Your new year shouldn’t be a twilight of grays, a melt of highlights and lowlights, a boring blend of neither success nor failure.
Your new year should be bright white striped with base black, it should be pure success played up by dark lessons.
Your new year should be an ambitious arch balanced on a pin-thin heel of risk and a fat platform of soul to save you.
But should you want to waste your new year, at least do it going into debt for Alexander McQueen f**k-you shoes, while jetting ’round the world, snorting coke off a model’s six-pack.
In the last few seasons of his work in particular, Alexander McQueen became famous for the incredibly intricate, digitally-rendered patterns that he used in everything from reptile-reminiscent cocktail dresses to Hieronymus Bosch-referencing pantsuits. The prints were at first only used for clothing, but the art has made its way to accessories with the Alexander McQueen Samurai Print Canvas Tote.
Printed bags can be a bit hard to wear, but if it’s doable in any season, it’s winter. People tend to regress to their favorite dark neutrals when weather gets cold and foreboding, and the warm, classic-meets-modern feel of this pattern is the perfect way to incorporate some colors into a fall outfit that aren’t black, navy or charcoal grey. Not that there’s anything wrong with black. Of course not.
could be that Lady Gaga, remotely—crashed through a whole new frontier in the projection of fashion shows as worldwide live entertainment Tuesday night. McQueen's collection, Plato's Atlantis, was live-streamed on Nick Knight's SHOWstudio.com, intercut with the photographer's premade video footage. That was the plan anyway, until 30 minutes before the show, Gaga Twittered that McQueen was about to premiere her new single. She has a million followers. Inevitably, before the crashing of the frontier could quite come about, SHOWstudio itself crashed. Which may have replicated, in a whole new audience, the sensation of a young hopeful stuck outside a McQueen presentation, waving a standing ticket and being unable to get in.
Seen from on the spot, it was a big-budget production, for sure. There was a sparkling, illuminated runway in which two sinister, robotic movie cameras on gigantic black booms ran back and forth, while a screen played Knight's video of Raquel Zimmermann, lying on sand, naked, with snakes writhing across her body.
Then the models came out, dressed in short, reptile-patterned, digitally printed dresses, their gangly legs sunk in grotesque shoes that looked like the armored heads of a fantastical breed of antediluvian sea monster. McQueen, according to an internal logic detailed in a press release, 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.
The consequences, in fashion terms? Well, it was a one-note, unmissable formula of the kind several other designers have decided is the way to communicate this season. McQueen's message throughout was essentially sunk into the short dress—a steady development of his engineered sea-reptile prints, worked into a nipped-waist, belled-skirt silhouette. The colors—first green and brown, moving to aqua and blue—were exceptionally executed and swagged, and molded across panniered structures. Each dress was a work of computer-generated art crossbred with McQueen's couture-based signature cut.
In a section in which it looked as if McQueen was envisaging a biological hybridization of women with sea mammals, there were trousers whose bulbous flanks mimicked the skin of sharks or dolphins. A reminder of his taste in Savile Row tailoring came via a few looks in which formfitting gray men's fabric was cut away to reveal "portholes" filled with turquoise (an effect akin to the view from a glass-bottomed boat). Finally, then? 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. 
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