Designer Alexander McQueen Posthumously Honored With Design Award

London, United Kingdom (CNS) – The late Alexander McQueen has been named one of the seven category winners of the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2010 awards. The four-time British Designer of the Year winner, who died last month, is posthumously honored with the top design award.

But mind you, it’s not a sympathy vote. One of the judges, Grazia magazine style editor Paula Reed, said that McQueen was a “clear winner” among the fashion nominees.

“The designer had been working for years on developing fabrics that could blend the hard into soft and had pretty much come close to achieving that in this collection.”

“Then there was the way the prints had been worked, taking one image across an entire piece of fabric and fit by hand to the body to make a dress: something seemingly random was minutely thought through. But there was also the sheer spectacle of it.”

“The impressiveness simply compounds the enormity of his loss.”

The other winners are:

• Architecture: Monterrey Housing, Mexico by Elemental, Chile
• Furniture: Grassworks by Jair Straschnow, Netherlands
• Graphics: The Newspaper Club by Ben Terrett, Russell Davies, and Tom Taylor, U.K.
• Interactive: The EyeWriter by members of Free Art and Technology, openFrameworks, Graffiti Research LA, The Ebelign Group and Tony Quan, U.S.
• Product: Folding Plug by Min-Kyu Choi, U.K.
• Transport: E430 Electric Aircraft by Yuneec International, China

McQueen’s designs and the rest of the category winners will compete for the overall Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2010. The winner will be announced at a ceremony at the Design Museum on March 16.

McQueen was found dead at this home on February 11. It was believed he took his own life. He was 40.

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