Alexander McQueen's The Hunger: a corset of live worms and a mooned front row
Wikipedia's editors put The Hunger on the front page for 16 October 2026: Alexander McQueen's Spring/Summer 1996 collection, shown in a tent at London's Natural History Museum on a reported £600, and remembered for a corset of live worms and the mooning that ended the show.
Wikipedia's editors choose one article a day and put it on the encyclopedia's front page for everyone who opens it. For 16 October 2026 they chose The Hunger (collection), the seventh collection by the British designer Alexander McQueen. 12
The clothes went down a runway in London on 23 October 1995. The collection was built around a 1983 vampire film, it was the first McQueen show to include menswear, and the runway show reportedly cost £600. 23
The garment everybody remembers is Look 64, a corset moulded from two layers of translucent plastic with real worms sealed between them. McQueen put the live worms in two hours before the models walked. 2
The evening ended with McQueen mooning his own audience. The fashion press disapproved, loudly. The order book filled up anyway. 2
The seventh collection, and the first with menswear
McQueen learned how clothes are cut on Savile Row, where he served an apprenticeship and earned a reputation as an expert tailor. 45
In October 1990, aged 21, he began the master's course in fashion design at Central Saint Martins, the London art school. 6
His 1992 graduation collection was bought in its entirety by the magazine editor Isabella Blow, who became his mentor and his muse. 78
By 1995 he was the most talked-about young designer in London. Highland Rape, his sixth collection, drew accusations of misogyny and is credited with leading to his appointment as head designer at the French house Givenchy. 910
The Hunger came next, for the Spring/Summer 1996 season of his own house. 2
The men's clothes in it were a contractual obligation. The success of the previous collection had brought funding from the Italian manufacturer Eo Bocci, who arranged a distribution deal with Bus Stop, a subsidiary of the Japanese apparel firm Onward Kashiyama. Bus Stop required menswear, and The Hunger was the first McQueen collection to have any. 2
Money stayed tight all the same. Most of the people who worked on the collection were paid little or nothing: some for the exposure, others on the assumption that working with McQueen would pay off in the long term. 2
The printmaker Simon Ungless agreed to design the prints for £500. Sebastian Pons, who knew McQueen was living in poverty, worked without asking for money. 2
Two horror films and a leopard print
The collection takes its name and its mood from The Hunger (1983), an erotic horror film about a love triangle between two vampires and a human doctor. A second film, Cat People (1982), in which a young woman discovers she is a seductive werecat, fed into it too. 31112
The palette was mostly red, white and black. Leather and feathers were used as themselves, and the prints came from nature: leopard spots, thorns, feathers. 2
The feather coat from Look 29 shows what that meant in practice. Its print was made by a photographic process on a nylon silkscreen, a screen normally used to print copies. McQueen made the screen itself into the coat, which is what a silkscreen is not for. 213
Elsewhere the textile consultant Kim Hassler was asked to knit a sweater from fur from McQueen's mother's dog. 2
Sex was the other running theme. One men's shirt carried a graffiti-style design referring to the sexual act of fisting. Many garments were cut open so that the lining or bare skin showed through, and depending on where the cut fell it read as a vulva or as cutting for self-harm. Menswear and womenswear alike dropped to the very low-cut "bumster" trousers that had made his name. 214
The worm corset
Look 64 was a corset moulded from two layers of translucent plastic with real worms encased inside, worn over a grey tailored jacket and a red silk skirt. 2
The plastic was pre-moulded on a fit model's body. McQueen assembled the corset with fresh, live worms two hours before the show started. 2
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has displayed the ensemble, records it in plain curatorial language: silver wool and synthetic with a red silk faille lining, a bodice of moulded plastic encasing worms, and a skirt of red silk faille with silver "antlers" by the jeweller Shaun Leane. 16
Asked once about his taste, McQueen described it as attention to what other people skip past:
"It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things."
McQueen, in an interview with The Face, November 1996, as quoted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1617
The collection is remembered for putting desire and decay in one object, which is why the corset is the look of the 95 that writers still return to. 2
A tent on the East Lawn
The show went on at the Natural History Museum in London on 23 October 1995, in a tent on the museum's East Lawn, during London Fashion Week. 21819
McQueen had the finale slot, the last and most watched position on the day's schedule, on the strength of Highland Rape. Attendance ran about 30 percent higher than the previous season, and some people were trying to get in on photocopied invitations. 2
The runway show itself was made for a reported £600. 2
After the criticism that met Highland Rape, McQueen had uninvited several fashion journalists and pushed at least one more to an undesirable third-row seat. His mother and his aunt Renee sat in the front row. 2
Björk, then dating McQueen's friend Goldie, produced the soundtrack, which the journalist Dana Thomas described as "thumping club music punctuated with monkey howls". 202122
Goldie walked in the show, along with Susanne Oberbeck of the pop band No Bra, Jimmy Pursey of the punk band Sham 69, and the journalist Alix Sharkey. McQueen drew his models from his own circle. 2123
Philip Treacy made the headpieces, the first of many collaborations with McQueen. Eugene Souleiman did the hair, Val Garland the make-up, Sam Gainsbury produced the show, and it was dedicated to Katy England, McQueen's creative director. 224
Shaun Leane, who had worked with McQueen before, made the jewellery. McQueen told him to "create something that kind of creates a little bit of an edge between all the girls", and the animal theme running through the show gave the pieces their direction. 2526
Two designs mattered most. The Tusk earring was a long, thin curve of silver worn singly rather than as a pair. The second was what Leane calls the "stag piece", a thorny silver ring that encircled the hips over the skirt. 2526
95 looks and a moon
The runway was plain white, with no set dressing of any kind. Make-up was cat-like, with eyebrows drawn up the forehead in exaggerated slashes, and the hair went back to the 1980s in mullets and Mohicans. 2
There were 95 looks, 28 of them menswear and mixed in with the womenswear. Tailored jackets and trousers filled the first half; softer dresses and skirts took the second. 2
Stella Tennant wore Look 22, a white shift with a leopard printed across its lower half. Looks 32 and 50 were made of silver mesh and worn with full-face coverings by Treacy that looked like fencing masks. 2
Look 35, a white midi-length dress, had its midsection roughly printed black, with the over-layer slit from the breasts to the navel. 2
The models were there to give attitude. They flashed their breasts from beneath jackets worn with no shirt, and threw obscene gestures at the audience, as they had in McQueen's earlier shows. 2
Then came the ending. McQueen mooned the audience, and later explained it as frustration: with the British Fashion Council and with the press, over how much support and how much expectation he was carrying. 22829
What the room said, and what the order book said
Industry reaction was poor, and it landed harder because Highland Rape had just gone well. Richard Benson, then editing The Face, remembered the lights coming up at the end:
"seeing fashion editors shaking their heads and tutting their disapproval"
Benson, quoted in The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia. 2
Few people came backstage afterwards. McQueen was distraught and assumed his career in fashion was over. Suzy Menkes went backstage to assure him that it was not. 230
Colin McDowell of The Sunday Times praised McQueen's "wit and awareness" and called the clothing an "ill-thought-out mess". Iain R. Webb of The Times thought him "extremely clever" with "unique cutting skills", and too deep in an "angry young man" persona. 3132
Sally Brampton of The Guardian found the tailoring better than in the previous two seasons and told him to "curb some of his more childish tantrums". Hilary Alexander of The Daily Telegraph called the tailoring "as precise as it was forward-looking", objected to how much flesh the models showed, and said McQueen "should not have bothered" with the mooning. 233
Others treated the collection as the highlight of a dull week. Amy Spindler of The New York Times wrote that McQueen had drawn on his Savile Row training to produce "the kinkiest, most fetishistic clothes on any runway". 34
Menkes, writing in the International Herald Tribune, singled out his lace, "laminated with car paint or sliced into abstract body-patterns". Luella Bartley in the Evening Standard called the collection "neoteric punk that looked razor sharp instead of Johnny Rotten". 303536
The two figures in circulation for what the collection sold come from different sources and sit hundreds of thousands of pounds apart. Women's Wear Daily reported the next day that McQueen claimed orders worth about US$1.1 million, or roughly £700,000. Dana Thomas, in her 2015 biography Gods and Kings, gives retail orders of £400,000, roughly $630,000. 22237
Reading the corset: worms, tombs and the abject
Fashion scholars have spent more words on the worm corset than on anything else here, mostly on what it does to the person wearing it. 2
Caroline Evans read it as an example of how McQueen's runway models were "armoured through glamour". The jacket worn over the corset had shoulders and lapels "drawn back like a surgical incision", exposing the model's bare torso beneath. 2
Evans found a visual resemblance to a transi, the cadaver figure carved on some late-medieval and Renaissance tombs, which shows the body after death and decay. 3839
She argued that the model's "aggressive vitality" asserted "the right of the living to commandeer the iconography of the dead", and that this "suggests a robust defiance". 2
Catherine Spooner, writing on McQueen's Gothic streak, called the corset one of his "most inherently Gothic garments". For her the worms carried death and decay, and — with their likeness to leeches — the vampires the collection was named for. 2
Spooner read the ensemble through Julia Kristeva's idea of the abject, the revulsion felt at anything which "does not respect borders, positions, rules". The corset holds the worms at the edge of the body, and sets the tailored jacket's structure against the worms' randomness: "structure countered with chaos, [and] beauty with horror". 241
Ana Finel Honigman put the same point more briefly, writing that the corset turned "shock into enticement". 2
The press had accused McQueen of misogyny throughout his early career, and The Hunger drew the same charge. He objected every time. After Highland Rape he had said he designed with his lesbian friends in mind, and in response to the reviews of The Hunger he noted that most of the women who walked in it were lesbians. 2
What it left behind
The people who worked on The Hunger mostly stayed. Sam Gainsbury went on to produce all of McQueen's runway shows with her partner Anna Whiting. Sebastian Pons joined him at Givenchy in 1997 and later moved to McQueen's own label until 2000. Shaun Leane and Philip Treacy worked with him until his death in 2010. 2
McQueen kept returning to the collection's devices. The moulded bodice reappeared in many collections for his own label and for Givenchy, and for Givenchy couture in 1998 he showed a clear bodice filled with butterflies, which Evans likened to the worm corset. 2
The full-face fencing mask of Look 32 came to be regarded as one of his trademarks after similar styles appeared in later collections. 242
Sarah Burton, who became creative director of the label after his death, went back to Look 35 in her final collection for Spring/Summer 2024. She opened the show with a short corseted black dress whose chest slash was left bare, and used the slash again on Look 37 in gold embroidery. 243
Reviewing that collection for Vogue, Sarah Mower likened the embroidered slash to a religious artefact, calling it "almost a holy celebration of the ultimate creative power of the female body". 2
One debt was settled badly and then forgiven. McQueen admitted to Simon Ungless that he had never had the money to pay him, and gave him a £1000 gift certificate for the London boutique Browns instead. Staff told Ungless the certificate was stolen. The two argued about it afterwards and then made up; Ungless told the biographer Andrew Wilson that they "started laughing about it". 2
Where the clothes are now
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns the feather-printed coat from Look 29, along with a shirt and a skirt from the collection. It put the coat on display in 2024 in Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion. 24546
The National Gallery of Victoria in Australia owns Look 50, the silver mesh top with the fencing-mask covering and silver bumsters. 247
The worm corset and a Tusk earring appeared in both stagings of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, at the Met in 2011 and at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2015. The London run drew a record 480,000 visitors over five months. 254849
The collection in figures
| Figure | What it counts | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 23 October 1995 | Date of the runway show, during London Fashion Week | The Hunger (collection) |
| 7th | The Hunger's position among McQueen's collections for his own house | The Hunger (collection) |
| 95 | Looks in the show | The Hunger (collection) |
| 28 | Of those looks, the number that were menswear | The Hunger (collection) |
| £600 | Reported budget for the runway show | The Hunger (collection) |
| 30 percent | Rise in attendance over the previous season | The Hunger (collection) |
| 2 | Hours before the show at which McQueen put live worms into the corset | The Hunger (collection) |
| 2 | Layers of translucent plastic in the corset | The Hunger (collection) |
| £500 | Fee paid to Simon Ungless to design the prints | The Hunger (collection) |
| £1000 | Browns gift certificate given to Ungless in place of payment | The Hunger (collection) |
| US$1.1 million | Orders McQueen claimed by the next day, per Women's Wear Daily | The Hunger (collection), Women's Wear Daily |
| £400,000 | Retail orders reported by Dana Thomas in 2015 | The Hunger (collection), Dana Thomas |
| 2011 and 2015 | Years of the two stagings of Savage Beauty | Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty |
| 66 | Items in the London staging that the New York staging had not included | The Hunger (collection) |
| 480,000 | Visitors to the London staging over its five-month run | Shaun Leane speaks about his work with Alexander McQueen |
Glossary
| Term | What it means here | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Collection | One season's line-up of clothes from a fashion house, presented together | The Hunger (collection) |
| Look | A single numbered outfit in a show; Look 64 is the worm corset | The Hunger (collection) |
| Spring/Summer 1996 | The selling season a collection belongs to, shown the autumn before | The Hunger (collection) |
| Finale slot | The last show on a day's schedule, the one the press stays for | The Hunger (collection) |
| Savile Row | The London street of bespoke tailors where McQueen trained | Savile Row |
| Bumsters | McQueen's extreme low-cut trousers, worn by men and women alike | Bumsters |
| Milliner | A maker of hats and headpieces, which is Philip Treacy's trade | Milliner |
| Transi | A tomb figure carved to show the body after death, often decayed | Transi |
| The abject | Julia Kristeva's term for what disturbs identity, system and order | Julia Kristeva |
| Gothic | A mode built on decay, the supernatural and transgression | Gothic fiction |
| Erotic horror | A horror genre that works through sexual desire and the body | Erotic horror |
| Couture | Made-to-measure Parisian fashion, which McQueen designed at Givenchy | Givenchy |
Six things that are easy to get wrong
The worms were alive. The corset held real worms. McQueen pre-moulded two layers of translucent plastic on a fit model, then assembled it with fresh, live worms two hours before the show. 2
The menswear was in the contract. The Hunger was the first McQueen collection to include men's clothing because the distribution deal with Bus Stop required it. 2
The venue was a tent on a lawn. The show took place in a tent on the East Lawn of the Natural History Museum in London, on 23 October 1995, during London Fashion Week. 218
A £600 show sold hundreds of thousands of pounds of clothes. Women's Wear Daily reported orders worth about US$1.1 million the next day. Dana Thomas gives retail orders of £400,000. Both figures are in circulation and they are far apart. 22237
The mooning was aimed at the industry. McQueen explained it as frustration with the British Fashion Council and the press over the support and the expectations he was given, rather than as a joke at the audience's expense. 2
The silver hip piece has five names. Shaun Leane calls it the "stag piece". The Met's own record calls the same silverwork "antlers". One writer called it a brooch worn at the groin, another "handcuffs", a third a "stirrup". They all describe the object at the hips of Look 64. 21625
In their own words
McQueen, on the eye he brought to clothes:
"It's the ugly things I notice more, because other people tend to ignore the ugly things."
McQueen in The Face, November 1996, as quoted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 16
McQueen to Sebastian Pons, his friend and collaborator, before the show:
"wanted to break some rules and do something a bit shocking"
As quoted in The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia. 2
Shaun Leane, on the brief for the Tusk earring:
"create something that kind of creates a little bit of an edge between all the girls"
Leane, interviewed by Dezeen in August 2015. 25
Caroline Evans, on what the model did with the corset:
"aggressive vitality ... asserts the right of the living to commandeer the iconography of the dead"
Evans, as quoted in The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia. 2
Catherine Spooner, on the two halves of the corset:
"structure countered with chaos, [and] beauty with horror"
Spooner, as quoted in The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia. 2
Sarah Mower in Vogue, on how Sarah Burton reused the chest slash in 2024:
"almost a holy celebration of the ultimate creative power of the female body"
Mower, as quoted in The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia. 2
The full source is The Hunger (collection) on Wikipedia, selected as Wikipedia's Today's Featured Article for 16 October 2026. The night went two ways at once: the room tutted, and the tills rang. McQueen put on a show for a reported £600, out of cheap fabric, unpaid friends and one corset of live worms, and the clothes sold in the hundreds of thousands. The reviews were about his manners. The corset was about what a body is. Thirty years on, the corset is the one in the display case.
References
- 1Wikipedia: Today's featured article/October 16, 2026
en.wikipedia.org
- 2The Hunger (collection) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 3The Hunger (1983 film) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 4Savile Row - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 5Alexander McQueen - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 6Central Saint Martins - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 7Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 8Isabella Blow - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 9Highland Rape - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 10Givenchy - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 11Cat People (1982 film) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 12Erotic horror - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 13Photo emulsion - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 14Bumsters - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 15File: Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray - Rendez-Vous 64.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
- 16Ensemble, The Hunger, spring/summer 1996 - Metropolitan Museum of Art
blog.metmuseum.org
- 17The Face (magazine) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 18Natural History Museum, London - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 19London Fashion Week - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 20Bjork - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 21Goldie - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 22Dana Thomas - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 23Jimmy Pursey - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 24Philip Treacy - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 25
- 26Shaun Leane (jeweller) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 27File: Lee Alexander McQueen & Ann Ray - Rendez-Vous 74.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
- 28British Fashion Council - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 29Mooning - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 30Suzy Menkes - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 31Colin McDowell - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 32Iain R. Webb - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 33Hilary Alexander - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 34Amy Spindler - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 35International Herald Tribune - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 36Luella Bartley - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 37Women's Wear Daily - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 38Transi - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 39Cadaver monument - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 40File: Boussu JPG00a.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.org
- 41Julia Kristeva - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 42The Widows of Culloden - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 43Sarah Burton - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 44
- 45Metropolitan Museum of Art - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 46Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 47National Gallery of Victoria - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 48Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
- 49Victoria and Albert Museum - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.