Transgression and beauty The collection, like much of McQueen's work, explored ideas of bodily perfection and interrogated who and what was beautiful. Horyn's review considered
Voss in conjunction with
Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art, an exhibition then running at the
Royal Academy of Arts in London. She felt that viewing
Apocalypse, with its similar subject matter, made it clear to her that McQueen was not just making fashion, but was "responding, like an artist, to the horror and insanity in contemporary culture".|alt=Red short jacket with kimono-inspired embroidery and pattern, on mannequinAnna Jackson felt that McQueen's incorporation of elements from
Japanese clothing was more "transformative" than similar efforts by other designers, who treated these aesthetics as a novelty. The embroidered straitjacket borrowed several elements from Japanese clothing: "rejection of natural body shape, flat expanses, elaborate sleeves, constricting wrap style and overpowering headpiece". Jackson felt the design showed McQueen's understanding of Japanese garments, as well as how he "transfigured them into something uniquely his own". McQueen's minimal alteration of the antique silk screen "preserved yet metamorphosed" the original work "into a piece of unexpected visual and tactile juxtapositions". McQueen drew on Japanese aesthetics again in
Scanners (Autumn/Winter 2003) and ''
It's Only a Game'' (Spring/Summer 2005). Claire Wilcox thought McQueen made use of the kimono in this and other collections because it could easily be made modern while being grounded in a tradition of "exquisite material and craftsmanship". Koda compared the feathered minidress from Look 63 to a t-shirt and vest combination by
Martin Margiela from 2000 which had a similarly conical silhouette. McQueen's design, he wrote, is a "chimerical pastiche: it is definitely avian, faintly reptilian, and possibly mammalian". Koda describes the heels which were paired with it on the runway as an explicit embodiment of McQueen's "critique of the fashion system", as they have an air of eroticism but were constructed to be very uncomfortable to wear. Researcher Lisa Skogh noted that McQueen often incorporated concepts and objects which might have appeared in a
cabinet of curiosities – collections of natural and historical objects that were the precursor to modern
museums. She identified the shell garments from
Voss as being in this tradition, writing that they "evoke the Shell grotto|[shell] grotto aesthetic of princely gardens" and other historical art objects made from shells.
Human-animal hybridisation Theorist Catherine Spooner noted that McQueen frequently used imagery of human-animal hybrids as a mischievous comment "on the notion of fashion as a transformational medium". Fashion historian Gertrud Lehnert suggested that McQueen's use of seashells and animal parts represented the natural duality of mortality and rebirth in his work. She focused on the ambiguity presented by McQueen's half-animal women, wondering if they were transitioning to or from animals. Although they bore some resemblance to mythical bird-women such as
sirens and
harpies, Lehnert felt that the women in
Voss seemed trapped within the glass, endangered themselves rather than presenting a danger to others. Loschek wrote that McQueen's shows presented images from the "subconscious". As an example, she described Olley, in her box, as a "faunlike creature" kept in a test tube. Some scholars viewed
Voss through the analytical lens of "becoming", developed by the French academics
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which suggests that identity is a constant process of change, and is not bound to fixed ideas. For these analysts, the way the collection presented an apparent
hybridisation of humanity with the natural world was an expression of "becoming" something other than human. Gender theorist Stephen D. Seely explored this notion in an essay about fashion which enables "the becoming-nonhuman of the wearer's body" and defies standard binary categories such as "human/animal". For Seely, McQueen's designs achieve this by incorporating aesthetics and materials from nature, with the bird attack dress as a specific example. While the model's upper half seems like it is being torn apart or carried away by the taxidermy hawks, her bottom half, covered in ostrich feathers, is seemingly transformed into a bird. Seely writes that "the model and the birds are becoming-indiscernible", neither one nor the other.
on display at Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty'',
Victoria and Albert Museum, 2015|alt=Several mannequins in a row, each wearing a different dress and shoesFaiers considered "McQueen's work as being in a constant state of 'becoming' something else", citing several examples from
Voss. He described a grey silk coat with thermal print, paired with a green feathered dress, as representing the life stages of a butterfly or moth. The furry-looking green feathers and unusual forward-thrust abdomen of the dress resembled a caterpillar in
camouflage, while the coat represented the
cocoon. Finally, the back of the jacket, with the thermal print of McQueen's face, resembles the
eyespot patterns found on mature butterflies. Faiers described this design as "human
aposematism, warning potential predators (other designers?) to keep away". He also discussed the hawk dress, comparing it to designs from ''
It's a Jungle Out There which incorporated large animal parts. Although Faiers acknowledges the inspiration from the film The Birds'', he asserts that the design is "no simple homage", but an imparting of the various qualities of a hawk into fashion as an attempt to "distill 'birdliness. Finally, he examined the use of shells, calling them pieces of "something left behind that has served its purpose". In his analysis, the shell items earned significance after they were destroyed by the models wearing them, which represented the models moving forward along an evolutionary path by discarding something no longer necessary. Both Faiers and Spooner commented on the throughline from the shell garments of
Voss to the underwater-adapted women of his final full collection, ''
Plato's Atlantis'' (Spring/Summer 2010). Theorist Justyna Stępień built on Seely and Faiers to argue that the "assimilation and transformation of the human and natural world" made
Voss an example of
post-humanist fashion. She focused on McQueen's incorporation of avian imagery into the collection, writing that the "mutation of different elements can be seen as the designer's attempt to understand this process of birds' variation". McQueen's juxtaposition of natural and experimental materials hybridises the human body with plants and animals, "redefining the relationship between fabric and flesh".
Mirrored box Fashion theorist Alma Hernandez Hernandez Briseño analysed
Voss alongside
Bellmer La Poupée, arguing that these shows blurred the line between fantasy and reality. In
Voss, the glass cube separating the models from the audience is a fictional space in which McQueen could explore transgressive notions of what beauty and fashion meant. Fashion journalist Alex Fury argued that McQueen's tendency to physically separate the audience from the models evoked cinema and television, offering
The Overlook and
Voss as examples; in this way, McQueen was expressing himself as a product of the modern, screen-based world. In contrast, author Claire Wilcox raised
Voss as an example of McQueen making the audience a part of the performance. She compared the mirrored box, which "subverted" the audience's role as observers, to the staging of ''Plato's Atlantis'', in which cameras on the stage projected the surroundings onto the backdrop, making the audience part of the show. Evans argued that the impact of the mirror trick came from targeting an audience of fashion industry professionals, whose work typically involved "sharp scrutiny of the models". The reversal forced them to think about their
objectification of the model and the clothes. McQueen then pushed the point further by concealing the audience from the models, turning the runway show into a "simulation of solitary pleasure[...] like a sex show", watched by an audience of
voyeurs. Conversely, the models' "workaday
narcissism" – a basic aspect of their vocation – was made to look "psychotic and dysfunctional". Author Vanessa Guerrera argued a similar point, saying that it was "revolutionary" for McQueen to turn the audience into the subjects. She felt
Voss represented McQueen more explicitly referencing elements of
horror fiction in his work: "uncomfortable voyeurism, the ugly reflections of the worst parts of us, and the flair for the dramatic". Design theorists A. Rabàdan and I. Bentz also commented on the mirror reversal, writing that McQueen had created a "
non-place" by staging the show in the cube of mirrors, detaching it from reality to create "a conflict in the spectator of the performative runway". They likened the spectators and models to
Narcissus of Greek myth: a young man who fell in love with his own reflection. Both spectators and models were forced to do so in the context of
Voss. == Aftermath and legacy ==