Vogue on: Alexander McQueen

Alexander (Lee) McQueen was - for the 15 years that he stood at its helm - British fashion&#39;s most significant figure.His extraordinary career, which took him from humble beginnings as an apprentice on Savile Row to the creative directorship of his own global brand, is a story of hard work, ambition and visionary brilliance. Leading photographers such as Mario Testino and Corinne Day photographed his stunning designs for Vogue, and through them Alexander McQueen&#39;s career is presented - from the controversy of his early shows to the elegiac perfection of his last - with a particular emphasis on the evolution of his signature style: immaculate tailoring, slashed fabric, historical references and beauty in the macabre.The book shows that McQueen&#39;s own ambition was fully realised: &#39;I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting so that, when I&#39;m dead and gone, people will know that the Twenty-first Century was started by Alexander McQueen&#39;.Vogue, the international fashion bible, has charted the careers of designers through the decades. Its unique archive of photographs, taken by the leading photographers of the day from Cecil Beaton to Mario Testino, and original illustrations, together with its stable of highly respected fashion writers, make Vogue the most authoritative and prestigious source of reference on fashion. With a circulation of over 160,000 and a readership of over 1,400,000, no brand is better positioned to present a library on the great fashion designers of the modern age.

Chloe Fox is a writer for Vogue, the Telegraph magazine, The Observer, Harper&#39;s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. She was formerly Features Associate of British Vogue, and is currently working on her first novel.

Chloe Fox

Fashion&rsquo;s leading shoemaker, Manolo Blahnik is one of the handful of designers whose name is synonymous with their product.His success has lasted from setting up as a shoe designer in a Chelsea boutique in the 1970s to the present day, with American Vogue&rsquo;s Anna Wintour declaring &lsquo;The truth is, I wear no other shoes except his&rsquo;.Blahnik has collaborated with many leading fashion designers &ndash; from Ossie Clark at the start of his career and John Galliano at Dior at its height &ndash; but Blahnik&rsquo;s greatest achievement is to have made footwear, previously subservient to the overall concept of a look, the most important of all accessories.His many covers and features in the pages of Vogue reveal that wearing a pair of &lsquo;Manolos&rsquo; is to be utterly transformed; in Blahnik&rsquo;s dreamy, handmade creations, a woman can reinvent her personality. She is a Lolita in his Mary-Janes and a red carpet diva in his satin mules. Or as Madonna once put it, with characteristic bluntness: &lsquo;His shoes are wonderful, and they last longer than sex.&rsquo;

Chloe Fox

Books by Chloe Fox

Series by Chloe Fox

Vogue on Designers

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