A Midsummer Nights McQueen

I am aware that I am not the only person whose imagination was running wild after seeing Alexander McQueen’s Spring Summer 2010 collection. Whilst one designer was rolling around in the hay with his show at Paris Fashion Week, McQueen was rolling around in a Shakespearean wood.

The hair styles of the models were evocative of Bottom in A Midsummer Nights Dream whose head is transformed into that of a donkey by the mischievous Puck. Alexander McQueen adapted a sense of play in displaying his collection and challenged to consider the idea of looking beneath the shoulders of what could be the donkey’s head; to ensure focus on the collection itself rather than the beautiful woman wearing them. The brown and green colours were reminiscent of the woodland fairies in A Midsummer Nights Dream and the deep blues of the royal Titania, Queen of the fairies.

The sense of play on the catwalk rewards us with the notion that we can take what we see on the catwalk and play with it to make it individual to reflect our own stylistic imagination.