Remembering Alexander McQueen’s Wintry Fall 1999 Overlook Show With Model Frankie Rayder
We’ve shaken the Vogue Runway archive like a snow globe. When the glistening flakes settled, the very best winter wonderland shows were revealed. We’re sharing them, one by one, over eight days. First up, Alexander McQueen’s Fall 1999 Overlook collection, presented on February 23, 1999, at Gatliff Road Warehouse in London.
“Get ready for a new gilded age,” declared Vogue as designers prepped for the Fall 1999 collections, the last to have a 20th-century designation. “From continent to continent and across time zones,” the magazine enthused, “designers are unapologetically indulging in a no-holds-barred, turn-of-the-century extravaganza: ‘We are creating a new fantasy elegance,’ says Miuccia Prada.” Alexander McQueen delivered a superlative example of the kind of extreme beauty Ms. Prada spoke of with his Fall 1999 Overlook collection. As was his way, the designer took a macabre source, the 1980 horror flick The Shining, which was set in the Overlook hotel, and found a way to make beauty from its ruins.
Winter Wonderland
In a clear-walled snow globe–like box, planted with birches and textured with snow drifts (25 tons of the stuff were used), figure skaters twirled and models walked on a floor of ice. Much has been written about the coiled aluminum corset Shaun Leane created for this collection, which sold last year for $807,000, but many other looks played with the winter theme, including laser-cut skirts and a bustier embedded with icicles of rock crystal designed by Kees van der Graaf. “I wanted to confront misconceptions of size and matter,” McQueen said, opaquely, at the time. But concept was secondary to the sheer luxury and fragile beauty of the mostly white and gray lineup.
“There was a stillness” to the collection, says model Frankie Rayder, on the phone from California, where we called her to discuss her memories. As with every McQueen show, she continued, “you would have to overcome some adversity; it was never outright, and that’s what was so beautiful about it.” In this case it was the cold—“it was like going to a hockey game”—and an underfoot surprise. “I was walking with Lee before the show,” remembers Rayder, “and he’s like, ‘So you’re going to open the show and you are walking on this.’ I said, ‘On ice? Are you joking? Are there spikes on the bottom of these shoes?!’ His response: ‘No. You’re from Wisconsin.’”
Winter Wonderland
The serenity that the audience may have enjoyed, the backstage crowd did not. “It was also a winter wonderland backstage!” says Rayder with a laugh, who remembers a small fire that McQueen tried to put out with a can of Diet Coke before the professionals took over. And that wasn’t the only technical snafu. Just inside the entrance to the set were Rayder’s and Stella Tennant’s racks, close to one of the snowblowers, which malfunctioned and covered the women. “Everyone was freaking out, but you have to maintain your composure,” notes Rayder. “I didn’t know that [collections like Overlook] would change the course of fashion shows, but to be a part of this . . . I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I felt like I was part of something special even before the special thing happened—even just being asked to do it. [You knew] you would kind of have to put your ego aside, and [that] you weren’t going to look gorgeous, but everyone was willing to do that. It was art, you know.”
