Five years after his death, the life’s work of Alexander McQueen lives on. The exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is now shown at Victoria & Albert Museum in London, after being one of the most successful exhibitions ever staged at Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Everything cannot but predict a similar success in Lee’s hometown.
Savage Beauty is a portrayal of McQueen and offers a glimpse of the creative utopian universe that he created. If you didn’t realize it while he was still alive, it becomes clear now, that McQueen was and still is a designer out of the ordinary and one of the world’s most influential creative minds. The exhibition has succeeded in recreating the shapes, techniques and McQueen’s ability to relate his creations to a historic period – qualities that contributed to making him unique. In the giant halls of the V&A museum, you are able to experience the different influences that guided McQueen in his work, with themes such as Cabinet of Curiosities and Gothic Mind. The final part of the exhibition showcases McQueen’s last collection, Plato’s Atlantis from S/S 2010. It was influenced by nature studies and inspired by Charles Darwin, but instead of focusing on the evolution, Lee was more interested in the ”devolution”, a dystopian prediction of our future.
McQueen brought his dreams (and sometimes nightmares) to life, whatever they might have been, they had one thing in common: the final creations were incredible and so was the craftsmanship behind them. The work of McQueen proves everyone who defines fashion as trivial, to be wrong. Instead of seeing it as something shallow, he used fashion as an instrument, a tool for creating and expressing feelings, thoughts and fantasies. McQueen was a phenomenal talent, not just because he had a great technical knowledge and an innovative approach to fashion, but because he used those qualities to create his own universe in which he was able to question or celebrate our society and future. Most designers might have those ambitions, but few of them are able to fulfill them without losing focus on everything else going on in the fashion industry. McQueen shut that out, and focused on making his dreams – and nightmares – real. The darkness was an often returning element of McQueen’s collections, and it was also those demons who took one of the fashion world’s last real designers away. Like other creative and talented people who died too soon, too young, McQueen has reached icon-status after his death. Some people might say that this is a typical reaction to how we look at the designer of today- as a creative genius put on a pedestal. The designer has a significant role in today’s fashion industry, but that does not mean it isn’t deserved. Alexander McQueen was a special and unique designer in many ways, who left a huge void after him, of which we are even more aware after seeing Savage Beauty.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty runs through August 2nd 2015 at the V&A in London.
Hanna Cronsjö – Images courtesy of V&A MuseumR
