Taxi Driver (Alexander McQueen collection)

Taxi Driver (Autumn/Winter 1993) is the second collection by the British designer

In lieu of a traditional fashion show, Taxi Driver was exhibited in a room at The Ritz Hotel during London Fashion Week in March 1993. McQueen was one of six young designers funded by the British Fashion Council that year. Aided by magazine editor Isabella Blow, who took it upon herself to promote McQueen, the collection garnered positive reviews. When the exhibition ended, McQueen packed the clothing into bin bags, went clubbing, and left the bags hidden in the rubbish behind the club. When he returned the next day, all the rubbish bags had been removed. Nothing remains of the collection.

Background

British designer

In October 1990, at the age of 21, McQueen began the eighteen-month masters-level course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins (CSM), a London art school.^[5][6] McQueen met a number of his future collaborators at CSM, including Simon Ungless, with whom he later lived.^[7][8] He graduated with his master's degree in fashion design in 1992. His graduation collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, was bought in its entirety by magazine editor Isabella Blow, who became his mentor and his muse.^[9]

Creation of label and collection

Label

Following his graduation from CSM in 1992, McQueen's friends wanted him to start his own label. He was concerned about the difficulty involved in launching a new business, and was more interested in landing a job with an existing fashion house.^[10] He had interviews, but nothing came of them. At times, he worked as Blow's assistant, but mainly subsisted on unemployment benefits.^[11][12] In the meantime, he spent his time experimenting with designs, working closely with housemate Ungless, who was focused on prints.^[13][14] Eventually McQueen ended up with enough pieces to call a collection, decided to launch a small design label, and found himself in need of a name for his nascent company.^[14]

McQueen chose to design under his middle name, rather than his given name of Lee, resulting in the brand name

The collection's title references both the film Taxi Driver and McQueen's taxicab driver father, although he only admitted to the latter much later.[18]^[23][24] Andrew Groves, a fellow designer and early boyfriend of McQueen's, believed it was named to honour McQueen's father.^[15] Ungless dismissed this idea, recalling that the collection was named after the film, because he and McQueen thought "De Niro looked incredibly fuckable" as Travis Bickle.^[18]

Sales efforts and exhibition

Blow had connections with fashion retailers, and she took him to various buyers hoping to secure orders.^[12] Joan Burstein, co-owner of Browns, a London boutique, recalled that the pieces were brought to her in a bin bag. She turned the clothing down, but told Blow that McQueen had talent worth working on.^[12] McQueen's friends Cressida Pye and Alice Smith, who had known him since 1992, had opened a fashion recruitment agency — essentially a matchmaking service that attempted to match designers with jobs at existing fashion houses. In an effort to promote McQueen's work to buyers, they held showings of Taxi Driver at their agency in Covent Garden in late February 1993.^{[b][16][25][27]}

Because of the slumping economy, few designers presented

Alice Smith wore a feather-collared bustier from the collection for a photo shoot with The Daily Telegraph in early March.^[32] On the taxi ride home, it shed feathers everywhere. Neither Smith nor McQueen wanted to deal with it, so she left it behind in the cab.^[33]

On the day the exhibition ended, McQueen and Ungless packed the garments up into bin bags. They

Lucinda Alford at The Observer wrote that the collection demonstrated McQueen's pattern-cutting skills with "some of the most interesting cuts around", and said that some of the garments, including the Scarlet Pimpernel coat, "could be works of art in their own right".^[36] She noted the combination of historicist references and futuristic concepts; McQueen relied on both throughout his career.^[36][37][38] Nilgin Yusuf at The Sunday Times said "McQueen is one of a new breed of British designers strong on craftsmanship and with a developing business sense who herald a renaissance in the much maligned British fashion industry."^[22] Iain R. Webb of The Times agreed, listing McQueen as one of a number of new designers whose "designs are unequivocably of today; their names should be world famous tomorrow".^[39]

Writing in 2009, fashion journalist Sarah Mower recalls the Taxi Driver collection as the moment British fashion started to recover from a slump that began with the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987.^[40] Curator Andrew Bolton remembered the bumster as "one of the garments that, very early on, would make his reputation as this provocateur".^[41] Journalist Susannah Frankel agreed; in a 2015 essay about McQueen's early years, she wrote that the collection "showcased many of the signature traits with which McQueen would make his name".^[8] Academic Chris McWade argued that Taxi Driver had been integrated into the mythology that surrounded McQueen: the complete loss of such an early collection "adds to the spectral quality and sense of loss that overarches his identity as a public figure".^[42]

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art began arranging the retrospective Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, they contacted Smith in the hope that she still owned the feathered bustier from the Telegraph shoot.^[33] Although nothing remains of the clothing, a collection overview and a price list from the archive of early McQueen employee Ruti Danan were auctioned in 2020.^[43] The overview sold for $250, while the price list sold for $2,505.^[25][44]

Notes

References