The first definitive biography of the iconic, notoriously private British fashion designer Alexander McQueen explores the connections between his dark work and even darker life. When forty-year-old Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February 2010, a shocked world mourned the loss. McQueen had risen from humble beginnings as the son of an East London taxi driver to scale the heights of fame, fortune, and glamour. He designed clothes for the world's most beautiful women and royalty, most famously the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore a McQueen dress on her wedding day. He created a multimillion-dollar luxury brand that became a favorite with celebrities including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. But behind the confident facade and bad-boy image, lay a sensitive soul who struggled to survive in the ruthless world of fashion. As the pressures of work intensified, McQueen became increasingly dependent on the drugs that contributed to his tragic end. Meanwhile, in his private life, his failure to find lasting love in a string of boyfriends only added to his despair. And then there were the dark secrets that haunted his sleep... A modern-day fairy tale infused with the darkness of a Greek tragedy, Alexander McQueen tells the complete sensational story, and includes never-before-seen photos. Those closest to the designer--his family, friends, and lovers--have spoken for the first time about the man they knew, a fragmented individual, a lost boy who battled to gain entry into a world that ultimately destroyed him. "There's blood beneath every layer of skin," McQueen once said. Andrew Wilson's biography, filled with groundbreaking material, dispels myths, corrects inaccuracies, and offers new insights into McQueen's private life and the source of his creative genius"--
Features garments made by the designer throughout his career, accompanied by quotes from the designer, an essay about his fashion career, and an interview with his long-time design assistant.
The first definitive biography of the iconic, notoriously private British fashion designer Alexander McQueen explores the connections between his dark work and even darker life. When forty-year-old Alexander McQueen committed suicide in February 2010, a shocked world mourned the loss. McQueen had risen from humble beginnings as the son of an East London taxi driver to scale the heights of fame, fortune, and glamour. He designed clothes for the world's most beautiful women and royalty, most famously the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore a McQueen dress on her wedding day. He created a multimillion-dollar luxury brand that became a favorite with celebrities including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. But behind the confident facade and bad-boy image, lay a sensitive soul who struggled to survive in the ruthless world of fashion. As the pressures of work intensified, McQueen became increasingly dependent on the drugs that contributed to his tragic end. Meanwhile, in his private life, his failure to find lasting love in a string of boyfriends only added to his despair. And then there were the dark secrets that haunted his sleep... A modern-day fairy tale infused with the darkness of a Greek tragedy, Alexander McQueen tells the complete sensational story, and includes never-before-seen photos. Those closest to the designer--his family, friends, and lovers--have spoken for the first time about the man they knew, a fragmented individual, a lost boy who battled to gain entry into a world that ultimately destroyed him. "There's blood beneath every layer of skin," McQueen once said. Andrew Wilson's biography, filled with groundbreaking material, dispels myths, corrects inaccuracies, and offers new insights into McQueen's private life and the source of his creative genius"--
Features garments made by the designer throughout his career, accompanied by quotes from the designer, an essay about his fashion career, and an interview with his long-time design assistant.
Anglomania gripped Europe during the mid to late 18th century. Continental Anglophiles such as Voltaire and Montesquieu saw England as a land of reason, freedom, and tolerance. Yet what began as an intellectual phenomenon became, and has remained, a matter of style. Through the lens of fashion, this volume examines aspects of English culture that continue to capture the imaginations of Europeans and Americans, among them the class system, sport, royalty, pageantry, eccentricity, the gentleman, and the country garden. Englishness is a romantic construct, formed by fictive and imaginary narratives. These narratives are, however, not merely the product of European-American Anglophilia but are fostered by the English themselves. As this book reveals, they can be found in the novels of Samuel Richardson and in the paintings of George Stubbs and William Hogarth. AngloMania presents historical costumes with clothing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in a series of theatrical vignettes staged in the Museum's English Period Rooms. The illuminating and entertaining texts are complemented by an essay, which traces the desire for all things British"-- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.
Inside the Westminster Menswear Archive is a unique guide to the role of garment archives as an industry resource for designers to research and examine both historical garments and the work of their peers. With exclusive access to over 120 key garments from the Westminster Menswear Archive, spanning the last 275 years, each piece is brilliantly photographed in close-up detail and annotated with curator commentary, to inspire new generations of designers. Highlights include garments from: A-COLD-WALL*, Ahluwalia, Aitor Throup Studio, Alexander McQueen, Belstaff, Bernhard Willhelm, Burberry, Casely-Hayford, C.P. Company, Carol Christian Poell, Comme des Garçons, Craig Green, Dior Men, Fred Perry, Helmut Lang, Hussein Chalayan, Jean Paul Gaultier, Junya Watanabe, Louis Vuitton, Martine Rose, Meadham Kirchhoff, Nigel Cabourn, Paul Smith, Prada, Stone Island, Umbro, Undercover, Vexed Generation, and Vollebak.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE $60,000 HILARY WESTON WRITERS TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION “What the hell kind of great escape is this? No one escapes!” —L.B. Mayer, on the 1963 film He had fifty-seven seconds of screen time in the most lavish POW film Hollywood ever produced. He was blond. A Gestapo agent. Sauntering down the aisles of a speeding train, he speaks in terse German to Richard Attenborough, Gordon Jackson, David McCallum. The film is The Great Escape (by John Sturges, starring Steve McQueen); the actor, though uncredited, is Michael Paryla. He was part Jewish. Shortly after filming he died. In This Great Escape, Andrew Steinmetz tenderly reconstructs the life of a man seen by millions yet recognized by no one, whose history—from childhood flight from Nazism to suspicious death twenty years later—intersects bitterly, ironically, and often movingly with the plot of Sturges’s great war film. Splicing together documentary materials with correspondence, diary entries, and Steinmetz’s own travel journal, This Great Escape does more than reconstruct the making of a cinema classic: it is a poignant and moving testament to the complexity of human experience, a portrait of a family for whom acting was a matter of survival, and proof that our most anonymous, uncredited, and undocumented moments can brush against the zeitgeist of world history.
The author of Fast Fade tells the fascinating story of one of the most important and controversial directors of our time. The man responsible for The Last Picture Show, and Paper Moon went on to Playboy model Dorothy Stratten. Illustrations.
The United States (US) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Office of Environment and Energy (AEE) has developed the System for assessing Aviation's Global Emissions (SAGE) with support from the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Logistics Management Institute (LMI). Currently at Version 1.5, SAGE is a high fidelity computer model used to predict aircraft fuel burn and emissions for all commercial (civil) flights globally in a given year. As part of SAGE development, this document has been prepared to provide detailed specifications of the model's methods, data, and assumptions. The information is provided within the context of using SAGE to develop global inventories of fuel burn and emissions.
Since antiquity, religious beliefs and practices have inspired many of the world’s greatest works of art. These masterworks have, in turn, fueled the imaginations of fashion designers in the 20th and 21st centuries, yielding some of the most innovative creations in the history of fashion. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination explores fashion’s complex and often controversial relationship with Catholicism by examining the role of spirituality and religion in contemporary culture. This two-volume publication connects significant religious art and artifacts to their sartorial expressions. One volume features images of rarely seen objects from the Vatican —ecclesiastical garments and accessories—while the other focuses on fashions by designers such as Cristobal Balenciaga, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Madame Grès, Christian Lacroix, Karl Lagerfeld, Jeanne Lanvin, Claire McCardell, Thierry Mugler, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Gianni Versace. Essays by art historians and leading religious authorities provide perspective on how dress manifests—or subverts—Catholic values and ideology.
This book is the first overall survey of the British West Indian press in the early nineteenth century—a critical period in the history of the region. Based on extensive and ground-breaking archival research, this volume provides an in-depth history of early nineteenth-century British West Indian newspapers and potted biographies of the journalists who produced them. The author examines the economics underpinning newspapers, and a political spectrum, unique to the West Indian press, is also posited. Towards one end sat a small group of ‘liberal’ newspapers that outraged white colonists by arguing for civil and political rights to be extended to so-called free coloureds and for the abolition of slavery; scattered at various points towards the other end of the spectrum were newspapers still best collectively described as the ‘planter press’—the traditional term used in the literature. Starting from this basic conceptual framework, the volume shows how the press landscape in the British Caribbean at this time was more volatile and complex than has been previously thought. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates and postgraduates studying Caribbean and media history and those interested in modern history.
A heart-warming memoir about the adoption of a champion greyhound and her transformation into ring-bearer at her new owner’s wedding Andrew had always wanted a dog—something you could mould into the perfect playmate. Tail going like a windscreen wiper, tongue a pink strip, wet-nosed, bright-eyed—what boy wouldn't want such a force in his life? But a man of thirty-seven? And an ex-racing greyhound? Set over a watershed twelve months, it's the story of wanting the perfect dog and planning the perfect wedding.
This book offers a fundamental reassessment of the origins of a central court in Scotland. It examines the early judicial role of Parliament, the development of the Session in the fifteenth century as a judicial sitting of the King s Council, and its reconstitution as the College of Justice in 1532. Drawing on new archival research into jurisdictional change, litigation and dispute settlement, the book breaks with established interpretations and argues for the overriding significance of the foundation of the College of Justice as a supreme central court administering civil justice. This signalled a fundamental transformation in the medieval legal order of Scotland, reflecting a European pattern in which new courts of justice developed out of the jurisdiction of royal councils.
This vibrant publication brings to life four centuries of extraordinary garments and accessories inspired by the natural world. Offering new ways for understanding and experiencing a garment’s inherent artistry, Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion explores clothing’s complex relationship with the body through the senses. Engaging texts by scholars, scientists, and conservators reveal the history behind over 200 works of fashion while also addressing their fragility and ephemerality. Exceptional new photography by Nick Knight of creations by international couturiers and design houses—including Cristòbal Balenciaga, Thom Browne, Collina Strada, Christian Dior, Gucci, Charles James, LOEWE, Madame Grès, Thebe Magugu, Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Issey Miyake, Paul Poiret, Yves Saint Laurent, Elsa Schiaparelli, Bea Szenfeld, Philip Treacy, Iris van Herpen, Louis Vuitton, and Charles Frederick Worth—further deepens our appreciation for each object’s sensorial integrity.
Includes multiple choice questions about the world of film. Embedded in the book is a special computerized quiz module that lets you compete against yourself or a friend.
[Book title] examines the practical, spiritual, psychosexual, and socioeconomic underpinnings of fashion's fascination with animals and birds."--Book jacket.
For centuries China has fueled the creative imagination and inspired fashion. This stunning publication explores the influence of Chinese art, film, and aesthetics on international fashion designers, including Christian Dior, Jean Paul Gaultier, Karl Lagerfeld, Alexander McQueen, and Yves Saint Laurent.
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