Derek McCormack

  • print February 2023

    VIVIENNE WESTWOOD (1941–2022)

    STOP SAYING STUPID SHIT.

    I write this directive in honor of Vivienne Westwood.

    Stop saying stupid shit about fashion.

    I write this directive because Westwood loved writing directives—she printed some on shirts, DESTROY being the best known. I’m making this memorial my DESTROY shirt.

    Stop saying stupid shit about Vivienne Westwood—she despised stupidity.

    I’m writing these because I adored what Westwood’s directives directed me to do: Destroy the Queen, destroy the state, destroy capitalism, destroy dumb music, destroy dumb fashion. I wish she had said: Destroy dumb fashion writing! I admired the

  • Models present creations of Jean Paul Gaultier’s Spring/Summer 2020 Haute Couture collections during Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, on Jan. 22, 2020. Photo: Piero Biasion/Xinhua.
    slant January 30, 2020

    The Gay Flou

    WHEN IS A FASHION SHOW A FUNERAL? When it’s Jean Paul Gaultier.

    Take his final couture presentation: It was a sort of death, or a spoof of death, or a spoof of spoofs of death.

    It put the poof in spoof.

    Gaultier started the show with a funeral. The stage was filled with models in mourning black. Pallbearers in black veils carried a coffin on stage. It wasn’t clear what had died. Fashion? Does it ever die, or does it come back undead and undeader?

    When the coffin opened, a model in a white babydoll dress strutted out and started the show. What followed was a lesson in what to wear to funerals. Among

  • View of “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime,” 2019. Foreground: Zumanity stage costume, 2003. Background: The Wyld stage costume, 2014.
    print Summer 2019

    Thierry Mugler

    I HAVE MADE A BREAKTHROUGH in the psychoanalytic study of fags, or psychofaganalysis—thanks to Thierry Mugler.

    At “Thierry Mugler: Couturissime,” a retrospective of his oeuvre at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montréal, I was able to answer a question that has long plagued psychofag-analysts.

    The question: Why do fags so often create fashion?

    The answer: They don’t create it; it creates them.

    “Couturissime” displays more than 150 of Mugler’s designs. It includes runway showpieces, projections of runway shows and music videos, and costumes he designed for the Comédie-Française, a theatrical company that’s

  • Judy Blame. Photo: Sophie Green.
    passages March 14, 2018

    Judy Blame (1960–2018)

    SHIT.

    Judy Blame is dead.

    Blame was the best jeweler of the punk era.

    Some of his jewelry was shit.

    There’s a photo I love: Blame in a Blame, a necklace made of shit, a bib necklace featuring fake turds cascading down his chest.

    This is what fashion calls a statement piece. What was the statement? That fashion is shit? That shit is fashion?

    Who would say such a thing?

    Le Shit?

    The Shit?

    What was that necklace called?

    Fake shit is funny. It doesn’t look like shit. It looks like something that’s trying to look like shit.

    Judy Blame’s necklace wasn’t jewelry. It was something that looked like joke jewelry.