ARTS REVIEW: ALEXANDER MCQUEEN - SAVAGE BEAUTY
British Fashion Designer Exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art Is Weird...and So Cool
On average the wait is two hours long and attendance has already exceeded 550,000 for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibition, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty.” The exhibit, which opened in early May, will close at midnight, August 7th -- the first time ever that the Met has catered to late-night clientele.
“Something that not everybody wears. If everyone else wears purple, I wear green,” she said, a determined look on her face.
The same defiance can be found everywhere in the McQueen exhibit, where gowns are decorated with razor clam shells, ostrich feathers, and glass medical slides that are painted red. “I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil,”
McQueen says in the wall text, and his designs display the swings in his moods. A piece from his MA graduate collection in 1992, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, is lined with red silk and human hair. “I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” boasts McQueen.
Upon occasion, as in the Widows of Culloden Autumn/Winter Collection from 2006-2007, McQueen’s designs rethink the traditional, as he drapes tartan fabric reflecting his Scottish heritage. In a room called Romantic Nationalism, McQueen pays homage to the Victorian era which, he wrote, greatly influenced him: “The austerity, the severity, the melancholy. Scotland,” McQueen says, “has been dealt a hard hand, “marked the world over as haggis.”
In the most crowded room of all, Met curators have installed videos with dresses from various collections along with accessories. In Dress, No. 13 from the spring/summer 1999 show, a model in a white cotton muslin dress is spray-painted black and yellow by two robots. The crowd oohs and ahs in French, Dutch, German, English, Russian, and Hebrew.
“This whole exhibit is weird,” Malka says to me, “and so COOL.”
'Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty' runs at the Met in New York from May 4th to August 7, 2011
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