Alexander McQueen works his magic on New York as Met unveils exhibition

Hadley Freeman The Guardian 05/02/2011 19:02

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty features all of the singular British designer's best-known work.

In life, Alexander McQueen was the risqué rebel of fashion, a designer who occasionally struggled to juggle his extraordinary creativity with the demands of commerciality; in death, he has achieved a level of establishment acceptance that he could never have dreamed possible – even with his elastic imagination.

Only four days after it was revealed that his label had received the commission of a generation, when the Duchess of Cambridge stepped out of the car wearing a wedding dress by the label's head designer, Sarah Burton, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held a preview of its retrospective of the designer's work. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty opens on Wednesday.

Since his death last year, Lee McQueen, who adopted the name Alexander for his label, has grown in prominence. It is an irony that this designer, who often played with images of mortality in his work, would have appreciated with his typically black humour.

The exhibition features all of McQueen's best-known work, from his early days in the 1990s, through his tempestuous tenure at Givenchy, to his very last collection.

The dress that was famously spraypainted mid-show by paint jets in 1999, the Chinese garden hat from his 2005 collection that was worn by his long-term muse, Isabella Blow, whose suicide in 2007 preceded McQueen's, and videos from his highly original shows all serve as reminders of the designer's unique talent.

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