CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/27/2013

Alexander McQueen: Working Process

Featured image, of Alexander McQueen making adjustments to one of his Fall 2009 designs, is reproduced from Damiani's new book of photographs by Nick Wapplington, Alexander McQueen: Working Process. This extraordinary volume, made collaboratively with McQueen before his tragic suicide in 2010, documents the now-legendary Fall 09 collection, which was shown in Paris on a runway covered in heaps of spray-painted trash from sets that the designer had used over the past 15 years. The book is featured this week on Style.com, where Katharine K. Zarrella presents a slideshow alongside an interview with Wapplington, who explains the image selection process, "I insisted that [McQueen] edit the book. I shot on film, I made six hundred prints, I laid them out in a photo book for him, and I said, 'The final edit is yours.' So basically, the choices are his and the sequence is his. It's unique because it's the only book that he produced himself. It was his vision and my pictures. I had a maquette made, which is this enormous hundred-pound book. It's got handwritten notes inside from him to me. He'd take that book home and edit the pictures, and it would go by courier to me, and I would make notes and make changes, and then it would go back to him. Finally, we locked it down and were ready to go, but then circumstance intervened."