McQueen wins posthumous fashion design award

[dutchman]

Fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who died last month aged 40, has won a top design award.

McQueen was named one of seven category winners at the Brit Insurance Design Awards 2010 for his latest spring/summer catwalk show.

Paula Reed, judge and style director of Grazia magazine, said the show emphasised the "enormity of his loss".

McQueen beat other fashion collections, including Beth Ditto's clothing label at Evans, to take the award.

Ms Reed stressed the jury did not give the award to McQueen, who was found dead at his London home on 11 February, for "sentimental reasons".

She said the video presentation of McQueen's last show was one of the most "compelling" pieces in the awards exhibition at the Design Museum.

"Among the fashion nominees, Alexander McQueen was a clear winner," she said.

"The designer had been working for years on developing fabrics that could blend the hard into soft and had pretty much come close to achieving that in this collection.

"Then there was the way the prints had been worked, taking one image across an entire piece of fabric and fit by hand to the body to make a dress: something seemingly random was minutely thought through. But there was also the sheer spectacle of it.

"The impressiveness simply compounds the enormity of his loss."

McQueen's winning designs will now compete for the overall Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2010, to be announced at the ceremony at the Design Museum on 16 March.