Posthuman bodies of water in fashion: Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis

Referencing Plato’s lost city of Atlantis, British fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis (S/S 2010) envisioned a dystopian future where humans, aided by bioengineering, adapt to water following rising sea levels caused by global warming. Through the collection’s ensembles, which mimicked the skin and scales of aquatic animals, and through prosthetic make-up that altered beauty codes, the other-worldly models embodied a subsequent step in evolution resulting from a posthuman hybridization between the human and the amphibian. This article analyses McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis guided by recent theorizations on the new-materialist and posthuman turn in fashion, and, in particular, on Astrida Neimanis’s notion of ‘bodies of water’ – a theoretical paradigm that rearticulates the ontological category of the ‘human’ as connected to the Earth’s hydrological systems, thereby blurring the boundaries between self, environment and other water forms. Plato’s Atlantis is, therefore, another example of how fashion engages with the ontological debates advanced by posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. By staging the process of becoming-amphibian, McQueen decentred the human subject to offer alternative figurations of the dressed body, establishing connections with non-human and technological actors, and ultimately disrupting an anthropocentric model of subjectivity in favour of mixed, fluid and watery ontological borders.