Video essay critiquing fashion brandfrom @sarahbellekim

Transcript

McQueen was never meant to be reanimated like this. Vogue says Sean McGurr seems more angel than demon, but he understands that McQueen is a house in which darkness has often proved creatively generative, as if darkness is just some paint color to swipe on your walls. In Haitian folklore, a zombie is a reanimated body exploited by a sorcerer for cheap labor, and I wonder how long luxury conglomerates can stretch the lifespan of a house like this. There's irony in the references to Horn of Plenty, my favorite McQueen collection, retrospective and a pastiche of hyper consumerism and the fashionable woman in her popular imaginations. In Lee's words, a sackable offense, a punked up McQueen it girl parody of a certain ideal, of of a woman who never existed in the first place. And I guess you could say the same about this show, but in a way that does not rush warm and thick through your veins. Sean McGurr is talented, but presented with an impossible task. Inspirations are the freedom and contradictions of the city, tension rank clashing notes. Vogue calls the gowns spiked with anarchic enhancements, but this reads like fluff for a narrative that fails to march on, shows us how brilliantly done Lee's work was by contrast that did not have to be explained to be powerful, yet we continue to discuss them. With zero context, the video of Horn of Plenty can make your heart tier, a mood, a disposition, a position about the world. Horn of Plenty was subtitled everything but the kitchen rank, and we can maybe call this new one the kitchen sink. It can't hide what it is, a commercial house with tanking profits paying publications to post.