Photo: Courtesy WWD
After a wildly successful run in 2011 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” will open at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in March 2015, and it will be “edited and expanded,” reports Women’s Wear Daily. Fans are so eager to see the show that almost 16,000 people have already bought advance tickets, according to the museum—so patrons, act fast.
The London showing will feature 30 additional garments and a new section that looks at the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s earlier, and often controversial, shows that he staged in London during the 1990s.
Senior curator of fashion at the V&A, Claire Wilcox, said at a preview that the exhibition “situates McQueen in his home city.” “The early days were full of raw energy and creativity but no cash, and McQueen was thought pretty hard-edged…[while] his style may have been subversive…it was entirely underpinned by exceptional skill.”
Alexander McQueen’s creative director, Sarah Burton, said that the exhibition showcases “in a way, more raw-er pieces—when there was no production and McQueen was making a lot of the pieces himself. When you look at Lee’s graduate portfolio…in those sketches there was so much information that he used again and again and re-worked.” Burton added: “it’s maybe a different period, but it’s not a different hand. That’s what’s interesting, it was all there at the very beginning.”
The exhibition will also significantly expand on the designer’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which will display designs that McQueen created in collaboration with Shaun Leane and milliner Philip Treacy.
To coincide with McQueen’s retrospective, the Tate Britain will also open a parallel exhibition of photographer Nick Waplington’s images documenting the designer’s working process in creating his “Horn of Plenty” Fall 2009 collection.
“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” will run from March 14–July 19, 2015, at the V&A Museum in London.