Tina Gorjanc, a student at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, has a new project that will make your skin crawl. She plans to create a leather handbag using the skin of dead fashion designer Alexander McQueen – complete with the famous artist’s tattoo. McQueen died from suicide in 2010.
McQueen, an alumni of the school, included his own hair in the labels of his graduate fashion collection, “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims.” Gorjanc plans to extract the DNA from the hairs and use it grow skin which could be harvested, tanned, and tattooed.
According to Gorjanc, a representative from McQueen’s company told her the renegade designer “would have approved of the project,” according to the Times.
The cost of getting the DNA and growing enough skin cells to create a purse is likely prohibitively expensive. The student says the project isn’t meant to create a macabre fashion line as much as commentary on the legality of “owning” another human’s DNA.
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“The Pure Human project was designed as a critical design project that aims to address shortcomings concerning the protection of biological information and move the debate forward using current legal structures,” Gorjanc said. “If a student like me was able to patent a material extracted from Alexander McQueen’s biological information as there was no legislation to stop me, we can only imagine what big corporations with bigger funding are going to be capable of doing in the future.”
The last time the Central Saint Martins art school made a big gay splash was when student Clayton Pettet performed “Art School Stole My Virginity.” Billed as “performance art,” the show was supposedly going to show Pettet having anal sex for the first time, but audience members were left disappointed when Pettet’s actual show didn’t feature anything particularly scandalous other than some racy signs, a bare chested woman, and the artist eating bananas.
