The unlikely Wikipedia editor archiving McQueen

How a Canadian call-centre worker with no prior interest in fashion began meticulously mapping out the designer's history.

By Rosalind Jana

Once dismissed as the internet’s least reliable cheat sheet, Wikipedia now occupies an increasingly valuable position amidst a rising tide of AI-generated summaries and search-engine sludge. I was reminded of this recently while looking up Joan, Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1998 collection. I noticed that the page had cited an ArtReview piece I’d written about Joan of Arc’s fashion afterlives. Intrigued, I clicked through to see who had placed it there. The editor was a user called Premeditated Chaos, who since 2003 has created more than six hundred articles on subjects as varied as intercrural sex, sea snails, and people from Watford. Now she is steadily producing pages for every single McQueen show.

I was moved by how her work paralleled the offline resources fashion students rely on: the catalogues, museum monographs, and Thames & Hudson Catwalk volumes that attempt to stitch together a designer’s history. Of all designers, McQueen makes a particular kind of sense to focus on. His universe was unusually porous, thick with references that suit the hyperlink logic Wikipedia encourages. Follow one page far enough and you move from runway to research trail almost without noticing: Hitchcock here, the Highland Clearances there. Eventually I tracked her down: a Canadian call-centre worker, researching and editing between shifts, assembling a rigorous body of fashion scholarship free for anyone to access. So I asked if she’d talk to me.