ELENA PATRIGNANI

ALEXANDER MCQUEEN: SAVAGE BEAUTY REVIEW

(14 March- 2 August 2015 V&A London)

1. Alexander McQueen biography

 

Lee McQueen was born in 1969 in the East of London. Son of a taxi driver and a social teacher, the young McQueen left school at the age of sixteen and started an apprenticeship with the Savile Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard. At the age of twenty he worked with Romeo Gigli in Milan and then, in 1990, he returned back to London. Here he attended the prestigious Fashion Design course at Central Saint Martins. After leaving college, the designer started to work on his own line under the label Alexander McQueen.
His incredible talent was immediately noticed by the influential and eccentric stylist Isabella Blow, at the time a Vogue fashion editor. She bought the designer's graduate collection and started to promote the emergent Alexander McQueen in the fashion business.
“The designer's early collections, such as Nihilism (spring-summer 1994) and Highland Rape (autumn-winter 1995) relied on shock tactics rather than wearability, a strategy that helped him establish a strong identity […] McQueen introduced extraordinary narrative and aesthetic content to his runway shows. Styling, showmanship, and dramatic presentation became as important as the design of the clothes”. The theatrical effect of his shows was enhanced by the extravagant accessories, realized by his loyal collaborators such as Shaun Leane, Naomi, Filmer, Philip Treacy.
“From the start McQueen understood the commercial value of shock tactics in the British fashion industry, which had almost no infrastructure despite its reputation for innovation”. 

In 1996 Alexander McQueen took over John Galliano, becoming designer in chief at Givenchy in Paris; in the same year was named the British Designer of the Year. “McQueen sold a controlling share in his business to Gucci in December 2000 and left Givenchy early in 2001, continuing to show under his own name in Paris rather than London”.
Alexander McQueen launched its first menswear collection in Spring/Summer 2005 and launched an online store in the US in 2008. This was later expanded with an online store for the UK market in 2010.

“McQueen's suicide was announced on the afternoon of 11 February 2010. At the time of his death, the company had debts of £32 million despite posting profits from handbag sales in 2008”.

 

2. Fashion exhibition's curators:

 

Andrew Bolton (curator of Savage Beauty exhibition at the Met, NY)

“As curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute since 2006, Andrew Bolton is recognized for having spearheaded some of the most groundbreaking and innovative fashion exhibitions in the museum’s history. Most noted for the phenomenally successful 'Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty' retrospective in 2011, Bolton has also overseen ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion. A graduate of anthropology from the University of East Anglia, Bolton spent 10 years at the Victoria & Albert museum in London before decamping for New York.
A celebrated curator, Bolton has been awarded the ‘Best Design Show’ award by the International Association of Art Critics for an exhibition on couturier Paul Poiret. In 2009, Bolton was awarded with the AIGA Design Award and the Independent Publisher Book Award for 'Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy' catalogue”. 

Claire Wilcox (curator of Savage Beauty exhibition at the V&A, London)

“Claire Wilcox is the V&A's senior curator of fashion, where she is responsible for the 20th-century and contemporary dress collections. She is also professor of fashion curation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.
During her time at the V&A, Wilcox has curated many headline exhibitions including Radical Fashion (2001), Vivienne Westwood (2004) and The Golden Age of Couture (2007). She was also the lead curator of the redisplay of the V&A’s permanent fashion collection (2012) and originating curator (V&A) for the Europeana Digital Fashion Project. In 2015 she curated the landmark exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”.

3. About the exhibition

 

According to Valerie Steele fashion exhibitions have gained an increasingly importance in the last years because they are become new strategic sites where to show fashion along with the catwalk shows and the retail stores. The entrance of fashion in museums demonstrates that these institutions have recognized the importance and the influence of this field in our society and culture.

Savage Beauty was organized by the Costume Institute of New York and curated by Andrew Bolton,  curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute since 2006.
The most beautiful and relevant pieces of the designer's archive, from his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation, are showed like real works of art which emphasize the theatrical side of fashion.
The exhibition at the V&A has been enhanced by Claire Wilcox, in order to showcase in the best way the work of one of the most influential spokesperson of the British fashion. “The exhibition  includes 66 additional garments that were not shown in New York City such as the white feathered dress from The Horn of Plenty (A/W 2009), a red ballet dress from The Girl Who Lived in the Tree (A/W 2008) and a Sworvski crystal mesh top from No.13 (Spring/Summer 1999) as well as showing footage from McQueen’s catwalk shows on the screens”.

Following the line launched by Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute, the retrospective does not follow a chronological order, but instead it is based on thematic sections, which create a sensational story involving the visitors in a suggestive experience. “Vreeland's exhibitions succeeded in abolishing the aura of antiquarianism that had previously surrounded most costume displays. Her presentations were show business”.
In Savage Beauty exhibition “each room of the show has its own carefully crafted synergy between clothes and setting, providing a three-dimensional walk through the many complex elements of the designer's imagination”.

The exhibition was in partnership with Swarovski and supported by American Express,  M.A.C. and Samsung.

4. Exhibition's thematic sections

 

“Savage Beauty is a showcase of the key themes and concepts that inspired and informed Alexander McQueen throughout his career: Romanticism, the Gothic, history, nature, anatomy, and the interplay between each in his search for the sublime”. 

 

London 

 

'London's where I grew up. It's where my heart is and where I get my inspiration'
- Alexander McQueen

The first room of the exhibition focused on the importance of London for McQueen's career. The city and its urban and artistic culture were the main sources of inspiration of McQueen's collections. The room is sheathed in huge concrete blocks that recall the Gatliff Road warehouse where his first shows were staged.
Here we can find the famous bumster trousers and other pieces that features his connection with the urban culture and with the British art scene of the Nineties. 

Savage Mind

 

‘You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.’

-Alexander McQueen

This section shows the remarkable qualities of the designer as an expert tailor. He developed his sartorial skills at Savile Row, and then he applied them to its creativity, conceiving incredible silhouettes and constructions that mixes tradition with innovation.
 “McQueen expressed this originality most fundamentally through his methods of cutting and construction. These were both innovatory and revolutionary. He was such an assured designer that his forms and silhouettes were established from his earliest collections, and remained relatively consistent throughout his career”.

A Gothic Mind

People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality.’
- Alexander McQueen

“The Victorian Gothic style was one of the recurrent theme in McQueen's imaginary of fashion. Like the Victorian Gothic, which combines elements of horror and romance, McQueen’s collections often reflected paradoxical relationships such as life and death, lightness and darkness, melancholy and beauty”.

 

Romantic Primitivism

What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. There's a lot of tribalism in the collections.'
- Alexander McQueen 
”Throughout his career, Alexander McQueen frequently returned to the theme of primitivism, which drew upon the fantasy of the noble savage living in harmony with the natural world. McQueen’s reflections on primitivism were frequently represented in paradoxical combinations, contrasting modern and primitive, civilized and uncivilized.  Using materials such as hair, beads, latex and mud, McQueen imbued the garments with fetishistic qualities. It’s a Jungle Out There (Autumn/Winter 1997–98) was based on the theme of the Thomson’s Gazelle. The collection was a meditation on the dynamics of power, in particular the dialectical relationship between predator and prey”. 

 

Romantic Nationalism

'The reason I'm patriotic about Scotland is because I think it's been dealt a really hard hand. It's marketed the world over as haggis and bagpipes. But no one ever puts anything back into it.'
- Alexander McQueen
In this area the patriotism of McQueen to British and his Scottish heritage emerges in a clear way. “Alexander McQueen’s collections were fashioned around elaborate narratives that were profoundly autobiographical, often reflecting upon his ancestral history, specifically his Scottish heritage. Indeed, when he was once asked what his Scottish roots meant to him, the designer responded, “Everything. McQueen’s national pride is most evident in The Widows of Culloden (Autumn/Winter 2006) which was based on the final battle of the Jacobite Risings in 1745”.

 

The Cabinet of curiosities

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. I have to force people to look at things.'
- Alexander McQueen
“The centre point of the exhibition is the Cabinet of Curiosities: a large, double-height gallery, packed floor-to-ceiling with revolving mannequins, accessories and video screens showing all of the late designer’s catwalk shows. We see the famous dress spray-painted by robots for a show finale; the numerous showpieces created in collaboration with jeweler Shaun Leane and milliner Philip Treacy. The room is a sensory overload in the most positive meaning of the term – by creating an almost schizophrenic cacophony of visuals and concepts, it achieves something near to putting us inside McQueen’s mind”.

The final scene of the Widows of Culloden

The most suggestive section of the exhibition recreates the dramatic finale of the Widows of Culloden catwalk show in 2006. Suspended in a glass pyramid, in a room of its own, a 3D hologram shows Kate Moss floating in a gown of white organza like a real ghost; the soundtrack is from the Schindler's List movie. For the show itself, McQueen used a century old technique called Pepper's Ghost that involved mirrors and projectors.

 

Romantic Exoticism

'As a designer you go through every nook and cranny to find inspiration. I get more inspiration from the personality of a region than the actual ethnic origin I think it's more important for the evolution of any design.'
- Alexander McQueen
“Alexander McQueen’s romantic sensibilities expanded his imaginary horizons not only temporally but also spatially. As it had been for artists and writers of the Romantic Movement, the lure of the exotic was a central theme in McQueen’s collections. His exoticism was wide-ranging. Africa, China, India and Turkey were all places that sparked his imagination. Japan was particularly significant, both thematically and stylistically. The kimono, especially, was a garment that the designer endlessly reconfigured in his collections”.
Like many designers before him, McQueen was fascinated by the myth of Orientalism: this term was coined by Edward W. Said in 1978. The concept refers to the stereotyped idea that the Western culture has about “The East” (the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East). In our culture we tend to have a romanticized vision about the East which does not corresponds with the actual reality and culture of the countries. Fashion, along with literature, cinema and art, has always tried to recreate the dream and the mystery of the Oriental world, but from a Western perspective. The Romantic Exoticism section is a clear example of this idea. 

 

Voss

'It was about trying to trap something that wasn’t conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within.’
- Alexander McQueen
Typical of McQueen’s collections, VOSS offered a commentary on the politics of appearance, upending conventional ideals of beauty. For McQueen, the body was a site for contravention, where normalcy was questioned, and where the spectacle of marginality was embraced and celebrated.
'VOSS (Spring/Summer 2001), also known as the ‘Asylum’ show, was staged inside a vast two-way mirrored box. The audience was reflected in the glass before the show began but, once it started, the trapped models could not see out'. (V&A). The same effect was recreated inside the room: when there is the lights the visitors see the clothes, and when it turns off they see their reflexion in the box.

 

Romantic Naturalism

'I have always loved the mechanics of nature and to a greater or lesser extent my work is always informed by that.’
- Alexander McQueen
“Nature was the greatest, or at least the most enduring, influence upon Alexander McQueen. It was also one of the central themes of Romanticism. Many artists of the Romantic Movement presented nature itself as a work of art. McQueen both shared and promoted this view in his collections, which often included fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world”.

 

Plato's Atlantis

Plato’s Atlantis predicted 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.’
- Alexander McQueen
“Plato’s Atlantis (Spring/Summer 2010) is the last fully realized collection the designer presented before his death in February 2010. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centred not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution”.
In Plato's Atlantis, this sublime experience of nature was paralleled with and supplanted by that of technology, and the extreme space-time compressions produced by the digital age. The collection was streamed live over the internet on Nick Knight's SHOWstudio in an attempt to make fashion into an interactive dialogue between creator and consumer. With its mixture of technology, craft and showmanship, Plato’s Atlantis offered a potent vision of the future of fashion. It was considered to be McQueen’s greatest achievement. 
 

5. Critique

M. Riegels Melchior (Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums): “In the recent case of the Costume Institute’s critically-acclaimed special fashion exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty the majority of the objects on display belong to the private archive of the Alexander McQueen fashion house. The exhibition is a spectacular display that stimulates all of the senses. It is beautiful and scenographic. But as it is not museums objects on display, the guidelines for displaying dress need not be followed as extensively, as the objects are not classified as museum objects; the private owner can by example decide whether the objects should be behind glass or not, if their priority is the protection of the clothing or the more sensuous experience of the visitor”.
Rachel Cooke (The Guardian.com): “There was the intense frustration of the show's curation. It's true that the rooms look superficially magnificent, each one dressed to match a theme […] But the labels that date and explain everything are hard to find and even harder to read. Equally, the lack both of biographical information about McQueen and of any context for his work is impossible to ignore […] I could not escape the feeling that the Gucci Group, the owners of Alexander McQueen, had sought somehow to control the show, seeing it, perhaps, as an extension of its brand rather than as a serious investigation of a controversial and complicated talent”.
Suzy Menkes (Vogue UK): “When I was in conversation with Claire, she raised with me issues that are nowhere in the exhibition itself: specifically the cultural context in which the designer worked. I am not an art critic, but I cannot understand why the V&A did not put McQueen into the context of the art world of his era […] If you already know the trajectory, the information is there in these opening rooms that Wilcox presents. But there is little more to explain the early part of McQueen's life unless something is hidden in the cream-on-stone, rather unreadable captions at floor-level”.

 

6. Fashion exhibition and the city

 

Organizing a blockbuster fashion exhibition in a prestigious museum like the V&A is a strategic way not only to refresh the image of the museum, but also to reinforce the status of London as a leading fashion capital with a strong identity and fashion culture: the retrospective about McQueen was a further celebration of the British fashion in the world: traditional materials (like the Tartan), history of costume (Victorian Age silhouettes), literature (references to E. Allan Poe), contemporary art (influence of the Young British Artists), originality and creativity; all this value are expressed by his fashion. 
“The ‘blockbuster' fashion exhibition has become one of the most interesting phenomena of the past ten years”. 
Such events play a relevant role even for the economy of a city because they contribute in the increasing of tourism, attracting not only professionals but also the general public that rarely has access to the exclusive fashion world. 

Regarding Savage Beauty, the V&A lured visitors from places such as Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, Italy and Spain on the basis that they were close enough to Britain to consider a day trip to the McQueen retrospective, which will not be staged again. Visitors attended from 87 countries including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kazakstan, Mauritius. 
As M. Riegels Melchior argues, “fashion puts the museum in the general news as well as in specialized fashion media such as magazines, blogs, etc. In this way, museums reach other kinds of news channels and different audiences than those that normally visit museums on a regular basis”.

The Savage Beauty exhibition was hugely promoted not only in fashion magazines but also in city guides. As David Gilbert argues, “since the late Nineteenth century magazines and tourist guides were increasingly significant in the production of international understandings of the fashion cultures of major cities. More than the clothes of particular designers, the fashion object that was being consumed was the city itself, and the spectacle of high fashion in situ [...] An indication of the power of cities in the imagination of fashion is also shown by the word ‘London’ being Global Language Monitor’s top fashion buzzword for 2013, taking its place as the key trending word in fashion’s discourse”.

But why fashion in museum has this incredible power to attract this wide masses of visitors? According to M. Riegels Melchior, “museum visitors can easily engage with clothing, which give legacy to fashion heritage in museums. It is part of everyday life, popular culture, and entertainment in television, magazines, and consumerism. In the museum context further knowledge can be added to our immediate understanding, and here lies the challenge: not to discourage people but to catch their attention and pique their curiosity to explore the museum further during their visit”. 

Sitography and Bibliography

http://www.themetropolist.com/
http://londontheinside.com/2015/03/16/review-alexander-mcqueen-savage-beauty/
http://www.businessoffashion.com/
http://showstudio.com/
http://www.vogue.co.uk/
http://www.vam.ac.uk/
 C. Evans “Alexander McQueen”, in Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion” by V. Steele.
D. Gilbert “A new world order? Fashion and its capitals in the twenty-first century”.
S. Bruzzi, P.C.Gibson “Introduction: the changed fashion landscape of the new millenium”.
Marie Riegels Melchior “Fashion Museology: Identifying and Contesting Fashion in Museums”.