Spotted: Avatar's Message and Color Palette, Alexander McQueen

Nick Knight said in an interview posted just before the show that Lee Alexander McQueen’s Spring 2010 Ready-to-Wear Collection entitled “Plato’s Atlantis” is based on fantasy and Plato’s definition of Atlantis as a metaphor for Neverland. McQueen was inspired by the idea of Atlantis sinking into the ocean. As Sarah Mower wrote for Style.com of McQueen’s press release about the collection, “he was casting an apocalyptic forecast of the future ecological meltdown of the world: Humankind is made up of creatures that evolved from the sea, and we may be heading back to an underwater future as the ice cap dissolves.” And after this apocalypse, it’s as if McQueen’s human race landed straight into James Cameron’s Pandora of Avatar (2009). McQueen's collection is filled with lots of reptile-patterned dresses, sea prints, a color palette saturated with green and brown, aqua and blue, and dresses that were digitally printed from computer-generated art prints. This is another thing this collection has in common with the film Avatar—technology. Mower notes “Although there was nothing to show McQueen breaking out from his set design mold, the way he’s embracing new computer technologies and the drama of the moving image puts him at the leading edge of change.” Much like the technological focus of Avatar and its many breakthroughs.

Both McQueen and Gaultier (featured on my previous post) are known for being the bad boys of fashion, and both of these collections have been criticized for their unwearability. But I hope we can all be inspired in some way by the genius of the late Alexander McQueen, the vision of James Cameron’s Pandora, Gaultier’s jungle, and the work of Avatar’s costume designers Mayes C. Rubeo, Deborah Lynn Scott, and John Harding, and costume illustrator Rafael Bugos.

Avatar (2009) Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Costume Designers: Mayes C. Rubeo, Deborah Lynn Scott, and John Harding | Costume Illustrator Rafael Bugos | Director, James Cameron.

Alexander McQueen Spring 2010 Collection, photos courtesy of Style.com.

© 2011 - 2015, Louise Junker.