McQueen’s Moment! Sneak Peek at Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Savage Beauty’ Exhibition
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Just days after the world watched the future queen of England arrive at Westminster Abbey in a ravishing gown by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen, the Metropolitan Museum of Art unveils its stunning retrospective of the late designer’s work. The spring 2011 Costume Institute exhibition, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” opens to the public on Wednesday, but we made our way past the rolls of red carpet, topiary barricades, controlled explosions of hydrangeas, and other careful preparations for this evening’s gala benefit to attend the press preview. While we catch our breath and decipher our notes, enjoy this virtual tour of what Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell, a man not inclined to hyperbole, described this morning as “what might be the most spectacular museum costume exhibition ever mounted anywhere.”
Pictured above, the lenticular cover image of the exhibition catalogue. (Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, photograph by Gary James McQueen)
The title gallery features two dresses from Alexander McQueen’s spring 2001 “VOSS” collection, one a fiery combination of ostrich feathers and painted microscope slides and the other a white column of stripped and varnished razor clam shells. (Photo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)
“With ‘Plato’s Atlantis’ [the spring 2010 collection], Lee mastered how to weave, engineer, and print any digital image onto a garment so that all the pattern pieces matched up with the design on every seam,” says Sarah Burton in an interview in the exhibition catalogue. “That was the difficulty with the collection that followed. Where do you take it? How do you move forward?” (Photos: UnBeige)
One gallery has been transformed into a charred cabinet of curiosities, in which garments and accessories are interspersed with monitors playing footage of McQueen’s runway spectacles. Here, a balsa wood skirt from spring 1999, a headdress of metal coins from spring 2000, Shaun Leane’s “Thorn” armpiece from fall 1996, and a flutter of butterflies created by Philip Treacy out of turkey feathers for spring 2008. (Photos: UnBeige)
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