Photos (right) on display at the V&A. Savage Beauty’s 10 themed galleries include Romantic Naturalism (above) and Romantic Nationalism (below)
SUCCESS IN NEW YORK Savage Beauty was fi rst staged at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2011. Attracting almost 700,000 visitors in its four-month run, it was the most visited special exhibition organised by the Costume Institute since it became part of the museum in 1946 and one of the museum’s top 10 most visited exhibitions. Andrew Bolton was the curator of the Metropolitan exhibition. It featured 100 ensembles and 70 accessories from McQueen’s 19-year career, drawn primarily from the Alexander McQueen Archive in London, with pieces from the Givenchy Archive in Paris and private collections. Bolton says he wanted the exhibition to show McQueen’s artistry as well as illustrate how his fashion designs refl ected his imagination: “McQueen was best known for his astonishing and extravagant runway presentations, which were given dramatic scenarios and narrative structures that
©CYBERTREK 2015 AM 3 2015
suggested avant-garde installation and performance art,” he says. “His fashions were an outlet for his emotions, an expression of the deepest, often darkest, aspects of his imagination.” Bethune says the V&A inherited a brilliant curation, but wanted to refl ect McQueen’s London roots: he was born in Stratford, trained at Central St Martins, cut his teeth on Savile Row and launched his fi rst collection in London. The London gallery, an addition to the beginning of the show, was one of the big changes from New York. “We wanted to include designs from the
early collections to tell the story before he was famous, when he didn’t have any money to invest in shows and materials,” she says. “We emphasised the edginess, rawness and grittiness of the early years.”
EARLY WORK To showcase work from his early career, the curatorial team had to track down
some of McQueen’s early collaborators. “In the early days he couldn’t pay his staff salaries, so he paid them in garments.” “Those pieces were quite widely dis-
persed and lots of work went into tracking down his PRs and stylists from that time. We were lucky that his close friend and stylist Katy England let us borrow from her private collection,” Bethune says. Another development was the expansion of the show highlight, the Cabinet of Curiosities. “We had one-third more space, so we increased the curation by 25 per cent, which equated to 66 more exhibits and almost all of them went into that gallery,” she says. “His limitless imagination really came through in that space. I love the Cabinet because of its intensity and impact. We’d never achieved that in an exhibition before. Not only was this the largest retrospective of McQueen, but the largest and most ambitious fashion exhibition that the V&A’s ever staged.”
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PHOTO: ANN RAY / VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
PHOTO: VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
PHOTO: VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
PHOTO: ANN RAY / VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
PHOTO: LAUREN GREENFIELD /INSTITUTE
PHOTO: FIRSTVIEW
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