After the controversy surrounding ‘Highland Rape’,
McQueen decided to move towards a less relatable concept for his following
collection, ‘The Hunger’ (which can be seen in full here). The overarching
inspiration for this collection was vampires – the inspiration arguably extends
to macabre imagery in general but the collection seemed more about vampires
than anything else as it focused on the fetishisation of the body, the hunger
for flesh. Many argued that McQueen was already rehashing old ideas, and it is
true that nudity wasn’t exactly new ground for the designer, but the approach
to the nudity was different – it showed the naked body in an almost cannibalistic
way, and there was a kind of perversion and aggression to the way that the
models flaunted their skin, unlike the vulnerable, threatened girls that we saw
in ‘Highland Rape’.
