Alexander McQueen retrospective comes home to London
A dream journey through late fashion designer's complex mind awaits visitors to the Victoria & Albert museum
There is a prescient quote from Alexander McQueen in the landmark retrospective Savage Beauty, just opened at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which appears at the end of the show. It really should greet visitors at the start. McQueen says: “There is no way back for me now. I am going to take you on a journey you’ve never dreamed possible.”
With hindsight, he seems to predict his own tragic demise, while that dream journey is the one visitors will take through McQueen’s complex creative mind as the exhibition lays out the fantasies and inspirations that shaped one of the most compelling fashion talents of our generation.
“It’s about a homecoming,” says Martin Roth, director of the V&A. This is Lee McQueen (Alexander was his middle name) coming home, not only to the museum whose archives he would often comb for inspiration, but because the exhibition – first staged in New York at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute in 2011, a year after McQueen’s suicide – has come to his hometown of London.
McQueen was renowned for his emotive catwalk theatre, each an imaginative journey created before the first dress was designed, whether it was Joan (A/W1998) a show that closed with a model encircled by a ring of fire echoing the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, or No 13 (S/S1999) that had model Shalom Harlow posing as a fragile music box doll rotating on a plinth as two giant industrial robots sprayed her with paint. A thread of brutality and voyeurism wound its way through much of his early work.
[McQueen] was an artist who just happened to use fashion as his canvas.
The team that helped bring these strong narrative visions in McQueen’s mind to reality are those that have created the dramatic staging for this exhibition. Sam Gainsbury, of Gainsbury and Whiting, evocatively captures the darkness and the romance of McQueen’s imagination with sets like the giant gilded picture frame that encases the designer’s last, unfinished collection, for A/W 2010, and a room lined with bones that displays McQueen’s interest in romantic primitivism.