Review: Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
In that rarefied, and manufactured world that surrounded Alexander McQueen during his terribly short life, he was careful to cultivate his intellectual yearnings, as well as his creative ambitions. In “Savage Beauty,” we can see that McQueen had more to work with than the average designer’s pea’s worth of a brain, his brilliant intellect embellishing the sculpted work more than all the blood-red beadwork, gold thread, and metallic sequins in the world. For McQueen, design aesthetics and fashion were deeply imbedded within the political and the historical (and vice versa), a vision that allowed him to see “beyond clothing’s physical constraints to its ideational and ideological possibilities”.
When he regarded the ‘African’ as many designers do, McQueen invoked the Romantic to exoticise and frame the African as ‘primitive’ in the same old problematic manner: “What I do is look at the ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress…there’s a lot of tribalism in the collections.” In It’s a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was “inspired by the Thomson’s gazelle” (“the poor critter” at the bottom of Africa’s food chain) there’s a lot of brown skin, gazelle horns, and miniature crocodile and vulture skulls. We are assured that “all were by-products”—the animals were killed for meat, and not solely for their skin or fur.
