---

Released less than a decade after the tragic death of its subject, the Scottish fashion designer Alexander McQueen, McQueen (2018) is a documentary whose overhanging sadness has the consistency of paint that hasn’t yet dried; its various talking-head interviewees, from colleagues to friends and family, still seem to be grappling with truths that have the paradoxically vivid and not-quite-real quality with which grief tends to saturate things.

McQueen is a conventionally made, but very compelling, documentary; it mostly takes the shape of a quasi-oral history of a man who, contrary to director Ian Bonhôte’s even-keeled approach, was comparatively unlike just about anybody else — the sort of iconoclast with a knack for ideological and sartorial confrontation whose fixation on disruption wouldn’t relent until he literally wasn’t able to make clothes anymore. (His debut collection, whose prominence rose after being purchased in its entirety by the influential fashion editor — and soon-to-be frenemy — Isabella Blow, was called Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, and served as his MA graduation collection.) 

The early part of the movie is, unsurprisingly, a real thrill, reliving (or, for those of us acquainted with McQueen’s clothing and not much else, learning about) the days when the designer, just barely out of his 20s or the Savile Row tailoring apprenticeship on which he cut his teeth, was skyrocketing. His stunning clothes rarely did what they were supposed to. Waistlines began barely above the crotch; rips spanned wide in places most people on the street would want covered up. A sense of power mounted with the onslaught of acclaim and appointments at labels like Givenchy years before he’d even turn 30.

But the early excitement of McQueen’s career didn’t last, as far as McQueen himself was concerned. The movie becomes about how the pressures of fame, especially when the person experiencing it knows that that fame lives or dies by their own creativity, are enough to grind down a person until they don’t feel like much of anything at all anymore. (Much was made about McQueen, who came onto the scene schlubbier and dorkier than you’d expect from someone making clothes like that, lost weight and played up a chiseled sexiness he hadn’t had before; one of the revelations of the documentary is that the transformation only made him more miserable, taking him further away from the young-and-eager designer that had been so much happier.) You wouldn’t sense it in the consistently exciting work; McQueen’s death by suicide is a testament to how one’s talent, as it’s experienced by others — who only take in its pleasures, not the pain that went into its making — is talented at obscuring the way fame corrodes even when it uplifts.