| Hundreds of thousands of visitors have accepted the late designer’s invitation, descending on the Metropolitan Museum in flocks to see “Savage Beauty,” a multi-media exhibition of McQueen’s couture curated by Andrew Bolton of the Museum’s Costume Institute. With the exhibit half over and visitors still patiently waiting hours upon hours for entry, the Museum announced that it would extend the show’s run through the beginning of August and even open its doors (for a $50 premium) on Mondays, the institution’s sabbath. In spite of this high volume of visitors, the mood among them is orderly, quiet, and almost ritual. |  |
“There is no way back for me now. I am going to take you on journeys you’ve never dreamed were possible.” –Alexander McQueen
A Journey with Alexander McQueen
Kate Meng Brassel
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have accepted the late designer’s invitation, descending on the Metropolitan Museum in flocks to see “Savage Beauty,” a multi-media exhibition of McQueen’s couture curated by Andrew Bolton of the Museum’s Costume Institute. With the exhibit half over and visitors still patiently waiting hours upon hours for entry, the Museum announced that it would extend the show’s run through the beginning of August and even open its doors (for a $50 premium) on Mondays, the institution’s sabbath. In spite of this high volume of visitors, the mood among them is orderly, quiet, and almost ritual.
“Savage Beauty” is divided into several connecting galleries with titles showcasing the dark romanticism that coursed through two decades of McQueen’s couture creations. A unique soundtrack—from howling winds to composer John Williams’ Schindler’s List—envelopes each gallery and complements its theme. A hologram film, wallpaper of the designer’s drawings, gilded frames, collapsing walls: the installation of the pieces is a curatorial achievement that testifies to Bolton’s intimate feeling for McQueen’s vision of his designs and shows as total works of art.
In my voyage through “Savage Beauty,” it became clear that McQueen did not market for the “modern woman” in the manner of most of his peers. McQueen had stories to tell—stories often inspired by the powerful yet doomed women of history: Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc, Colette, and Catherine the Great, among others. Wearers of his pieces want to be part of his stories. His increasing use of helmet- and mask-like headdresses, which often covered the entire head in his later runway shows, reveal the extent to which wearers of McQueen’s art are absorbed into his visions.
Three of the galleries—Cabinet of Curiosities, Romantic Primitivism, and Romantic Nationalism—are underpinned by what I would recognize as McQueen’s narrative of the British Empire. These rooms showcase pieces that reach for their motifs as far eastward as India, China, and Japan, and as far inward as Scotland. This body of work both luxuriates in the products of the Imperial grasp and poses as a force hostile to it. The intricate use of natural objects and oriental embroideries parallel the Age of Exploration and the Imperial period. Meanwhile, pieces from McQueen’s “Highland Rape,” his 1995-1996 winter collection, expose the brutality of that fist, even right at home, through tattered lace dresses slashed open at the crotch.
For McQueen, whose father’s side was from Scotland, work such as “Highland Rape” was deeply entrenched in his own experience. Fabric used in this collection included MacQueen clan tartan. In a famous 2004 interview conducted by his mother, the designer said that his Scottish roots meant “Everything.” The Scottish connection is not the only deeply autobiographical aspect of McQueen’s work. The fantasy of death appeared frequently in the Costume Institute’s choices. The designer’s highly publicized suicide in February 2010, soon after his mother’s death, will now irresistibly inform any interpretation of his work. In the interview, McQueen’s mother asked him to name his greatest fear. “Dying before you,” he answered. One wonders whether his constant reworking of the motif in his designs was an act of preparation for death at his own hand, committed shortly after his mother’s death.
McQueen was a master not only of couture techniques, but also of art and cultural histories. His influences and inspirations were diverse, sometimes obscure. His unparalleled range is patent in the Met exhibition: bespoke tailoring, Chinoiserie and the oriental, S&M, birds, artifacts of nature, feathers, bones, butterflies, Yamamoto, Fabergé, the passion of the Christ, the Northern Renaissance, militarism, the Greco-Roman, the Victorian, the Gothic, the Bedouin.
And yet, to list these, and many more, points of contact is a disservice to McQueen’s genius. His frequent use of these motifs never amounted to citation or recycling. Having once called himself the “Edgar Allen Poe” of fashion, the designer—like that dark writer—used repetition to exhilarate. The “polarities,” as Bolton concisely puts it, of the macabre and the ethereal elevate McQueen’s work from what might otherwise be earth-bound grimness. For example, his work with the suffering of the Christ—through prints of paintings of the Passion and a crown and armband of thorns wrought in silver—accesses the sublime. The designer’s famously pervasive use of feathers put his corpus into flight.
The brutal romanticism that Bolton used to shape the exhibition fails in one respect. Pieces from McQueen’s posthumous “Plato’s Atlantis” collection (2010) do not cohere to the exhibit’s “Romantic Naturalism” gallery. The iridescent, fishy scales and jellyfish-like pieces depart into a futuristic fantasy that naturalism fails to encompass. This departure from expectation and thematic containment, however, only witnesses McQueen’s genius.
Installation, optical illusion, sound, film, and dresses, all curated with passion and virtuosity. “Savage Beauty” is surely the most conceptually ambitious exhibition that the Costume Institute has staged and demonstrates the flexibility that the Institute has vis-à-vis the rest of the museum. The marginalized status of fashion in the art world actually empowers the Costume Institute to transgress the limits of propriety that otherwise govern the Met’s stately collections. The persisting throngs of visitors should show the Museum that a bold and dynamic show like “Savage Beauty” is what its public wants and what will ensure and nourish its relevance in the future.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
Until 7 August 2011
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
Free with General Admission
Tuesday-Thursday, Sunday: 9:30am-5:30pm
Friday-Saturday: 9:30 am–9:00 pm
Free with General Admission on Monday, 4 July 2011: 9:30am-5:30pm
Mondays, by appointment ($50): To buy tickets, visit:
