity. A black coat with blood-red lining containing human hair seemed to her “the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” She became a champion and patron of a man who determinedly honed his image as a misfit. Wearing low-slung jeans and old lumberjack shirts, he was, as Plum Sykes said, “smelly and sweaty and grubby,” and—until he underwent gastric band surgery—overweight. Insecure, emotionally fragile, and yearning for romance, he failed to sustain relationships; one man after another left him, overwhelmed by his jealousy, paranoia, and need to control. Drugs and alcohol became his defense against loneliness and stress, and his cocaine addiction intensified after he became creative director at Givenchy, contracted to produce six shows yearly. Each, one boyfriend noted, could not be just “a normal catwalk show, it had to be amazing.” The author details not only the designer’s “stunningly beautiful and deeply unsettling” fashions, but also what McQueen and everyone else wore on every occasion.
Wilson ably and unsparingly portrays the heady, competitive, solipsistic world that celebrated, and ultimately doomed, McQueen.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7673-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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