"Savage Beauty" Exhibition may take place again in LONDON.

“Alexander McQueen appreciates the huge amount of interest the public has shown towards the Savage Beauty exhibition. We have been in discussion with a number of major venues in London for some time now however nothing has been finalised. Please be assured that an official announcement will be made the moment we confirm our plans for London.” - Alexander McQueen representatives via Daily Telegraph

"ALEXANDER MCQUEEN: SAVAGE BEAUTY" has finally closed!

 

After a successful run, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” has closed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibit featured the work of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide last year. The exhibit highlighted the Victorian romance and dark melancholy (Dark Romanticism) that inspired the designer’s work. McQueen proudly professed that he had found beauty in the grotesque, which is one quality of the Dark Romanticism. It was set to run until July 31, but the organizers had extended the show by a week to accommodate record crowds.

With about 100 ensembles and 70 accessories from collections spanning 19 years, the Costume Institute exhibition “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” reveals the inspiration behind his elaborate shows, his imaginative approach to fashion and the technical ingenuity and masterful constructions of his provocative creations.

“From opening on May 4, we have had more than 625,000 visitors,” museum press officer Nancy Chilton said, adding that the show had already seen the highest attendance of any exhibition staged by the Met’s Costume Institute. “It is among the Museum's top 20 blockbusters.”

Here are some more pictures of the exhibit.

Above: "Romantic Gothic and the Cabinet of Curiosities."

“For McQueen, fashion wasn’t just about wearability or practicality it was a vehicle to challenge our ideas, our concepts about fashion, to challenge our boundaries and challenge what we mean by beauty,” said Andrew Bolton, the curator of the exhibition that opens on Wednesday and runs through July 31. “He saw life very cinematically and I think that was reflected in his clothing.”

"Romantic Primitivism."

"Jellyfish" Ensemble, Plato's Atlantis, spring/summer 2010.

“I wanted the exhibition to unfold like a fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm fairly team. McQueen was deeply romantic in the Byronic sense of the word,” said Bolton, who added McQueen’s shows suggested avant-garde installation and performance art.

McQueen’s interest in history, patriotism and nationalism are featured in his works and shows, which each tell a story.

Left: "Oyster" Dress, Irere, spring/summer 2003. Right: Sarabande, spring/summer 2007.  The Oyster dress is made from hundreds and hundreds of layers of silk organza. In the audio voiceover, Sarah Burton explains the how the ivory chiffon is frayed and shredded to give the disheveled look  that McQueen envisioned. The dress on the right is embroidered with real fresh flowers. In the words of McQueen, "I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time."

“In terms of designers who stretch our understanding of fashion and expand the boundaries of fashion, I do think McQueen was unique,” said Bolton.

Alexander McQueen retrospective in Vogue US, May 2011

“Savage Beauty,” a retrospective of Alexander McQueen’s stunning work, opens at the Costume Institute on May 4th.

Creative director Sarah Burton shares with Vogue US her memories of working at the late designer’s side. I had posted about this event before somewhere in April of this year. And I know I haven't been keeping myself up to date with the dates... So I just want to share this story again before May ends.

Photographed by Steven Meisel, featuring Coco Rocha, Karen Elson, Stella Tennant, Caroline Trentini and Raquel Zimmerman.

WIDOWS OF CULLODEN, FALL 2006

  
“The collection was about the 1745 massacre of the Scottish Jacobites by the English, which Lee felt so passionately about because of his Scottish family heritage, which his mother had researched. The women were the widows of the slaughtered army. This dress was actually based on my wedding dress—I got married two years earlier. We had to figure out how to make lace work in the round with those ruffles because Lee hated gathering. So we cut out all of the flowers from the lace and reappliquéd it on tulle to make our own fabric. This is the collection most people remember as the one with Kate Moss in a hologram."

VOSS, SPRING 2001

“So much of this show was about the collective madness of the world. It was presented in a two-way mirrored glass box in London, and the girls had bandaged heads, acting like inmates of a mental asylum. Lee wanted the top of this dress to be made from surgical slides used for hospital specimens, which we found in a medical-supply shop on Wigmore Street. Then we hand-painted them red, drilled holes in each one, and sewed them on so they looked like paillettes. We hand-painted white ostrich feathers and dip-dyed each one to layer in the skirt.”

SARABANDE, SPRING 2007

“The collection was based on Handel’s ‘Sarabande’ in the film Barry Lyndon. It was held in the round at the Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione in Paris, with classical musicians playing onstage under a giant chandelier. This dress had fresh flowers on it. We put them on just before she went out, and they started to fall off one by one as she walked. I remember people saying Lee timed it. We had a laugh about that. It was an accident!”

IT’S ONLY A GAME, SPRING 2005

“All the girls were dressed as chess pieces, and the show was choreographed as a chess game. It was about the chessboard of fashion. Lee did have foresight and a sense of humor! This is one of the two horse pieces. He made it by commissioning Steve Powell, a hospital prosthetics expert, to make the body. And the horsetails were from the same suppliers who make the plumes for the queen’s Royal Horse Guards.”

VOSS, SPRING 2001

“This is a straitjacket, a kimono with the sleeves strapped around the back, embroidered with raised birds and flowers, and the flowers on the hat were real. I saved all the showpieces from every collection because I’m an obsessive, obsessive hoarder. Sometimes Lee would look at them again, just to remember what he’d done with something. It was his dictionary he was building, really.”