![]() "I didn't realise at the time, but I think he is a real artist in that he wanted a spectacle, a performance… He wasn't satisfied with just sending something down the catwalk that was nothing to him." "I think the dream for him was always the show," says Katy England, who helped devise the look of McQueen's early shows for his own label and the house of Givenchy (where he was head designer from 1996 until 2001). "I think when the clothes came first he probably struggled more, because he couldn't think where to place them," says Gainsbury. Removed from the context of those frenetic dancing bodies, the clothes lost something. The clothes themselves, twisting and turning on the body, seemed caught in perpetual motion, halfway between frenzy and exhaustion. For the spring/summer 2004 Collection McQueen titled "Deliverance", the designer chose to show his clothes in a dance marathon, choreographed by Michael Clare and inspired by the 1969 Sydney Pollack film They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. ![]() Those concepts extended to the clothes, of course – often tied so closely to the idea of the show that the two could not be pulled apart. Later this month, a show about those shows opens at London's Victoria & Albert Museum: titled "Savage Beauty", and originally staged at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is a thematic exploration of McQueen's aesthetic obsessions throughout his career. "He didn't give a shit about what anybody else thought or said, and when he'd come in, it'd be like he knew exactly what he wanted… he wanted to fight for it until he got it. "The thing about Lee was the pure, pure vision," says Burton. All worked tirelessly to help McQueen realise his dreams – and really, that was what his shows were about. McQueen's spring/ summer 2001 show, "Voss" – at which models walked inside a padded cell, the audience peering at them through walls of one-way mirror – cost more than £70,000 to stage and involved 200 specialist technicians. Gainsbury was one of a close-knit coterie of collaborators: others, over the years, included the stylist Katy England, artistic directors Joseph Bennett and Simon Costin, milliner Philip Treacy, make-up artist Val Garland and hairdresser Guido Palau. He almost couldn't visualise the clothes until he knew how they were going to be shown." "Sometimes the show came and then the clothes," says Sam Gainsbury, a creative director and producer who worked with McQueen from 1994 until his death in 2010. Like he always said, whether you liked it or hated it, he really wanted you to feel something."įor McQueen, the shows were at least as important as the clothes. ![]() "It was not really about showing clothes to the press, it was actually telling a story or painting a picture," says Sarah Burton, McQueen's right-hand woman, who took over as creative director of the label after his death in 2010. For McQueen, the catwalk show was more than a parade of unobtainable bodies in unaffordable clothes – the status it is so often reduced to by other designers. The remaining portions remain fully accessible through Sunday, October 9.The clothes were hardcore, but his vision reached its greatest extreme in the presentation of his collections, first in London and then in Paris. The central gallery of this exhibition is now closed. Drucker alongside artworks largely from LACMA’s permanent collection, Mind, Mythos, Muse presents a case study of the designer’s methods and influences, and in doing so, provides the opportunity to better understand artistic legacy and cycles of inspiration. Displaying select McQueen garments from the Collection of Regina J. Exploring imagination, artistic process, and innovation in fashion and art, the exhibition examines the interdisciplinary impulse that defined the designer’s career. The first McQueen exhibition on the West Coast, Lee Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse contextualizes the designer’s imaginative work within a canon of artmakers who drew upon analogous themes and visual references. ![]() His critically acclaimed collections synthesized the designer’s proficiency in tailoring and dressmaking with both encyclopedic and autobiographical references that spanned time, geography, media, and technology. One of the most significant contributors to fashion between 19, Lee Alexander McQueen (London, 1969–2010) was both a conceptual and technical virtuoso.
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