NUMBER ONE HUNDRED & FORTY ONE.
June14
I’ve been in New York for the better part of a month now, so figured it was high time I started sharing some of the gems I’ve discovered in this AMAZING city.
First up, a huge highlight was visiting the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty installation at the Metropolitan Museum. The retrospective of McQueen’s short but hugely influential career is nothing short of spectacular, giving a real insight into McQueen’s creative process and the themes which resonate throughout his collections; life or death, lightness or darkness, predator and prey, man versus machine.
I went into this exhibition largely unaware of McQueen’s contribution to fashion over the last decade, but left immensely impacted by this artist who managed to consistently blend the macabre and the saccharine into something ether-worldly and, ultimately, shockingly beautiful. As Andrew Bolton, curator of the exhibition, refers to it, the idea of the sublime was fundamental to McQueen’s work.
I was particularly drawn to McQueen’s unique method of incorporating natural materials into his designs. The concept of the natural world asserting it’s power over humanity’s echoes throughout the breadth of his collections, especially prevalent in his final, posthumous, show which predicts a future in which “the ice cap would melt … the waters would rise and … life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. Humanity [would] go back to the place from whence it came.”
Personally, I was enamored by McQueen’s use of feathers (an aesthetic which continued to crop up), and in his SS07 collection his use of fresh flowers to create dresses that, as they withered, resonate in much the same way the Dutch masters’ still lifes do. There is a visceral quality to pieces like these.
McQueen managed to consistently theme his season’s contributions around a narrative. For me, the stand out dress of the exhibition hails from McQueen’s SS03 collection Irene, where “the collection told the story of a shipwreck at sea and the subsequent landfall in the Amazon, and it was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians.” The dress itself, simply known as ‘Oyster’ is best described by Sarah Burton, McQueen’s Creative Director: he wanted it to seem “almost like she drowned—and the top part of the dress is all fine boning and tulle, and the chiffon is all frayed and disheveled on the top. The skirt is made out of hundreds and hundreds of circles of organza. Then, with a pen, what Lee did was he drew organic lines. And then all these circles were cut, joined together, and then applied in these lines along the skirt. So you created this organic, oyster-like effect.” It apparently took a team of three people, working exclusively on this dress, several months to complete. Worth it? Undoubtedly.
I love that Alexander McQueen was never afraid to push the boundaries - whether with regard to a silhouette or his choice of raw materials, his career is marked by creativity and courage. The exhibition was an eye-opening experience, and if you’re in New York you should definitely make the effort to immerse yourself in McQueen’s world.
