The Hunger: Introduction

On the night of October 23, 1995, at the tail end of that season’s London Fashion Week, the relatively new enfant terrible of the industry, Alexander McQueen, staged an incredibly prolific yet underrated performance. Titled The Hunger, after the 1983 horror film of the same name starring Catherine Deneuve, Sarah Sarandon, and the late rock icon David Bowie, directed by Tony Scott, the show is invaded by characters from the film the morning after a night of violent clubbing, vampires and blood junkies alike. The collection is also based on Cat People (1982) directed by Paul Schrader, an erotic tale about the transformation of the human into the animalistic due to a ravenous sexual desire. Cruelty, vulnerability, death, and eroticism permeate the Spring/Summer 1996 collection as McQueen explores the tensions between Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory regarding the classical and grotesque body. Through subversions of 80s power dressing and restricting the body with impeccable nigh impossible tailoring, McQueen enters into the paradoxical realm of “fetishistic elegance” (Breward 45). McQueen’s designs literally peer underneath the exterior of clothing, displaying the body through the use of transparent materials, the absence of certain garments, and cutouts with abstracted shapes and razor-sharp edges. This exposed interior begins to crack Fashion’s perfected surface. Now the audience must reckon with that which has been hidden and purposefully ignored - the physicality of the body and its deathliness. By unsettling the boundary between exteriority and interiority, McQueen criticizes the cruel stagnancy of the youthful classical body, instead opting for a grotesque body that is continuously “in the act of becoming” (Bakhtin 317), aging through mutability no longer resisting an inescapable mortality.

Still from *The Hunger* (Tony Scott, 1983, 97 min.)

Mikhail Bakhtin was a 20th-century Russian cultural theorist who studied the presentation of the body as a literary trope in the works of masters such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and François Rabelais. Bakhtin used the body and its physical expressions as sites to question normative ideals that police lived realities. Two interrelated concepts central to Bakhtin’s work are the Carnival and the grotesque body. Extremely popular in early modern Europe, the Carnival served as a celebration filled with excess and abandon through the copious consumption of food and drink. Those celebrating were freed of their inhibitions and acted in whatever way they saw fit unburdened by concepts of normalcy and compliance. In a sense, their manner of behavior could be described as grotesque. Repulsive and distorted those participating in the Carvinal could no longer be understood through implicit social codes. As they interacted with their environment by allowing things into the body like food and drink and forcing substances out such as defecating, ejaculating, or urinating they began to inhabit the liminal space between in and out. The grotesque came to represent the essentialness of life because these are things we do as humans to sustain life or for pleasure. Bakhtin contrasts the jovial authenticity of the grotesque with the unachievable austerity of the classical body, one that is “closed, smooth, and impenetrable” (318). Penetrating into the body’s open depths one is confronted with a complexity that is constantly in flux, growing and decaying, marching towards an inevitable death. We can use Bakhtin’s theories to have a greater understanding of McQueen’s work as he explored what it means to be human through fashion using the notions of exaggeration, humor, and growth.

Staged inside the British Fashion Council’s East Lawn Tent outside of London’s Natural History Museum, The Hunger follows a season after his infamous and often misunderstood Highland Rape Collection, which caused a mixture of outrage and anguish by the press, not too dissimilar from the themes he explored through England’s historical violation of Scotland. Produced by his creative consultant, Sam Gainsbury, and dedicated to his creative director, Katy England, this collection expands further outward regarding the unstable limits of a supposedly fixed human condition. All eyes are on McQueen as there is frustration amongst British fashion insiders that British fashion is not being taken seriously by the industry due to their fascination with the avante-garde and some British designers using London as a sort of stepping stone as prominent figures such as Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano had begun showing in Paris (Gleason 35). People are excited by Mcqueen’s work, yet already tired of his quote-unquote bad boy antics. The show, filled with 95 looks, is one of very few that present womenswear and menswear simultaneously. This is mainly due to the fact that McQueen’s new distributor, Bus Stop which was a part of the Japanese appeal group Onward Kashiyama, required McQueen to create menswear (Thomas 382-383). Both the menswear and womenswear focus on extremely slim and narrow silhouettes, evoking a sense of confinement as the space the garments occupy seems restricted by the width of the coffins used in The Hunger film.

Beneath the Surface

Once the audience takes their seats, the show starts with ear-screeching sirens warning of danger, followed by the most intoxicating pulsating club music mixed with cacophonous monkey howls. The first model walks out onto a relatively simple all-white runway in a clear PVC two-piece set with white lining, matching underwear, and white leather ankle boots. He also adorns a single tusk earring designed in collaboration with jeweler Shaun Leane, who became a long-time creative partner of McQueen, crafting some of the most gruesome and memorable jewelry for the House. The transparent material seductively clinging to the model’s body allows the spectator a voyeuristic glimpse into a private interiority as they appreciate the technicality of the garment. This appreciation brings with it a view of the innermost parts of the body not usually on display to the public. The boundary paradoxically shifts as what is usually inside, the navel region and the legs, are metaphorically forced out. They are now exposed visually, yet a protective material still encases these areas. Still inside, in a literal sense, most of the body is shielded from the other senses, namely touch. Caroline Evans argues in Fashion at the Edge that the theatrical presentation of cruelty inherent to McQueen’s work involves:

Going beneath the skin of conventional fashion, McQueen's first collections explored the taboo area of interiority, breaching the boundaries between inside and out. The fantasy of exploring and probing the interior of the body, although commonplace in contemporary art, is habitually disavowed in Fashion by its emphasis on surface, perfection and polish. McQueen, by contrast, actively explored the female body in relation to the tropes of abjection (Evans 144-45).

Throughout the collection, there is a palpable fascination with the limits and constraints of the body through McQueen’s technical expertise in tailoring. Susannah Frankel describes the relatively minimal clothes and set design as “streamline[ed] modernism with dabs of excess and horrors” (Frankle, “Alexander McQueen: Susannah Frankel/Nick Knight Interview:Top, Hunger S/S 96 & Bumsters,Dante A/W 96,” 7:27). McQueen’s early minimalism could be partly due to budget constraints because the House had little money during the 90s. However, the aesthetic also fits in with the prevailing celebration of heroin chic by the industry as Fashion, especially the avante-garde and experimental strains, confronted a brutal world with emotional abjection and detachment while rejecting the glamourous excess of the 80s and more established heritage Houses. Yet, the restrained color palette of red, black, white, and flesh tones further speaks to what is hidden underneath the surface, piercing the exterior as it forces the viewer to confront something more substantial than the superficial. McQueen forces the viewer to reckon with the grotesque complexity of the body as clothing mimicking blood, veins, flesh, and the intestines are all used to cement a bodily presence that is “habitually disavowed in Fashion.”

Unstable Performativity

Through its refusal to celebrate the classical youthful body, The Hunger marries McQueen’s technical might with performance art as both are used to show a body that is continuously transforming, no longer stagnantly stable. There is an element of performance integral to McQueen’s work that elevates the mere presentation of clothing into something more authentic by being distinctly human. Traditionally, models are meant to robotically walk down the runway, displaying the designer’s work for an audience of potential buyers and the press. An element of uniformity exists in this process where the clothes supersede any individual autonomy by the model. Yet, McQueen disrupts and destroys this tradition. As his models — regular people off the street, professionals, and celebrated British musicians — stagger down the runway, supposedly coming down from a blood high and frantically searching for the next fix, they harass the audience, the keyholders of the industry who had the power to make or break McQueen’s brand. Jimmy Pursey of the punk-rock bank Sham 69 gives the photographers at the end of the catwalk the middle finger, while another modeling Look No.40 steadily glares at the audience, not even paying attention to where he is walking. Even McQueen himself at the end of the show quickly pulls down his pants and moons his audience indifferent to their disgust or maybe actively seeking it.

The models’ attitude – animated and angry, sort of like teenage rebellion – agitates Fashion’s hierarchical power balance. At the same time, their liveliness is juxtaposed with the decaying mortality of the clothes and the physical body. McQueen presents a deathly body, precariously thin and severely disturbed. The visible aggression of the models towards the audience -- almost as if their fascination and engagement with the clothes borders on voyeurism and judgment -- injects the collection with a sense of anonymity. The audience realizes that the models are aware of their presence, and, thus, the models begin to look back at them, turning their performance into antagonistic delight. It seems like the models derive pleasure from the audience’s distaste. As Francesca Granata argues “Bakhtin’s theories … spur an exploration of the relation between humor and fashion”(139) as humor causes “temporary disruptions of hierarchies … [in that] their denial of systems and orders and their play with and disruption of category and classificatory systems, they can be read as a critique of closed symbolic systems and fixed categories” (142). Their performance is animalistic, the result of the tension between the classical and the grotesque disrupting the “‘canon of behavior’, which Bakhtin sees as an attempt ‘to close up and limit the body’s confines and to smooth the bulges” (Granata 129). The models display an interior mental state and propel it outward into a state of activity where it becomes mutable, similar to a virus that invades the body. Their inconsistencies become harmful partially because they are variable. The uniformity of a stable exterior breaks. Now, the audience must face an unknown, defiant presence. Their antics could be read as retribution for the vitriol McQueen faced by the press after their misunderstanding of his previous collection. Yet, like always with McQueen, this transgressive “canon of behavior” serves a practical purpose, as some of the more simplistic looks are brought alive by the models’ stomping liveliness, and conversely, some are made more menacing by their lethargic deathliness.

The Animal Within

Throughout The Hunger, McQueen explores being in nature and our futile yet incessant need to escape. Vampires, supernatural creatures divorced from the natural life cycles of mortality, feature prominently in the collection. Their deathliness as immutable beings existing on the precipice of life and death becomes a seductive trap where they hunt those who will eventually suffer the fate of mortality with the promise of eternal permanence. McQueen interrogates this innate desire by contrasting human versus the animal within and the hunter versus the hunted.

Look No. 2 features a stark white taffeta skirt suit with a double-vented bottom and a blood-red feathered bustier modeled by the late Stella Tennant. The appliquéd feathers signal the animal within, which is unsuccessfully hidden and paradoxically exposed through the classical and normative forms of tailoring in this razor-sharp suit that fits her body perfectly. The suiting is so perfect that it borders on the unnatural. As it desperately tries to contain the wildness of base, primal instincts, it forces the animal within to the surface. McQueen implies that Fashion’s overemphasis on perfection ironically calls forth the incomplete. It is almost as if the two cannot exist without each other because the contrast gives each meaning. The seventh look is quite similar to the second with the same white taffeta skirt suit. But, this time, the hem of the skirt is dyed this stark red, almost like it was dipped in blood, and nothing is under the suit jacket save for the model’s flesh. More seductively dangerous than the first, Look No. 7 takes the relationship between Fashion and the body further. The tailoring of the suit is so precise, so severe, the model sways as she walks, her movement restricted by the proportions of a classical body. Even with the severity of the suiting, she remains uncontained as the audience sees the model’s skin and, thus, her human imperfections.

Look No. 73 shows the aftermath of this process, rejecting the classical in favor of the grotesque. A nude gauze midi dress with black and white feathers curving up the stomach and down the spine transforms the model into a bird-human hybrid. No longer perfected but overtly animalistic, the look takes on a brighter air of freedom. As the model playfully scatters feathers down the runway, this is someone not concerned with upholding the classical sense of what a body should be or how a body should act.

Here we see the influence of Paul Schrader’s Cat People at its most literal. Taking on the idea of the hunt more literally, Looks No. 26 and 35 are bright white midi dresses that feature a photographic printed stalking leopard. The leopard’s gaze is alert and penetrating, majestic yet deadly. Like the vampires that stalk Scott’s film or McQueen’s runway, the leopard’s connection with death is what makes it so alluring. The hunter and the hunted imbue The Hunger with a sense of exhilarating danger, intensifying the transience of life to a euphoric high. Life is unstable, and this realization is incredibly freeing to those who feel trapped in the indifferent passage of life into death. The printed feather motif on various silk dresses and jackets throughout the collection evokes a sense of upward movement, no longer bound by a youthful classical ideal that fears change and instability. Instead, it celebrates the grotesque, that which is unbound, grows, and ages, free to exist in whichever ways it sees fit.

Natural Cycles

McQueen made growth and decay central motifs of this collection, and his work at large, through the image of woman in nature. The second half of the collection prominently features the use of lace. The transparent lace tops on Looks No. 40, 62, and 65 are masterfully designed to look like decaying foliage as the lace attached to the nude gauze is derelict and aged. Recalling Eve after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, there is a cruelty and terror inherent to these looks that “echoed fears about the social, economic, and sexual emancipation of women at the turn of the century” (Evans 148). While these models still have a recognizable human body, there is a fear that as the foliage continues to grow it will slowly transform their bodies into something unknowable. The body as a perfected, symmetrical object will be lost to nature, deviating from a supposed norm. These are bodies that can and will change, merging with nature through death as their bodies rot and decompose. McQueen celebrates our mortality as he constantly negotiates our fear of it, showing the beauty of such a stark truth. The repetition of the brocaded floral print makes this desire more commercial as it was transferred onto loose knee-length dresses as in Look No. 71 or his signature bumsters in Look No. 89.

The grotesque naturalism of the McQueen woman is not only presented through his clothing but also the wildness of the collection’s hair and makeup. Arched impossibly high feathered brows with tight, braided, and slick updos and bizarrely colored eyeshadows the models look animalistic, yet extremely polished. Eugene Souleiman’s New Romantic hair and Val Garland’s makeup are uncanny but there always seems to be a box or limit constraining its potential otherness. While not something you are likely to see in everyday life, the presentation of the hair and makeup still adhere to the conventional codes of the art form and human anatomy. The birdlike hair is reminiscent of nests but also the way some birds, such as peacocks, will sprout and expand their feathers during mating rituals to attract potential mates, recalling the deathly grace of vampires luring so many to their deaths. Yet, the avian influences throughout the collection also reflect McQueen’s fascination with birds and their ability to transplant boundaries. Frankle argues that McQueen’s wild, but uniform hair and makeup disguised the model, similar to how Martin Margiela used masks to hide his models thereby allowing the audience to focus on the clothes and the way the body moves in space when either constricted or freed by them (“Alexander McQueen: Susannah Frankel/Nick Knight Interview: Suits, Hunger S/S 96 and Eshu A/W 00,” 3:33). However, I would argue that the physical look of each model is differentiated enough that their individuality breathes life into the garments. These are not uniform robots just meant to display the garment in three dimensions, but rather individualized physical manifestations of McQueen’s ideas regarding the transience of life. The hair and makeup add to the transgressiveness of exploring such an idea rather than hiding who modeled the clothes.

Death and Decay

At the heart of The Hunger is the passage of life into death, an end to the tyranny of an eternal youth. Throughout the collection, certain looks and garments feature aggressive cutouts serving as wounds, legions, and sites of entry into the interior of the body. Engtanling suffering with pleasure these slashes serve as erogenous zones, spaces of stimulation and sensitivity not usually exposed to the outside. The viewer is allowed access while the rest of the garment still protects the wearer from exterior forces. These garments force both the wearer and the viewer to contend with a body that exists simultaneously in and out, a body constantly in flux and no longer fixed in position.

The cutouts that expose or highlight the navel region or genitals, for example, Look No. 48, focus on the image of the maternal and the essence of life. The silver metallic diamond shape seems to glow against the model’s crisp white skirt questioning notions of the vampire as barren and having reproductive capabilities. While Granata discusses how the relationship between Bakhatinaian theory and feminism is rife with naturalized misogyny, she also argues that those who have traditionally been othered by normative standards can use the grotesque to question ideas of social norms and the effects of deviation in fashion (Granata 130). Evans argues that McQueen’s femme fatale was not an “object of fear: rather, she became a frightening subject. Her highly sexualized appearance was a defense, but one which shaded into a form of attack” (Evans 148). McQueen uses the grotesque to problematize the barren stagnation of the classical body. Because the classical body cannot change, it also cannot host life, hostile to any foreign entity that exists outside of its bodily boundary as it becomes a body within another body. The nudity of Look No. 48 or Look No. 42 “counteracted the common understanding of the belly as a region to be suppressed”(Granata 136). As the bumsters lowered the natural waist and hip, they expanded the belly as a site of life, both through the growth of reproduction and also the digestive capabilities of the stomach and intestines as fundamental to the sustenance of life.

“Frightening subjects” invade The Hunger as McQueen depicts the violent passage between life and death: from the sharpness of the collars which seem as if they will slice the model’s neck at any moment; to the proliferation of blood-red suiting; to the silver metallic garments which suggest the weapons or materials used against vampirism and thus become a symbol of their eventual death and a negation of their immortality. Yet, alongside this violence is an undercurrent of sensuality where sex exists at the impasse between life and death. Looks No. 16-18 feature some type of bondage that immobilizes the movements of the models in some way recalling BDSM fetish wear. Trapped and confined, they fervently resist their restrictions, displaying the allure of a body in repression, a body that desires the freedom of change.

As life grows into death through decay, McQueen offers an uncontrollable, yet magnificent view into our future, externally manifesting an internal despair. Visually displaying our “inability to avoid fading” (“Vampires, Atlantis Legends, Childhood Dreams, and Other Images That Inspired Alexander McQueen” 1) through memory and menace, The Hunger affords us the privilege of hindsight to fully appreciate the beauty of growth. Look No. 32 holds the memory of a presence in pain as the large red handprints on the 1950s-style short-sleeve button-front shirt seem to be remains of marks left by hands soaked in blood. The garment marks the passage of an existence that is no longer present, immortalizing an experience in the permanence of cloth. These are marks left by someone in the past, whether that be the wearer or someone else, who no longer exists in that current state in the present during the show or in the future now, some 28 years later. The person may have faded, but their presence has not, persisting at the limits of life and understanding.

The grotesque framed as a lack of complete comprehension is displayed in Looks No. 43 and 64. As each model stalked out onto the runway in either a silver dress or pantsuit their faces were supressingly covered in a metal-like fencing mask designed by Philip Tracey recalling the treatment of Margiela’s models during his tenure at the helm of his eponymous House. The mask could serve as a canvas for the spectator to project their memories and their fears onto this unknowable threat. Aggressive yet obscured, the masks take Fashion’s infatuation with the surface to an extreme as the matching masks and garments are so polished so finished so complete that one cannot help but feel agitated at the sheer exteriority and superficiality. These masks serve as a reflection of an industry more concerned with vanity than trying to understand how clothing can be used as a way to better understand the nuances of the human condition. Interestingly enough, this type of mask and the threatening pose of the model would be reinterpreted by McQueen throughout his prolific career, most notably in his Joan collection 5 seasons later.

The Hunger culminates in Look No. 84, serving as the thesis for the entire collection. Encapsulating a grotesque body that is constantly in flux and no longer fixed in youth, McQueen presents a subversion of 80s power suiting as a model drifts down the runway in a corporate gray wool kimono-like suit jacket; a blood red skirt made of silk faille with silver antlers across the genitals'; and a transparent sandwiched Perspex corset filled with living, writhing worms between two layers of the acrylic sheets. The molded bodice encases the model’s breast, stomach, and upper hips overlaying the top of the skirt. The silver jacket, with red silk faille lining echoing the materiality of the skirt, is tailored in such a way that it is reminiscent of skin pulled back and stitched downward to reveal the innards of a cadaver. McQueen problematizes the border between exteriority and interiority as “the worms are both within and without” (Spooner 151) the self. No longer a pure, completed self, the body now contains another in the worms. While not literally in the body, the clear plastic gives the illusion that the worms are contorting on her skin, burrowing in her body. Recalling the act of hosting another body within oneself, Grants argues that

Bakhtin’s understanding of the grotesque is thus in line with the maternal and with Kristeva’s writing on the subject. Maternity, according to Kristeva, poses a model of a subject-in-process, a subject whose boundaries are not sealed (as it indeed contains another within), and thus ultimately represents a model of discourse’ which, together with psychoanalysis and poetic language, ‘admit, even embrace, the alterity within them’” (Granata 138).

As the body becomes othered it transforms from the classicism celebrated by Fashion to the grotesque that is, in a sense, more real and exceedingly more interesting. Forcing the viewer to reckon with the ugly, with the real, McQueen offers a realm of difference no longer beholden to the stark rationalism of the classical body that punishes and ostracizes any who deviates from such impossibly high standards, rationalism that punishes those who age as we all will. The showpiece of Look No. 84 represents all the contradictions inherent to a collection that uses our fear of death to emphasize the beauty of life. The worms could be read as intestines, a sign of our liveliness as a body completes a series of complex biological processes to sustain our vitality. Yet, they are also foreign entities that will one day feed on our decomposing corpses as we rot, symbolizing our impending mortality, even for vampires.

The Hunger is alive and dead, existing in a liminal state between in and out. Just as vampires are animate but unchanging. The classical body, one of perfect symmetry and proportion, will never bring a sense of fulfillment because our humanity limits such completeness. We will always exist in a state of change, growing, learning, and evolving. While it may be grotesque, there is something “domineering, yet vulnerable” (Frankle 7:27) about it.

ALEXANDER McQUEEN during the finale of *The Hunger*

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson, University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Breward, Christopher. “SU[I]TURE: Tailoring and the Fashion Metropolis.” Alexander McQueen, Abrams, 2015, pp. 37-49.

Evans, Caroline. “Cruelty.” Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 141-161

Frankel, Susannah. “Alexander McQueen: Susannah Frankel/Nick Knight Interview: Suits, Hunger S/S 96 and Eshu A/W 00.” Interview by Nick Knight. May 14, 2015. Video, 3:33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b6PyRLIF4k.

Frankel, Susannah. “Alexander McQueen: Susannah Frankel/Nick Knight Interview:Top, Hunger S/S 96 & Bumsters,Dante A/W 96.” Interview by Nick Knight. May 11, 2015. Video, 7:27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebaSkBo9RXM.

Gleason, Katherine. “The Hunger.” Alexander McQueen Evolution, Race Point Publishing, New York, NY, 2012, pp. 33–35.

Granata, Francesca. “Mikhail Bakhtin: Fashioning the Grotesque Body.” Thinking through Fashion: A Guide to Key Theorists, London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, London 2020, pp. 128–49.

Spooner, Catherine. “A Gothic Mind.” Alexander McQueen, Abrams, 2015, pp. 141-155

Thomas, Dana. Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Penguin USA, 2016.

“Vampires, Atlantis Legends, Childhood Dreams, and Other Images That Inspired Alexander McQueen.” World Fashion Channel, https://wfc.tv/en/articles/about-fashion/vampires-atlantis-legends-childhood-dreams-and-other-images-that-inspired-alexander-mcqueen/. Accessed August 19, 2023

Death after Life: Alexander McQueen’s The Hunger Spring/Summer 1996