Alexander McQueen

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It's hard to find garments like that amid the high street's shapeless viscose and denim. McQueen's collections were art. As Burton says: The collection featured a number of exoticised garments, including a coat and a dress appliquéd with roundels in the shape of chrysanthemums. A fragile, blood-red glass and ostrich feather gown offered a meditation on life's transience, while a thermal image of the designer's face was woven into the fabric of a silk coat. Kate Bethune, Senior Research Assistant, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. ‘Encyclopedia of Collections’ in Alexander McQueen, ed. Claire Wilcox, V&A Publishing 2015. As with any works of art in The Met collection, the staff preserves and protects all accessioned costumes from deterioration. For this reason, no one may wear a garment after it enters the collection. You were able to photograph McQueen’s works on live models because they weren’t accessioned Museum objects, right?

Like Byron, Beethoven, and Delacroix, McQueen is an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly followed the dictates of his inspiration. As a designer, he doggedly promoted freedom of thought and expression and championed the authority of the imagination.” Our book holds up because of its exceptional photography, design, text, and curation. Andrew selected each piece to tell a broader story. Thumbnail images of some of McQueen’s fashion shows give a sense of his creative process and show how he presented his work. Quotes from McQueen about his work appear throughout the book. I do not follow fashion closely by any stretch of the imagination, but found Alexander McQueen's craftsmanship breathtaking and his complex ideas expressed about Nature, culture, politics, gender, sexuality and beauty really fascinating. The book also captures a certain moment in time. It represents a period of transition for the house as it reflected on its beginnings and looked toward the future. More people can understand the dress if it's tarnished and distressed. If you walked out in the first dress you'd be setting yourself apart form everyone but if you wore the second one people would be able to accept you. I find that untouchable Hollywood glamour alienating. It has no relevance to the way I live my life. Remember where you came from. The second dress is beautiful in a different and more authentic way.When you see a woman wearing McQueen, there's a certain hardness to the clothes that makes her look powerful. It kind of fends people off." One of the things that made the Savage Beauty catalogue such a success is the evocative imagery by fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø, and I think readers might be interested to know that there is a little more to the photographs than meets the eye. How did these images come to be? After his tailoring apprenticeship, he went on to learn exact military tailoring and then the detailed art of the Japanese kimono. Arguably the most influential, imaginative, and provocative designer of his generation, Alexander McQueen both challenged and expanded fashion conventions to express ideas about race, class, sexuality, religion, and the environment. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty examines the full breadth of the designer's career, from the start of his fledgling label to the triumphs of his own world-renowned London house. It features his most iconic and radical designs, revealing how McQueen adapted and combined the fundamentals of Savile Row tailoring, the specialized techniques of haute couture, and technological innovation to achieve his distinctive aesthetic. It also focuses on the highly sophisticated narrative structures underpinning his collections and extravagant runway presentations, with their echoes of avant-garde installation and performance art. Alexander McQueen's dashing creativity was expressed through the technical artistry of his designs and the dramatic intensity of his fashion shows. Drawing on avant-garde installation and performance art, these were also emphatically autobiographical. McQueen fearlessly challenged the conventions of fashion. Rare among designers, he saw beyond clothing's physical constraints to its conceptual and imaginative possibilities.

McQueen, arguably more of a performance artist than even a fashion designer, used every influence, everything he learned, to form his art in his unique interpretational way. Each idea was personalized using world history and his imagination. His incredible attention to tailoring, learned on Saville Row during an apprenticeship at the tailor shop used by the Monarchy, is staggering. He could cut a pattern from a vision in his head in 3 minutes!!! he always called himself a designer, not an artist. He was a showman more than anything. Still, when you think about how he designed, it did feel more about art. It was never, "Oh, is this comfortable?" It was all about the vision and the head-to-toe look of it. When you saw the models lining up, it was so clear and so direct. Lee was a designer who was making a world and telling a story. Sometimes it was on such a level that maybe the fashion audience wasn't the right audience to tell it to, but what audience was right? That's the problem I think he had. The stigma: is it fashion? Is it art? But if it's not making money, you can't do these amazing shows. Lee did care about the commercial side of the industry, but what most people remember are the shows. As a place for inspiration Britain is the best in the world. You’re inspired by the anarchy in the country.’ Right. All the works were part of McQueen’s archive and we photographed them there. The models we hired had worked as dress models for McQueen, so they were familiar with wearing his garments. We shot the photographs in December 2010, on a very fast schedule. We had to start printing the book in February so that copies would arrive from the Italian printer in time for the show’s opening in May. The finale was inspired by a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin entitled Sanitarium (1983), which depicted a voluptuous woman connected via a breathing tube to a stuffed monkey. On McQueen's catwalk, the role was played by the fetish writer Michelle Olley.

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In 2011, many people in the Museum were worried that McQueen’s work was not widely known or appreciated. The Friday before the show’s opening was the royal wedding, and Kate Middleton wore a McQueen dress created by Sarah Burton, who is interviewed in the catalogue. Suddenly, everyone in the world knew McQueen’s and Burton’s names. The first printing sold out in three weeks. The installation curated by Andrew Bolton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is absolutely wonderful, astonishing, extraordinary! I would give this book five stars if it contained photographs from the actual installation -- raw concrete stages, aged mirrors, Cabinet of Curiosities room, etc. This 8.5 minute video will give you a good overview of the "experience": http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermc... It amazes me! Perhaps it reached a tipping point and became so iconic that everyone affected by McQueen’s work wanted to have it. McQueen's romantic sensibility propelled his creativity and advanced his fashion in directions both unimagined and unprecedented. His individualistic and defiant vision was augmented by an acute sense of time and place, and a preoccupation with the exotic and the untamed. Filtered through a powerful modernity McQueen's work was, above all, driven by his fascination with the beauty and savagery of the natural world. I have always loved the mechanics of nature and to a greater or lesser extent my work is always informed by that.’

What do you think most contributes to the popularity and longevity of this book over the past decade? There has to be a sinister aspect, whether it’s melancholy or sadomasochist. I think everyone has a deep sexuality, and sometimes it’s good to use a little of it – and sometimes a lot of it – like a masquerade.’Alexander McQueen (17 March 1969 - 11 February 2010) was an icon in the fashion industry. He is currently the subject of a spectacular exhibition of his works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and this book serves as a catalogue for that exhibition. From the lenticular cover by Gary James McQueen ('Lenticular printing is a technology in which a lenticular lens is used to produce images with an illusion of depth, or the ability to change or move as the image is viewed from different angles') to the layout or deign of the book itself to the extraordinary photography (by Sølve Sundsbø) this book is an art piece by itself.