FROM L’UOMO ARCHIVE

In general, when we talk about archive images, the mind goes to dusty shelves, rows of binders, and memories that are possibly no longer necessary. Often it is like this, a forgotten cemetery. But without archives, history doesn’t exist, and though fashion pretends to know nothing of its past, it draws on it like a vampire, always the same, always something else.After five decades of reporting on what’s happening up and down the streets and fashion runways, L’Uomo Vogue has an endless number of stories to dust off in its archives. And one discovers that those fashion features aren’t mere crystallised moments, but what happened after (the memory that came after), infused with new meaning, connections and means of interpretation. April 1993.The focus is on work clothes and denim.The set is in London; wearing these pieces are “L’Uomo Vogue-style” workers: artists, photographers and designers – the classic outsider types who have made the magazine what it is. Who are they? There’s an established designer (Matthew Carr), a sculptor from a famous art family (Daniel Chadwick), and two eccentric photographers/directors, so it might be easy to overlook the guy at the opening of the feature – he’s a bit awkward in front of the camera and doesn’t look to be 24 (his age would come out later) – if you didn’t read his name, Alexander McQueen. “That” McQueen who made fashion history for almost 20 years. He had presented “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims”, his first collection, the previous March. He came out of Saint Martins after an experience in Milan with Romeo Gigli: was it a coincidence that the overalls he was wearing were by G Gigli? Three years after that shot in LUV, McQueen was creative director of Givenchy, and his career took off. We know everything that happened after. We thought we knew the story, but that fragment found in the archives adds a unique per spective to history.