Essential viewing: Plato's Atlantis

There is so much competition for our attention from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and the Internet in general that I wonder if there’s anyone who hasn’t watched the live stream of the McQueen spring 2010 fashion show. As we are being taken over by high tech gadgetry, it has become incredibly easy to follow the fashion action moving between New York, London, Milan and Paris. The Internet is becoming increasingly used to hit the spot, drawing us in because of its vivid virtual atmosphere. A door has been opened and two worlds coincide. Fashion is embracing technology and recognizing its importance as the ideal vehicle to rapidly flash ideas and access a bigger public. As more and more designers indulge in streaming their shows live to the world, traditions and attitudes are challenged. Nostalgia is definitely not on the menu. This week, Alexander McQueen captured a moment of truth. He must have woken up one day with a vivid premonition of what’s going to happen in the future and decided to show us what it would be like with his imaginative putting together of an integrated programme featuring fashion, live feed, music, sounds and film. And it worked. Never afraid to put on a spectacle of epic proportions McQueen has approached change with a bold, ambitious and radical agenda. He is telling us that fashion is about to adopt a completely new direction. The show was so insanely enormous and of a brash blockbusting scale that it can no longer be defined as a “fashion show”. It was emotional fantasy, theatre, art, powerful marketing and advertising, innovative entertainment. The world of fashion is already completely dislocated from reality and McQueen pushes this concept even further, deliberately blurring the dividing line between fashion and entertainment. The standard of the “performance” (I’m not too sure how else to describe it) was of such overwhelming intensity that I’m inclined to say that I’ve rarely experienced anything like it in the fashion industry. The two movie cameras mounted on gigantic and ferocious rolling cranes moved robotically backwards and forward, the sanitized hospital white runway added a funeral air to the proceedings, the background screen showing a provocative naked Raquel Zimmermann with snakes writhing across her body told a mythological poetic story of life and death and the tribe of disturbing looking slow moving creatures all contributed to the permeating uneasiness, exploding gloomy energy and real darkness. In no way did the clothes seduce me but the new shapes, silhouettes and shoes evoked a disturbingly provocative, tough, dreadful and dysfunctional new world that attracted my attention immediately. I know that a lot of work went into the clothes but they go far beyond anything I would ever wear.

Watch the show here: http://alexandermcqueenlive.showstudio.com/

All pictures courtesy of Style.com