Writing Like McQueen

Status report: Today, I sent my revised first chapter to my readers. I'm working on the final revisions to all the chapters now. I should be able to send them the introduction tomorrow, and then the second and third chapters by the end of the week. And that will be it. More revisions, hopefully the final ones, and then the dissertation will go to the committee.

So, I'm feeling all right, although tired of course.

I wanted to write at least a little about the Alexander McQueen exhibit. But because I don't have much time tonight, because I have so much to do, I'm going to post a few videos.

The first one is a video put together by the Met that discusses some of the exhibits. These are the things I saw. They are glorious, aren't they?

The second one starts in a winterscape with some beautiful dresses, but quickly goes to one of his fashion shows, in which a dress is spraypainted by two robots. I saw the dress in the exhibit.

Isn't it a weird, wonderful little ballet? What I love is his imagination, how he creates stories out of clothes. All of his clothes are like stories. You feel that his clothes tell stories about the women who wear them.

And here is a video of a hologram that was also part of the exhibit. It's Kate Moss in one of his dresses, originally shown at one of his fashion shows. Again, you can imagine a story, can't you?

What I can't show you is the exquisite workmanship in the clothes. I saw them from less than a foot away, looked right at the stitching, the beading. And it made me wonder, how can I write the way McQueen created clothes? Because what I saw in the exhibit was glorious and inspirational.

And I thought, I know who writes that way: Angela Carter.

Do you remember when I took photos of the Scaasi exhibit? (There were no photos allowed of the McQueen exhibit.) Well, McQueen is to Scaasi as Angela Carter is to Danielle Steele.

So, how can I be a sort of McQueen of stories, without being Carter, since I am not her and can't be her? I think the key is to write with exquisite craftsmanship and imagination. To take things from the past, strange things, political but also fantastical things, and merge them into a whole, a statement. But also to create something beautiful and entertaining, something that someone might wear or read for pleasure. I don't know if this makes sense to you, but it does to me, and it points me toward a place I want to go with my writing, in terms of craftsmanship and in terms of what I do, how far I want to push myself. Which is far, along a strange and beautiful road.

I hope you like the videos.