The year was 1996, and Alexander McQueen had solidified himself as the kind of designer that carefully melded bizarre objects with the rare sort of indelible fashion one can never forget. For Alexander McQueen’s Spring 1996 collection, there was one piece in particular that struck the perfect balance between dark and inquisitive: the worm corset.
With a strikingly cut blazer in corporate gray, the translucent Alexander McQueen worm corset rose from the ashes. Paired with the aforementioned blazer and bright red skirt with a long metal piercing poking through the middle of it, the worm corset was just that: an actual corset molded in the shape of a clear buster, filled with dirt-covered, filthy worms.
McQueen’s Spring 1996 collection was dubbed Hunger, and this wild worm corset served as the perfect descriptor of the designer’s twisted fantasy. If you’re wondering if the worms inside the corset were real; yes they are. The McQueen worm corset is now owned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and as you can see, the piece has degraded over time, with less and less worms inside as it ages.
In the words of the designer himself, “Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places,” and “It’s the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things.”
Would you wear the Alexander McQueen worm corset, if given the chance?
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