Savage Beauty: a reflection on Alexander McQueen
(glamour is a verb)
When Alexander McQueen’s posthumous retrospective was at the Met’s Costume Institute, I went with my mother to see it five times. We couldn’t stay away. The exhibition was confrontation, retribution, a deep kiss on the mouth, a wink, and a sharp slap on the arse. I was transfixed.
The show was, oh rightly named, “Savage Beauty.”
My mother was a Met member, and went there nearly every day for 50 years. The Met had been my babysitter, when I was growing up in NYC. It was free to children, it must have been, because I would go there at lunchtime, or after school, alone, whenever I wanted, or needed someplace to pass the time while my mother was at work. Or she and I would go at weekends, look at the pictures, the furnishings, wallhangings, pottery, sarcophagi, jewelry, statuary, every large and small fetish, every mark of human vanity, every lovely stain, every shriek against ugliness, against ignominy, against death and debasement, toward joy and transcendence, all gathered here, gifted or stolen or rescued, the whole of human existence piled up in one memory palace, and all of it presented to me. I loved to run up the great staircase, to turn and behold below me the bubbling flow of visitors from all over the world swarming the great hall, rilling round the gorgeous flower arrangements, themselves larger than gardens (a bequest from Jackie Kennedy? who paid for those ever-burgeoning wonders?).
So, yes — all that history. All those costumes, caught in the aspic of oil paintings, hems fluttering in cold marble carvings. I never could understand why the people around me chose to dress hideously, in togs or badly-cut dresses. Or why my own clothes were sub-par. The only places people looked beautiful to me were at the theater, in movies, or in art.
In spite of my judgements, I had no real comprehension of what modern fashion was. I understood it as fad, à la mode and then de mode, just passing through. It was already becoming disposable, mass produced, with little care for details in craft, and had been heading that way, I suppose, since WWII. So many people to dress, more and more of them. Faster, and faster, cheaper and cheaper.
What I wanted as a young girl was haute couture, but I didn’t yet know the phrase. It had a price-tag so far above my station, I had no language for it, certainly not in French. I saw pretty things hanging in Madison Avenue shops, fabulous things in mid-town, ratty things downtown. All of it grabbing at me, but quite out of reach. I could look at Vogue at the dentist’s, of course. But the fashion stories in those pages were dreams as intimate and far-away as any Grimm’s fairy tale. I never saw beautifully made modern clothes in-person, never set foot in an atelier. I had no idea I could come in direct contact with such mortal magic.
Later on, I had a friend in high school whose father knew fashion. He was a bigwig at the most chic department store in NY. I remember her family hosted a party for Valentino at their home. It was in the papers, and seemed terribly thrilling and glamorous in my imagination. My friend was a great beauty, and had been photographed at 16 by Scavullo. I still have a little black and white square cut out from his proof-sheets of their session together, a memento from her. She already knew how to dress, understood the importance of beauty and self-presentation. This awareness rubbed off on me, and clothing became an interest of mine, and continues to be to this day. Even though I didn’t really understand it as a teen.
Anyway — where am I going with this?
Yes — that ravishing, raving, cold and calculating McQueen show at the Met. It took me by the shoulders, bit my cheek, and made me see that fashion could carry the depth, evocations, and provocations of art. And I suppose that to call McQueen’s pieces ‘fashion’ is a misnomer. Better to call them clothes. Costume? No — not costume, not exactly. Too limiting.
Clothes are spells everyone needs. Essential, sensitive to occasion and revealing of personal circumstance as the food on one’s table. Clothes are substrate and substance, covering and unraveling, showing and hiding. Clothes are transformation, narration, code, protection. They are mask, masque, and exposition of self, status, and of culture. Clothes, and the whole contraption of dreaming them, making them, strutting them down a junk-pile of a runway while kids storm the venue doors, knocking down torches and accidentally setting fire to trashed cars alongside — all this was McQueen’s medium. He had great rage in him. Spontaneity. And great humor. That and unsurpassed skill as a tailor. He could look at you once and lay down a bespoke pattern for a suit, perfectly and just exactly for you.
“McQueen” is a 2018 documentary, tracking his early professional life, the development of his work and career. Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, with every gorgeous inch of it scored by Michael Nyman, it is the best possible documentary of the subject imaginable. There is wonderful archival coverage of the places where he apprenticed, worked and lived, and interviews with people still haunted by the love and experiences they shared with McQueen. The whole film is presented with an appearance of carelessness and craft, yet nothing, not one stitch, is left to chance. Almost as if McQueen had made it himself.
The most riveting footage is of his extraordinary shows, which were theatrical events, transgressive, immersive, confrontational, socially, politically, and historically aware. He really threw it in your face at those shows, he just did not care if you liked it or not. And sometimes the press got ugly. More often than not, he was their naughty darling.
I fell in love with Lee at the Met. Just enraptured by his work, so personal, hand-made, so purposefully concocted, shoving the viewer into bedlams, but never itself unhinged, never giddy. As with every other magnificence on museum display, McQueen’s show clothes are far beyond my means, and would have been so while he was living. I would not buy the McQueen brand ready-to-wear now. I don’t think he would either. It’s next to nothing. Not notable enough even to be sacrilege. Which middle-finger was his signature gesture.
I don’t know if that retrospective will ever materialize and tour again. I suppose a great many of its wonders were on loan by individuals and institutes. But, the documentary is a great way to get a sense of the guy, as an artist, a son, a lover of dogs.
For McQueen was not a brand. He was a common man.