While most people, by now, will have heard much about the exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty currently on view (through August 7) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – not much attention has been paid to the text of the exhibition catalog from Yale University Press. As readers may remember, I wrote the tribute to McQueen for Worn Through in February 2010.
The book itself is a beautiful object, printed in Italy, with a now-familiar hologram of McQueen’s face juxtaposed with a skull. The catalog is visually stunning, and the unique nature of the photographs by Solve Sundsbo have already been discussed at length by others. Individual pieces in the exhibition are not examined in depth here – but two essays do eliminate much of Mr. McQueen’s inspiration and points of reference.
Certainly, any student of fashion will have known of McQueens interest in the gothic and the grotesque, his experimentation with unusual materials -from human hair to seashells, as well as British and Military history and above all Romanticism.
I had heard of his interest in iconic women from history. As the book notes, McQueen once said “I don’t really get inspired [by specific women] . . . It’s more in the mids of the women in the past, like Catherine the Great, or Marie Antoinette. People who were doomed. Joan of Art or Colette. Iconic women.”(115)
What I had not previously been aware of was his use of literary reference. It became obvious from the image on the cover – his own face transformed into a skull immediately brings to mind the tortured character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Curator Andrew Bolton addresses this point first in the preface to the book, highlighting the fact that McQueen had a tattoo from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on his arm, “Love Looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.” Bolton explains how this notion of love transforming something ugly into something beautiful was “critical to his creativity.” Continuing to explore McQueens work through the lens of literary criticism, Bolton compares McQueen’s use of Romantic exoticism with the work of Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Overall, the catalog has a very light touch in terms of reading – only Bolton’s esssay, an introduction by Susannah Frankel, and an Interview with Sarah Burton by Tim Blanks provide context to the stunning images. I would have loved a deeper analysis of the objects themselves – something I’ve felt has been lacking in several recent exhibition catalogs. However – this catalog is a beautiful object, and represents the most important of McQueens designs. It is a beautiful tribute to a one-of-a-kind designer.