This exhibit, which opened just over a year after McQueen’s tragic death (and less than a month after Sarah Burton scored the coup of dressing Kate Middleton for her wedding), set attendance records at the Met (and at the V&A, once it travelled to the UK), and is one of the ones I truly miss having been able to see. Its Wiki tells us:
The exhibit was organized by the museum’s Anna Wintour Costume Center and curated by Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda. The exhibit featured McQueen’s pieces from the archives of his own London fashion house, Alexander McQueen, and of the Parisian couture house Givenchy, as well as pieces held in private collections. The show is composed of six separate galleries, arranged by theme: “The Romantic Mind”, featuring some of his oldest work in the early 1990s; “Romantic Gothic and the Cabinet of Curiosities”, featuring his exploration of Victorian Gothic themes; “Romantic Nationalism”, examining Scottish and British identity; “Romantic Exoticism”, examining non-western influences in his designs; “Romantic Primitivism”, featuring natural materials and organic designs; and “Romantic Naturalism”, featuring his attempts to integrate themes of the natural world with technology.
The exhibit includes pieces from his first major collection, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims, created during his graduate studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Other notable collections in the exhibit include Dante, #13, VOSS, Irere, and Plato’s Atlantis, as well as Banshee, Highland Rape, The Widows of Culloden (including the original life-size hologram of Kate Moss), and Horn of Plenty.
Note: Some of these looks you might have seen in other recent retrospectives — Diane Kruger, and Zoe Saldana, and Lucy Liu. Please enjoy them anew! It’s been fun doing these and trying to decide which looks proved to be memorable. Despite how famous this exhibit proved to be, I’m not sure if any of the celebrity looks had real staying power — other, I think, than Beyonce’s, which I did remember very clearly. What do you think?
