From Hell

One of the joys of living in London is that there is always someone crashing on your couch and dragging you along to tourist attractions that you would never consider visiting under normal circumstances. For reasons I cannot fathom, some of my friends have a peculiar fascination with anything horror related so in the past couple of months, I have had the privilege of experiencing such delights as the Jack the Ripper walking tour and the London Dungeons. The latter in particular was a hellish day out - not in a scary sense, more so hellishly rubbish. I now have an in-depth knowledge of all the gory happenings that went down on the mean streets of Spitalfields hundreds of years ago. Lucky me.

All of my tour guides neglected to mention how Alexander McQueen is supposedly descended from Jack the Ripper himself. Now this piece of trivia would have made me slightly more interested in what they had to say. McQueen returned to his East End roots this week with his latest menswear collection in Milan. The show was brimming with 19th century horror, evoking demon barbers and murderous butchers. As always with McQueen, the staging was spectacular and the tailoring impeccable. The runway was lined with street-lamps and stalked by sinister dandies brandishing canes. The clothes themselves were both beautiful and wearable - lots of sharp suit jackets, fitted camel coats and tweed trousers. Let's gloss over the codpieces and breastplates, shall we?

                                       Images from GQ.com