Even with its most avant-garde architect off the runway and dabbling in the afterlife as of last year, the McQueen hallmark stamped in fashion’s every wrinkle will never fade. The very timelessness of McQueen’s creative genius and meticulous construction, inspired New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art to house ‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’ in honor of the late and great designer.
The exhibit epitomizes the life and legacy of the guiding garment engineer by showcasing his extraordinary contributions to fashion, both traditional and revolutionary. In addition to applauding the aesthetic of his intricately cut and divinely draped work, the presentation and each unique gallery within it seek to explain the ways in which Alexander-the-artist used clothing as a palette for conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. Added to the obvious utility apparel’s been assigned, McQueen wove philosophy into the threads; Romanticism guided his sewing hand into realms of revolution intertwined with custom, modernity mixed with antiquity, the elaborate networks in nature, and the perplexity of privitism. To be robbed of a craftsman with such stylistic finesse and profundity is asphyxiating, but the Met’s McQueen memorabilia will assure that the fashion world will never forget.
When the runway’s modern-day Einstein was found hanging in his wardrobe by his housekeeper on February 10th last year, his suicidal strangling not only suffocated him, but severed fashion’s future. The 40-year old lynched in the clothes closet of his London home was born prior as Lee Alexander McQueen to Scottish parents in England. Beginning to create dresses for his sisters at a young age, a young McQueen declared his designer status early and climbed the creative totem pole as a working class artist. By the age of 16, he’d scored an apprenticeship with Savile Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard where he established his expertise and reputability in perfecting an immaculately tailored look.
Later in his clothing career, McQueen offered his extravagant taste and practiced precision as a chief designer at Givenchy until 2001 when he fled to evade the ‘stifling’ of his creativity. After parting ways with from Givenchy, the latter parts of McQueen’s professional narrative featured him founding his own company, Alexander McQueen, the name under which he would employ a plethora of celebrity patrons and laudably win four British Designer of the Year awards as well as the CFDA’s International Designer of the Year award.
‘Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty’, open at the Met until August 7th, consists of six distinct galleries each of which embodies McQueen’s recurring themes that runways, high-fashion photogs, and artistic aficionados cherish. Between ‘The Romantic Mind’, ‘Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities’, ‘Romantic Nationalism’, ‘Romantic Exoticism’, ‘Romantic Privitism’ the Romantic era that rebelled against industrialization, reform, and the rationalization of science became McQueen’s crowning glory over his prolific 19-year career.
The first of six era-influenced sections,’ The Romantic Mind’ emphasizes originality and innovation in the hero-artist whose freedom of thought is limitless. While such ingenuity should enter in the technical stages of tailoring, this is also where traditional skill and knowledge should mesh with his imaginative impulsiveness as McQueen himself so clearly said, “You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.” 
McQueen’s incredible ingenuity was apparent early as his graduation collection from the Fashion Design MA course at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Entitled Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (1992), it introduced such iconic designs as the three-point “origami” frockcoat. In his first collection after graduating, entitled Taxi Driver (autumn/winter 1993-94), McQueen launched his “bumsters,” pants that sat so low on the hips that they revealed the backside. Such new-age silhouettes were born in the beginning of his career and persisted throughout, now an inspiration to designers of our day.
The second of the Romantic galleries, ‘Romantic Gothic and Cabinet Of Curiosities’ highlights McQueen’s historical interests, particularly his creative exploration of the Victorian Gothic. These Edgar Allen Poe-inspired melancholic and somber aspects of his work accentuate what’s morose in life, “People find my things sometimes aggressive. But I don’t see it as aggressive. I see it as romantic, dealing with a dark side of personality,” he explained. These “shadowy fancies” that Poe writes about are evident in many of McQueen’s collections, most notably Dante (autumn/winter 1996-97), Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (autumn/winter 2002-3), and the posthumous, unofficially entitled Angels and Demons (autumn/winter 2010-11). Lastly, the Victorian Gothic incorporates striking contrasts and dichotomies such light versus darkness, mixing what is morbid and macabre with vivacity, etc. The dark side of the mind and these startling contradictions especially sparked McQueen’s interest.
‘Romantic Nationalism’, as the name suggests, smelled of McQueen’s patriotic impulses in the gallery room. He drew his incredibly autobiographical silhouettes from fascination with his Scottish heritage, which he always said meant, ‘everything’ to him. His national pride is most evident in the collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995-96) and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006-7), both of which explore Scotland’s turbulent political history during the 18th century Jacobite Risings, and the 19th century’s Highland Clearances against a brutal and bloodthirsty Britain. Despite some resentful remarks about his British birthplace, “what the British did there [in Scottland] was nothing short of genocide”, McQueen still felt semi-national ties to the UK, especially to London. He confessed, “London’s where I was brought up. It’s where my heart is and where I get my inspiration,” and his muse in London town is certainly apparent in his The Girl Who Lived in the Tree (autumn/winter 2008-9), a dreamy fairy tale inspired by an elm tree in the garden of McQueen’s country home near Fairlight Cove in East Sussex.
Other cultures impacted the great McQueen in a way that allowed his imagination to span both traditional and geographical horizons. ‘Romantic Exoticism’ shows the ways in which India, China, Africa, and Turkey all stirred inventive juices, particularly Japan from which he reconfigured the kimono to no end. McQueen spoke of his exotic affection and cultural curiosity proudly, “My work will be about taking 
elements of traditional embroidery, filigree, and craftsmanship from countries all over the world. I will explore their crafts, patterns, and materials and interpret them in my own way.” As a large part of his exotic pallet, McQueen once again employed his contrasting opposites amidst his exploration of alien civilizations to make political statements. This was the case with It’s Only a Game (spring/summer 2005), a show staged as a chess game inspired by a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), which pitched the East (Japan) against the West (America). External influences were not only utilized, but also embraced and celebrated throughout the threads.
Lastly, in line with the undomesticated ideals of the Romance era, ‘Romantic Privitism’ and ‘Romantic Naturalism’ condemn the rationalization of nature in a way that also celebrates the human who dwells in nature. McQueen plainly put it as the ‘noble savage living in harmony with the natural world’ He aimed to paint a realistic rather than romanticized picture of humans living in nature in his reflection on privitism. Such was the focus of his first runway collection after college, Nihilism (spring/summer 1994). McQueen said of the collection, “It was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford.”
As for putting his nose in naturalism, McQueen used natural stimuli every step of the way from a conceptual muse, to the extraction of raw working materials. McQueen acknowledged nature as the locus of his imagination, “I have always loved the mechanics of nature and to a greater or lesser extent my work is always informed by that.” The centrality of nature in his work is most reflected in Plato’s Atlantis (spring/summer 2010), the last fully realized collection the designer presented before his death in February 2010. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centered not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution. Nature is the nerve center and enlightening nucleus of McQueen’s designs worn by the humans who populate it.
“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” is located in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, second floor, and is free with Museum admission. There will be a wait to enter the exhibition, but toy with an engaging activity as you move through line; the new “McQueen Line Trek: The Taming of the Queue” is available to play via a new app or a text message. See the Met’s website for instructions and updates on operating hours set to change during the last week of the exhibit, ending on August 7th. Semantically, ‘Savage Beauty’ encapsulates all that our beloved McQueen idealized; it depicts a savage and her boorish existence in all the rustic natural networks, but even the raw and untamable environment can’t erode her immaculate beauty. This woman who embodied such dichotomies of sophistication versus barbarity, liveliness mixed with morbidity, and any other opposites in his Romantic world was McQueen’s mannequin; she was his muse, and she stands in the Met.
