Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Victoria & Albert Museum, London 14 March – 2 August 2015
It’s about the politics of the world – the way life is – what beauty is.1 Alexander McQueen
SALLY GRAY This northern spring and summer, London offered a powerful Alexander McQueen moment. The Victoria & Albert Museum presented their ‘edited and expanded’2 version of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, originally mounted in May 2011 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In addition, Nick Waplington’s stunning large format photographs of the working process for McQueen’s ‘Horn of Plenty’ collection (A/W 2009) were presented at Tate Britain from March to May. Waplington, noted for photographs focusing on class and conflict, was invited by McQueen to document the development of the 2009 collection – an uncompromising exploration of waste and decay in the context of the beauty and luxury of fashion’s histories – of which McQueen commented: ‘It’s a sackable offence this collection. I could easily have made it digestible but I didn’t want to, it’s not safe in any way.’3 Another exhibition, Warpaint: Alexander McQueen and Make-up, was presented through May-June at London College of Fashion’s Fashion Space Gallery, facial enhancement and distortion being a key element of McQueen’s performative fashion presentations. A play McQueen, by James Phillips, shown at St James Theatre, claimed to document the ‘dark dream world’ of the designer’s ‘visionary imagination’.4 And two biographies, were disseminated throughout the Anglophone world, in the months leading to the V&A show.5 As has been widely reported, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was an outstanding success in New York: the eighth best-attended exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum’s history; audience figures of 661,509; queues snaking down Fifth Avenue and thoughtful critical responses from such as The New York Times art critic, Holland Cotter, who claimed that the show was ‘poised on a line where fashion turns into something else’.6 British-born curator, from the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum, Andrew Bolton, conceived and mounted the New York show and was ‘Consultant Curator’ for London. The expanded and restaged V&A exhibition was curated by Claire Wilcox, Senior Curator of Fashion at the museum and Professor of Fashion Curation at London College of Fashion. This is not simply a touring exhibition from the Met, there is an established V&A curatorial lineage underpinning the exhibition, which builds on previous research, collecting and exhibiting of McQueen’s work by the museum. Claire Wilcox included McQueen’s work in her 2001 exhibition Radical Fashion and in her speculative series of live events at the V&A, Fashion In Motion, in 1999 and 2001. Amy de la Haye, included McQueen in her 1997 V&A exhibition Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion, five years after his MA graduation show at Central St Martins College of Art & Design. McQueen himself knew and used the V&A’s collections for his research on tailoring, history, painting and photography: ‘The nation is privileged to have access to such a resource,’ he stated.7 Andrew Bolton was a curatorial assistant at the V&A when he saw his first McQueen show, ‘No. 13’ (S/S 1999).8 And he included McQueen in his V&A exhibition Men in Skirts in 2001 (later at the Met as Bravehearts: Men in Skirts in 2003-4).
18 | BROADSHEET | Winter 2015
As a place of inspiration Britain is the best in the world. You’re inspired by the anarchy in the country. Alexander McQueen London was McQueen’s hometown. The specificities of McQueen’s, simultaneously sublime and angry, vision could hardly have grown from anywhere else. As fashion historian Christopher Breward puts it: ‘In the twenty-first century, London’s reputation as a guardian of the bespoke and the edgy remains a constant in the longstanding, international configuration of fashion cities.’9 London engendered McQueen’s interweaving of abjection, perversity, violence, provocation, and ineffable beauty, in shows conceived from the start as whole, often challenging, mise-en-scènes. Born in South London and raised in the East End, McQueen had the capacity to read the culture of fashion with the ruthless, truth-telling capacity of the working class outsider. Britain’s harshly enduring, finelytuned class gradations; its continual reinstatement of forms of exclusion; its phenomenal demonstrations of wealth, and its lawless youth cultures, foster sartorial thinking that Breward has characterised as distinctive, chaotic and crosscutting.10 The road from Stratford to the luxurious hedonism of the London and Paris fashion world did not change McQueen’s uncompromising attitudes – close creative friendships with upper class figures like Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness were only the exceptions that proved the rule. After leaving his comprehensive secondary school in 1985 at sixteen, with just one pass subject – Art – McQueen found his way, almost by accident, into the bespoke side of London sartorial heritage, as an apprentice tailor at the venerable Savile Row firm, Anderson & Sheppard, followed by a short time at Gieves & Hawkes, a few doors away. He worked for theatrical costumiers, Angels, then for Londonbased Japanese designer, Koji Tatsuno, before he took himself on a one-way ticket to Milan to talk his way into working with Romeo Gigli. Returning to London after less than a year, he found his way, against the odds, into the prestigious MA in Fashion at Central St Martins under the legendary teacher, Bobby Hillson (he’d offered himself as a pattern cutting instructor; Hillson detected something extraordinary in him and asked him to return with drawings, on the basis of which she admitted him to the course). McQueen’s life is usually presented – in biography and fashion commentary – as a brilliant, tragic trajectory, traced from his MA graduating show in 1992 to his suicide aged 40 on February 11, 2010, shortly after presenting his last complete collection ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ (S/S 2010) in October 2009. In Alexander McQueen’s approximately two decades in fashion, he stunned, shocked, delighted, amazed, and often emotionally overwhelmed the fashion world. He presented 36 collections under his own label and four women’s wear collections a year (two haute couture and two ready-to-wear) as chief