Talk:Taxi Driver (Alexander McQueen collection)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Vaticidalprophet (talk · contribs) 19:06, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

This was a fun read. Some notes...

• Who is Alice Smith? The caption is the first place the reader hears of her, but has no context. Later she's clarified as a 'fashion recruiter'. It's worth putting this in the caption (and possibly clarifying, in that later mention, what a fashion recruiter does...)
  • That might be worth its own article; basically they were middlemen who tried to connect designers with existing fashion houses (remember, McQueen was still pretty ambivalent about having his own company at this time). Part of how they did that was promoting their existing designs and stuff to build a portfolio. Since I don't think that's super-relevant to the lead image, I put "McQueen's friend" (which she also was). I've reworded the later mention to clarify a bit.
• Did McQueen specifically decide to go by his middle name around this point (i.e. was Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims done under "Lee McQueen")? The chronology kind of implies it, but that article is still redlinked and the main article isn't super-clear on the subject. Currently, born Lee Alexander McQueen looks like it's of unclear relevance when you take the background section by itself, before incorporating the main section. (It's not necessarily 100% clear why it's relevant even with that, given Alexander being his middle name is mentioned again later.)
  • I would argue that anything in the Background section is going to seem a bit mysterious until one reads on and sees what it's the background to. The idea with saying it earlier on is to have it in the back of the mind so it's confusing when it comes up later ("what do you mean he had another name?").
  • The name change was definitely post-grad. I do think it's relatively clear here, as it says he wanted to launch a company after graduating, needed a name, and settled on Alexander. Also, he didn't meet Blow until after grad, so she couldn't have been involved if he'd done it before, and much as McQueen liked to rewrite history, she was definitely involved in the name change.
• Would any images of low-rise jeans be due in the article? It makes a big deal out of the importance of the bumster, and understandably we don't have photos of the bumster in the show itself (maybe we do, but then you'd be at the mercy of whoever doesn't like the look of multiple fair-use images), but it still seems reasonable to illustrate what he later inspired.
  • There's no photos of the bumsters from this collection, sadly. There's no bloody free-license images of the bumsters at all, which is a sin against god as far as I'm concerned. I don't think a photo of regular low-rise jeans would suffice - bumsters aren't just hip-huggers, they're cut beneath the coin slot. I might throw caution to the wind and do an NFCC image of them; I got away with two at Widows.
• Another garment had feathers lined up vertically around the collar, obscuring the face -- is this what Smith is wearing in the lead image? May be worth specifying.
  • It sounded like it to me, but it's not possible to confirm. Smith said she left it in a taxi after a photoshoot, and that photoshoot would have been just before the show at the Ritz opened. So either someone was remembering a garment they saw before the Ritz exhibition, or he had a second feather corset thing that made it to the Ritz.
• priced at £800 -- well, it was priced at £0, wasn't it? Or did he manage to sell that just before everything got stolen, or was the intended price otherwise important?
  • Well, no, it was priced at £800, it's just that he lost the thing before he managed to sell it. Remember, he was shopping it to buyers even before the show at the Ritz. I think it's significant because it indicates that he saw these as high-end garments right off the bat even when he was a prickly little weirdo baby designer with no clout (£800 was a hell of a lot for a jacket in 1993).
• Ungless created a series of prints from photos of missing and murdered people, rendered in black and white on cheap cotton. He printed an image of Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle from the 1976 film Taxi Driver on grey taffeta, from which McQueen made a vest. I'm having a little trouble picturing these. Is that all the detail about them in the source? My kneejerk image is, like, a graphic t-shirt made of taffeta. On that note, check your engvar with 'vest'...is this a waistcoat, undershirt, something else?
  • For the first thing, Thomas says he made a skater skirt and a "short vest" (no clarification); I've now added that to the article.
  • As for the Bickle print item, I dunno. Andrew Wilson is British and calls it a jacket, while Dana Thomas is American and calls it a vest. Based on that and what taffeta feels like as a fabric, I'm guessing vest in the American sense, what Brits would call a waitscoat. I've split the difference and added a footnote.
• It's not made textually clear why we're quoting Groves' read on what it was named for, given it's clarified the name came from both places.
  • Basically to reinforce the point that it's ambiguous. McQueen was a big bullshitter, very much prone to revising his own past. It's interesting to see that two people who are both fairly significant to him at this point in his career have totally different understandings of the name. He may well have not even thought about his dad until years later and then "admitted" to it because he thought it sounded better.
• I love blockquotes, but I'm not sure why we have the second blockquote specifically, which is a bit choppy to read and takes up valuable space for photos of low-rise jeans
  • It's choppy to read because that's how it was written; it's literally his ad copy. I think is significant because it spells out the design philosophy he was going for, particularly the combination of historical and unconventional techniques. Even if I do an NFCC bumsters pic, I still have room for both imo.
• She noted the combination of historicist references and futuristic concepts Is 'historicist' strictly the right word here?
  • It absolutely is, swiping design concepts from various historical eras and reworking them into something modern was one of the things he was known for. I could probably get a whole article out of "Alexander McQueen as historicist".
• Nilgin Yusuf at the Sunday Times said "McQueen is one of a new breed of British designers strong on craftsmanship and with a developing business sense who herald a renaissance in the much maligned British fashion industry." and Academic Chris McWade argued that Taxi Driver had been integrated into the mythology that surrounded McQueen: the complete loss of such an early collection "adds to the spectral quality and sense of loss that overarches his identity as a public figure." both need attention to MOS:LQ
  • The first one is correct since it's a whole sentence quote, but I've fixed the second.

Otherwise, pretty great (I dug promptly forgot about them). Vaticidalprophet 19:06, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

• (It's just the saddest, funniest, most on-brand thing that could have happened to him.) Thanks for the prompt review, Vati. I've made changes and responded, let me know your thoughts. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 08:07, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  Looks good -- I'm happy to let most of the queried things slide. Given the clarification about the bumsters and their obvious relevance to this article, I'd definitely suggest an NFCC image (the case for it might be more solid than the one that exists, even). Vaticidalprophet 15:32, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  Following all changes and the addition of the image, I'm happy to pass this. Good luck with the GT :) Vaticidalprophet 21:37, 12 June 2023 (UTC)

  Cheers! I'll ping you when I finish the next grotesque one (I figure Irere isn't up your alley given how it's mostly pirates and rainbows). ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:39, 12 June 2023 (UTC)