Erin: I'm Glad McQueen Pushed Me

Erin O´Connor has spoken about her part in one of the most famous catwalk shows in history: Alexander McQueen´s spring/summer 2001 Voss show, which was set in an asylum. O'Connor wore a white column dress, embellished with white razor-clam shells, which did not make it to the end of the show in one piece.

"It's probably the most exciting show I've ever done, in my career," O'Connor told photographer Nick Knight as part of his series, Subjective, focusing on the role of the model in fashion photography. "To me, it defines why I love my job. When McQueen made this dress for me, it was done in such painstaking detail; I was really involved in the story. It was made of razor clams, and before the show - we'd never really get a rehearsal, we'd get some kind of vague guidance, which was always shaky territory - this time he said, 'So, you're in a lunatic asylum. I need you to go mental, have a nervous breakdown, die, and then come back to life. And if you can do that in three minutes and just follow the crescendo of the music.' 

Unlike actors and actresses, we're not directed, we're not given a rehearsal, and you have free reign to do what you think is right and how you think you should represent something. So, before I go out, he grabs me by the clam and says, 'I want you to rip the dress off,' and I had worried that it looked that I was in some way a victim of being in that mind-set - but it was completely the opposite of that. It looked like I was stripping away the pain and the armour and just going 'Here I am.' He pushed me, and I'm glad."

"My friend George and I were walking on the beach in Norfolk, and there were thousands of razor-clam shells," McQueen told WWD in 2000. "They were so beautiful, I thought I had to do something with them. So, we decided to make [a dress] out of them... The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O'Connor] came out and trashed the dress, so their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really." 

Erin O´Connor

The models - including Kate Moss, Karen Elson and Jade Parfitt - walked inside a mirrored box and couldn't see the audience as they sat in a dimmed seating section surrounding it; perhaps explaining their willingness to completely let go and assume their respective roles. The audience sat facing the mirrored box when they first arrived; forced to look at themselves - or as Knight remembers, their feet - until the inside of the box was illuminated as the show began.

"Mum and Dad came to that show, and they sat with Isabella Blow," O'Connor revealed. "When my dad saw me, he didn't see me at all; he saw some woman that he had never expected to see, nor had he identified with, and he cried. He cried really hard. He couldn't believe that I had it in me to want to express like that. But those shows were real emotion; there was nothing gimmicky about it."

See more videos from the series at Showstudio.com/project/subjective