Last week when I was in New York, I was lucky enough to go to the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was one of the most incredible exhibitions I have ever seen, and it made me appreciate and understand a little bit more about his work. No words can explain how incredible it was.
"There is no way back for me now. I am going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed were possible."
A Sense of Intrigue - Tony Hymas
"I oscillate between life and death, happiness and sadness, good and evil."
Kate Moss Hologram (AW06-07)
Plato's Atlantis (SS10)
Sarabande (SS07)
Ashu (AW00-01)
The Horn of Plenty (AW09-10)
"I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress."
The Overlook (AW99-00)
Widows of Culloden (AW06-07)
"I'm a romantic schizophrenic. Some people think I've become softer, but it's always been in my work. There may be an Edgar Allan Poe romance to it - it's not a heart-on-your-sleeve type thing - but that's just my personality. I've always been very sensitive, very romantic, but not everyone has seen that."
(AW10-11)
"I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I'm dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen."
Untitled (SS98)
Voss (SS01)
"[In this collection] the idea was to turn people's face on themselves. I wanted to turn it around and make them think, am I actually as good as what I'm looking at?"
"The show was staged inside a huge two-way mirrored box, whereby the audience was reflected in the glass before the show began and then the models could not see out once the show started."
"These beautiful models were walking around in the room, and then suddenly this woman who wouldn't be considered beautiful was revealed. It was about trying to trap something that wasn't conventionally beautiful to show that beauty comes from within."
Highland Rape (AW95-96)
All images and quotes taken from here and the book Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (by the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
