Joan is the twelfth collection by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, released for the Autumn/Winter 1998 season of his eponymous fashion house. Continuing McQueen's fascination with religion and violence, it was inspired by imagery of persecution, particularly the 1431 martyrdom of French Catholic saint Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake. The collection's palette was mainly red, black, and silver; colours that evoked notions of warfare, death, blood, and flames. Many looks alluded to ecclesiastical garments and medieval armour, including several that mimicked chainmail and one ensemble featuring actual silver-plated armour pieces.
The runway show was staged on 25 February 1998 at Gatliff Road Warehouse in London. McQueen banned several tabloid journalists, one of whom responded with an angry editorial. Production was handled by McQueen's usual creative team. The set design for Joan was sparse and industrial: a dark room lit by metal lamps suspended over the runway. The runway was covered in black ash, and models entered through a black backdrop backlit in red. Ninety-one looks were presented, primarily womenswear with some menswear. The show concluded with model Svetlana wearing a red beaded dress that covered her face, swaying in a circle of flames.
Critical response to the clothing and the runway show for Joan was positive, and it is regarded as one of McQueen's most memorable shows. Academic analysis has focused on interpretation of the styling, the finale, and the meaning of several garments printed with a photograph of children. Several items from Joan have appeared in museum exhibitions, including Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty and Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse.
Background
British fashion designer Alexander McQueen was known throughout his nearly twenty-year career, spanning 1992–2010, for his imaginative, sometimes controversial designs. Over the course of his career, which lasted from 1992 until his death in 2010, he explored a broad range of ideas and themes, particularly sexuality, death, violence, romanticism, and historicism. The son of a London taxicab driver and a teacher, he grew up in one of the poorer neighbourhoods in London's East End before joining the fashion industry via a Savile Row apprenticeship. In the early stages of McQueen's career, journalists often framed him as a working-class trespasser in an industry that was seen as upper-class, which he found frustrating. McQueen identified with the persecuted and vulnerable, given his homosexuality and difficult upbringing.
McQueen's personal fixations were a throughline in his career, and he returned to certain ideas and visual motifs repeatedly. His fashion shows were theatrical to the point of being performance art. For example, in Untitled (Spring/Summer 1998), the show preceding Joan, McQueen had his models walk down a runway made of clear water tanks, then drenched them with artificial rain in the second half. Beginning with his graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (1992), McQueen appropriated photographs and integrated them into his work. He did so again in Dante (Autumn/Winter 1996), a collection that explored religious motivations for warfare. McQueen continued to explore religion until his final collection, Angels and Demons (Autumn/Winter 2010).
McQueen's collections were both historicist, in that he adapted historical narratives and concepts, and self-referential, in that he revisited and reworked ideas between collections. He played with notions of clothing as armour and vice versa, creating high fashion cuirasses sculpted for the female torso. Although McQueen primarily designed womenswear, he had featured some menswear in previous collections including The Hunger (Spring/Summer 1996) and Dante.
From October 1996 to October 2001, McQueen wasin addition to his responsibilities for his own labelhead designer at French fashion house Givenchy. His time at Givenchy was fraught, primarily because of creative differences between him and the label; his early collections there were poorly received. McQueen resorted to smoking and drug use to deal with the pressure he felt to satisfy Givenchy management and the fashion press. He became overbearing and temperamental towards those around him, causing his friend Simon Costin to stop working with him before the release of Joan.
Concept and collection
Inspiration Joan (Autumn/Winter 1998) was the twelfth collection by McQueen for his eponymous fashion house. It was inspired by imagery of historical persecution, most significantly the 1431 martyrdom of French Catholic saint Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake. During his tenure at Givenchy in Paris, McQueen frequently passed by a gilded statue of Joan on the Rue de Rivoli in Paris and became intrigued by her story. Curator Claire Wilcox suggested that Joan's androgyny and martyrdom "appealed to his sense of drama". McQueen archivist John Matheson argued that with Joan, McQueen was reflecting the new skills and techniques he was learning in the Givenchy haute couture workshop.
McQueen was also inspired by a 1452 painting of French royal mistress Agnès Sorel, which he used in altered form for the show's invitation. The painting depicts Sorel with pale skin and the artificially-plucked high hairline popular in the medieval period, a look that was echoed in the models' hairstyling in the runway show. Curator Kate Bethune suggested the hairstyles may also have been inspired by the look of the children in the horror film Village of the Damned (1960). Author Andrew Wilson pointed out that both Joan of Arc and Sorel died in service to Charles VII of France.
Some jackets in the collection were printed with a black and white historical photograph of three young girls, using the same process that was employed for photo-printing in Dante. Many critics have suggested that these are images of children from the Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, and there is a widespread belief that the collection is drawing upon the killing of the family in 1918 as inspiration. Matheson discovered that the jackets actually feature an 1845 daguerreotype of three unnamed girls by German photographer Carl Gustav Oehme. At least two contemporary articles correctly identify the girls as Victorian, including a 1998 interview with i-D in which McQueen discussed the symbolism behind the image. In it, McQueen described one of the men's coats printed with this image as multi-faceted in its references. For him, the clerical style of the coat juxtaposed with the young girls evoked "paedophilia by the church" as well as naivete and anti-authoritarianism; he did not mention the Romanovs.
To a lesser extent, McQueen drew on the 1567 beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. The red, black, and yellow McQueen clan tartan, which McQueen had first used in the controversial Highland Rape (Autumn/Winter 1995), reappeared in Joan, referencing the history of Scotland.
Collection The collection's palette was mainly red, black, and silver, colours which evoked notions of warfare, death, blood, and flames. Materials with strong textures featured heavily, including raffia cloth, leather, snakeskin, denim, sequins, and beadwork. Slits, sheer fabrics, and short hemlines created a dark sense of eroticism. McQueen's signature tailoring appeared in the form of frock coats and other jackets. Like Dante before it, Joan referenced cuts and fabrics that evoked the medieval period. There were design elements taken from medieval ecclesiastical dress including dresses shaped like monastic cowls and long, cassock-like coats that buttoned all down the front. Author Judith Watt felt that "boned, high-neck chiffon blouses[...] and slim maxi skirts" were references to the Edwardian era.
The clothing imitated armour of the medieval period in several ways, with dresses rendered in moulded leather or in lightweight metal mesh resembling chainmail armour. More literally, silversmith Sarah Harmarnee, who had previously contributed accessories to It's a Jungle Out There (Autumn/Winter 1997), created silver-plated armour pieces for the collection. Look 8 featured a model wearing armour that covered her head, shoulders, arms, and hands. Bethune felt it was a reference to Joan of Arc armoured for battle and possibly a nod to the 1995 Thierry Mugler design "Robot Couture".
Runway show
Production details
The runway show for Joan was staged on at the Gatliff Road Warehouse in London; it was McQueen's second time presenting there. It was the final collection for London Fashion Week that season. According to Katy England, McQueen's assistant, McQueen and his team had intended to produce a much simpler show following the complicated aquatic set for Untitled. However, McQueen "got a bit carried away", and the show "turned into another huge production". The theatrical effects – custom contacts, wigs, and bald caps for some fifty models, plus pyrotechnics – were not cheap. McQueen later said "it was fucking the most expensive show I ever did", although he was not dissatisfied with the result, adding: "it's kind of good".
Gainsbury & Whiting oversaw production, and England dealt with overall styling. Hair for female models was styled by Guido Palau; Mira Chai Hyde handled male models. Val Garland was responsible for makeup. McQueen had worked with Garland before, but it was Palau's first McQueen show. The show was dedicated to model Annabelle Neilson, a friend and muse of McQueen. Well-known attendees included actress Kate Winslet; models Kate Moss and Shakira Caine; Keith Flint of music group The Prodigy; Meg Mathews, then-wife of musician Noel Gallagher; and Pauline Prescott, wife of then-Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott.
McQueen caused an upset by banning several media outlets, including The Sun and GMTV, from attending the runway show for Joan, purportedly because they played to "the wrong sort of audience". Irate, Sun columnist Jane Moore accused McQueen of rank hypocrisy, pointing out his working-class origins and complaining that he was "so far up his own bottom, I'm surprised he can still see daylight". Staff from The Dallas Morning News were turned away at the door by McQueen's public relations personnel due to lack of seats. Other fashion journalists also complained of poor treatment. Anna Harvey, deputy editor of British Vogue, and Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue, felt the show was a "complete disgrace" in this respect. Hilary Alexander agreed, calling the show the "nadir" of Fashion Week. She was upset that guests were expected to enter the show via a "small entrance in pitch darkness" and that following the show, bouncers refused to let photographers exit the venue for unexplained reasons. She criticised the "bizarre little episode" but felt she should not have been surprised given McQueen's treatment of GMTV. Catwalk presentation The set design for Joan was sparse and industrial: a dark room lit by metal lamps suspended over the runway as well as by smaller lights in the floor. The runway was covered in black ashes, and models entered through a black backdrop backlit in red. The sound of fire crackling and burning played over the start of the show, then transitioned into a selection of disco tracks.
Styling for all models, male and female, was deliberately androgynous in a reference to Joan of Arc's cross-dressing. Hair for women was styled in one of two modes. Some models wore blond wigs left loose, sometimes with artificially high hairlines in the medieval style. Others wore bald caps, which were styled partially or fully bald, with or without thin coiled braids. Models wore thick white face make-up that concealed their eyebrows, red contact lenses, and red mascara. Wilcox called the styling "half medieval, half futuristic", while Wilson quoted Garland as calling it "Joan of Arc kidnapped by aliens".