MUSEUMS
IT’S AN EXTREMELY POWERFUL SHOW AND A PRIVILEGE TO OBSERVE MCQUEEN’S WORK AT SUCH CLOSE QUARTERS
FIRST
PERSON Kath
Hudson, journalist
V 74
isceral and captivating, Savage Beauty is an assault on the senses. There’s something
appropriately discomforting about the show – and it feels like a show, not an exhibition. I’m assuming Alexander McQueen would have approved: he said he wanted people to be scared of the women who wore his clothes. The clothes are beautiful, and occasionally frightening: religious motifs become sinister, crocodile skulls are a surprising addition to the shoulders. The black swan dress, which Naomi Campbell famously wore, is aggressive, but with an admirable beauty. The further through the exhibition you progress, the more you have the sense of looking at works of art as opposed
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A dress in the Cabinet of Curiosities gallery at the V&A (above) was famously spray- painted by robots as part of Alexander McQueen’s S/S collection in 2013 (left)
an orchestra playing Adagio for Strings, from a collection exploring war and religion. I could have stayed there for
to garments. Light and sound enhance the experience. The high point – certainly the most overwhelming part of a consistently overwhelming exhibition – is the Cabinet of Curiosities. This double- height gallery has three tiers of exhibits: clothes, shoes, headwear. Some exhibits are revolving, and interspersed with 27 video screens showing footage of McQueen’s shows. Each wall refl ects a different theme: gothic, other cultures, arts and crafts, and nature and
the natural world. In the middle is the paint-splattered dress from the Number 13 collection, when a model stood on a rotating disk and the dress was spray-painted by two robots. Visually, it’s a busy gallery, and the soundtrack, put together by Matt Gosling, creates an eerie sense of unease. There’s a typewriter from A/W 1999/2000 collection the Overlook, which was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s fi lm The Shining; a child singing from A/W 2001/2002 collection What a Merry-Go-Round and
hours, admiring creations like the outlandish armadillo shoes, but after a while I started to feel how a baby must when it gets overstimulated. The child singing also had a horror movie quality which creeped me out. More powerful exhibits follow: a recreation of the padded cell fashion show, where the audience could see in, but the models only saw mirrors; and the Pepper’s Ghost of supermodel Kate Moss. Savage Beauty ends with the
fi nal collection, when McQueen’s craftsmanship was at its fi nest. It’s an extremely powerful show and a privilege to observe his work at such close quarters. ●
AM 3 2015 ©CYBERTREK 2015
PHOTO: VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON
PHOTO: CATWALKING
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