MCQUEEN AT THE MET
Originally published June 28, 2011 for The Gentleman Tramp
Why This Exhibit is Just So .. F–ING … Good
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (extended now to August 7th) could potentially become one of the most popular shows in the Metropolitan’s 160-year history. Why exactly the show is so popular, I don’t profess to explain. McQueen was a global brand, and I guess you could say a “household name,” but I seriously doubt even 1 in 50 of the show’s visitors would have been able to name the fashion house for which he worked. (It was Givenchy.) Maybe McQueen’s exquisite artistry, theatrical flair and tragic demise make for the perfect art blockbuster. I don’t know. What I can say is that Savage Beauty is the best fashion retrospective––and honestly one of the best art shows––I have ever seen. I went twice––both times reduced to quiet sobs––and while I was trying to figure out what makes this show so f-ing good, I landed upon a more specific question: why does this fashion retrospective make others (sorry Armani and Valentino) look so, how shall I say, flat by comparison? The answer, I hypothesize, boils down to one thing, one little curatorial adjustment that solves one gigantic problem.
You see, while clothing tends to look great on people, it tends to look like shit in a museum. This is through no fault of the garments themselves, it’s just the whole point of fashion is to dress human beings, so by definition removing the human from the equation reduces the intended effect. Clothing is like a puppet, without a human hand, it just sort of drapes there, still beautiful, still worthy of its pedestal, but missing something. So what to do? How does one breathe life back into the threads? It’s all in the head. Curator Andrew Bolton and the McQueen production team embraced McQueen’s love of hats, masks and head pieces, adding one or the other to almost every dress in the show. It seems like a obvious move, but think about it. Instead of a deadening, blank, mannequin head, you get a leather gimp mask, or a crown of golden duck feathers or massive antlers ripping through lace. By simultaneously incorporating and obscuring the mannequin’s head the dress-form disappears, and a presence –– not quite human, not quite sculpture, sort of a beautiful zombie sexy alien –– takes its place.
“But how can it breathe in that thing?” I asked myself, observing the woman––I mean mannequin––whose head was encased in red bugle beads. That’s when I realized I wasn’t simply looking at masterfully made dresses, but feeling them, imagining the pain of the wire bodices or the horns growing from their bones, the terrible––or perhaps erotic––asphyxiation of the leather, the impossibility of the Armadillo Boot. These recoiling, bewitching, eyes-to-gut reactions are the hallmark of McQueen and what facilitated that experience, what transposed the show from academic to visceral, from “isn’t that just gorgeous” to literal breathes being taken from my lungs, were the head pieces. They were, at the very least, my subconscious entry point. And once the dresses have presence, have character, everything else builds from there. The story can be told. And boy is it told well, not simply as a series of collections, but as a series of counterpoints, from dark to light, demonic to angelic, organic to technologic, cultivated to savage.
As any good visual story should do, the exhibit employs a full bag of mis-en-scène tricks to heighten drama and underscore themes. The lighting, the sets, punctilious and well done, but the sound was scored to perfection, transitioning from cold and somber to happy-go-lucky; wind and wolves in one room, then fanciful orchestral in the next. Back and forth, sad then happy, despair then hope. In one room a humanoid voice interlaces with a solo violin while in the opposite corner two moaning voices echo from an unidentified source. It reminded of the time I barged in on a roommate, thinking she was perhaps being strangled to death, only to find her in the throws of passion. One of nature’s little jokes, I mean, why not make ecstasy and agony sound exactly the same? We moan when we hurt; we moan when we come. And maybe that’s the point of it all. McQueen loved to toe that uncomfortable line between that which makes us feel good and that which makes us suffer. Which perhaps is why he got into so much trouble over the years. The robot paint guns, the sad tango with the woman being dragged across the floor, “Highland Rape,” these are not pleasant images or ideas. Some might even call them distasteful. Suzy Menkes elaborates, “Distasteful images? But a reflection of our nasty world. And a powerful fashion designer always ingests the ether of modern times.” And speaking of ether, the highlight of the exhibit was no doubt the hologram. Obviously, I never saw the full scale rendition (my invite to the Paris couture show was lost in the mail) but it’s magic seemed all the more potent in the miniature.
It catches you completely by surprise, this tiny shimmering, three dimensional specter which slowly forms into a little angel who just happens to be a Ms. Kate Moss––who at the time of the original fashion show was a certified cultural anathema, in the middle of her cocaine scandal, or in McQueen’s eyes, the ideal figure to star in his show. She simply twirls, wrapped in festoons of organza which float about her in slow motion––a fallen angel swimming inside a cloud. The image lasts no more than a moment before she blurs and shrinks into a ball of light, igniting into spinning atoms which collide and vanish. A moment of exquisite beauty too ethereal to exist, too powerful, too unstable and so loses its structure, loses its form, and almost as soon as it forms, it is gone, imploding in a burst of white light. And then darkness. And then the cycle begins again. “As soon as it’s born, it’s dead,” McQueen once said about a collection. “You’re there, you’re gone …” The truly good stuff in life tends to do that. Rest in peace good sir.