Fashioning the Posthuman Body in the Anthropocene: Alexander McQueen’s The Horn of Plenty

Abstract

Often eclipsed by what is considered Alexander McQueen’s magnum opus, Plato’s Atlantis (S/S 2010), The Horn of Plenty (A/W 2009) has received less critical attention. Conceived as a satirical response to the excessiveness of the fashion industry, the collection reveals McQueen’s ecological consciousness and his artistic exploration of posthumanist thought. Drawing on the epistemology of posthumanism and recent works on the posthuman turn in fashion, this article examines how McQueen’s The Horn of Plenty challenged anthropocentric worldviews through both sartorial design and staging techniques to expose consumerism’s environmental impact. Through a series of bird-woman hybrids, McQueen rendered how humans and non-humans are altered by the Anthropocene, and, resorting to a Gothic presentation of clones, he engaged with a post-anthropocentric discourse that critiqued the relentless cycles of mass production. The show’s mise-en-scène—a heap of black-sprayed trash—alongside the debris-like headgear worn by the models turned the runway into an artistically crafted commentary on environmental pollution. Through grotesquely altered bodies and an overall unsettling stage evoking landfills and oil spills, McQueen’s The Horn of Plenty illuminated the fraught entanglements of the human, the non-human and the more-than-human in a time of ecological crisis.

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