Alexander McQueen, Tweeting Mourners

Alexander McQueen hanged himself yesterday. Some thoughts:

1. Upon reflection, to call McQueen a fashion designer would a) render “clothing” a word with virtually no definition and b) address only a sliver of what he managed to create. This guy was a pure, raging installation artist – he constructed violently intellectual fantasies that were completely alluring and, well, completely beyond understanding.

1. There is the pretty, and there is the ugly, and these are nice and fine and seasonal and forgotten. And then there is the provocative: grotesquely inflated lips, a chain-mail hood, robots spray-painting a dress on the runway, terrifying armadillo shoes, a head encased in a cloud of butterflies. These are timeless, simply because no amount of time will yield appropriate adjectives for such pieces or wear away (no pun intended) at their stunning impact.

1. I’m intrigued by the floods of tweeted celebrity grief. From Kelly Osbourne (“I am so so sad”) to Tyra Banks (“So so sad”) to Boy George (“Very very sad”), I wonder if the grammatically unsound Twitter-mourning has anything to do with the fact that the mournee was an avid tweeter himself in his lifetime, or if perhaps this is just the new way, which is a slightly scary thought. A universe tweeting suicide gives new meaning to the old, “A little bird told me…”

–Trisha Jain