Costume Institute Gala 2011 : Alexander McQueen : Savage Beauty

[j´adore dior]

Man, I'd fly to NYC just to see that exhibit if I had the time and money. Hopefully I'll be able to get the book somehow: those photographs look amazing. I love the mannequins they used!

It will probably be available at amazon.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

^Yes, on Amazon the book for UK Customers is listed as £23, and the release date is the 30th April, for American Customers the release date is the 31st of May at $24.

 

[speakmylanguages]

Amazing... love how the mannequins look worn out, looks like they just sanded them down in certain places..it gives a good effect. I cannot wait for this book.

 

[Phuel]

Man, I'd fly to NYC just to see that exhibit if I had the time and money. Hopefully I'll be able to get the book somehow: those photographs look amazing. I love the mannequins they used!

Yes, the mannequins are sublime-- part greco-roman artistry with the rawness in the sculpt, and part modern sleekness with the faceless heads. That juxtaposition of antiquity and modernity captures the unique spirit of McQueen's vision so supremely. Love.

Thank you Chanelcouture09 for sharing the pics from the book. It's definitely by far the most beautiful volume that will be out of this Visionary, but at only 224 pages, and a demure dimension of 25x15x1.5cm, this appears to be such a weak tribute to such a strong individual. I hope that there are plans by the likes of Nick Knight and Fabien Baron to produce a deserving volume to this design genius.

Anyway, tacky celebrities won't deter me from seeing this sure-to-be supreme exhibit. Can't wait.

 

[hautechild]

I'm very much looking forward to seeing the exhibition. To see so many of McQueen's works in person, it will be amazing.

 

[Kaki]

I've been wanting to return to NYC and this may be the perfect excuse! I would LOVE to see this exhibit. I'm interested in the book as well but at a mere 224 pages? I'll have to wait for more information!
I agree with everyone that celebrities tend to destroy McQueen, but I'm still so eager to see what everyone wears!

 

[Flashbang]

THE MET SET: McQueen momentum is building: On Tuesday morning, organizers of “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” swooped into London’s Ritz hotel to offer more details about the upcoming exhibition devoted to the late designer’s work at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “McQueen showed us that clothing can be a form of art, that it has a purpose beyond wearability, and that it can be a way of conveying ideas and concepts,” said Andrew Bolton, who curated the show that will run from May 4 to July 31. “McQueen’s shows always challenged the viewer, and his work was always inspired, I think, by a search for love.”

Bolton spoke before an audience that included Britain’s First Lady Samantha Cameron, Stella McCartney, Shaun Leane, Philip Treacy and Sarah Burton, creative director of Alexander McQueen. Susannah Frankel, fashion editor of The Independent, has written a biography of McQueen for the catalogue that will accompany the show, while the British fashion writer Tim Blanks interviewed Burton about her memories of McQueen’s design process and inspirations.

Sølve Sundsbø shot the photographs, and Leane reconditioned all of his original jewelry and silver pieces for the show. Bolton said that, thanks to McQueen’s colleagues, former colleagues and friends, he was able to secure almost all of the outfits he needed for the show.

“Only one continues to elude me: It’s a coat with three points. I have a softer version of the coat from McQueen’s MA show, but I can’t locate the more solid, structured one,” he said. “I’d love to find it.”

wwd.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

More from the book....


*nymag.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

....

*nymag.com

 

[Chanelcouture09]

The Accompanying Article :

On May 2 the annual Met Ball kicks of the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute's new exhibit, Savage Beauty, a retrospective of Alexander McQueen's work. The hefty catalogue of the exhibit was recently distributed, and it features new glorious photos of some of the late designer's most glorious pieces. The book also includes Tim Blanks's interview with McQueen's successor, Sarah Burton — one of the most extensive that's been conducted to date.

Burton tells Blanks that when McQueen (she calls him by his first name, Lee) got the call from LVMH to go to Givenchy, he merely thought they were calling him to do a handbag collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which was the hot thing in fashion at the time. Burton went with him to Givenchy. "We had one pattern-cutting table, which used to belong to Body Map and Flyte Ostell, with chairs that didn't reach the table. When Lee got the Givenchy job, we got chairs that reached the table," she tells Blanks. "And he was really excited because it meant there was money coming in, and he could do things he'd never done before."

One of the most memorable collections from those days was for fall 1999, "which involved a model in a Perspex robotic body," Burton says. "The guy who made the robot told us ten minutes before the model walked out, 'If she sweats in the suit, she's going to electrocute herself. So tell her not to sweat.'"

"Every collection began with a show," Burton adds. McQueen designed in complete looks — hair, makeup, shoes, the works. "Shoes were really important because they anchored the look. The 'Armadillo' shoe from [spring 2010 show] 'Plato's Atlantis' was based on a ballet point shoe designed by Allen Jones. They were actually quite comfortable to walk in, but if a girl couldn't walk in them, she wasn't in the show."

Blanks asks Burton if the big spectacles McQueen was known for "satisfied" him. Burton replies, "He really loved the shows. He used to say, 'This is the last big one we're doing,' but he couldn't help himself. Lee just didn't like doing normal catwalk shows and so much was expected of him."

Burton says one of her challenges moving the label forward is finding things McQueen hasn't done. "With 'Plato's Atlantis', Lee mastered how to weave, engineer, and print any digital image onto a garment so that all the pattern pieces matched up with the design on every seam. That was the difficulty with the collection that followed. Where do you take it?" she explains. "He wanted to talk about the craftsmanship, about the old techniques that are being lost, and how people don't do things with their hands anymore."

Burton recalls McQueen's handiwork in the houndstooth jacket in look No. 2 of the fall 2009 show. "He slashed it, cut an asymmetrical kimono sleeve, and took the collar off and recut it. He laid a piece of fabric on the floor and cut it to make just the right collar shape. It was incredible." See many more incredible pieces he made, with quotes from him about each look

*nymag.com

 

[alonsoJonathan]

^woww amazing!

 

[Chanelcouture09]

From The Press Conference, more looks from the book....


*magazine.motilo.com

 

[Psylocke]

The shots from the book are breathtaking Thanks for posting!
(BTW, what season is that first look with the skeleton tail in #48 from?)

 

[Chanelcouture09]

^It was Spring Summer 1998.

 

[Psylocke]

^Thanks!

 

[cottonmouth13]

Those pictures from the book look absolutely breathtaking! True definition of creativity.

 

[Rigida]

I wish i could go to NY.. and i really want that book! it looks spectacular..

 

[ToniOrtega]

Truly Beautiful!!

 

[kiseki]

i hope it will exhibit in london!

 

[Spike413]

An interesting piece about the photography of the exhibit catalog.

A Mannequin in Every Sense

By ERIC WILSON

Published: April 13, 2011

LITTLE more than a year ago, during a small posthumous presentation of the collection Alexander McQueen had been designing in the days just before he killed himself, Polina Kasina, one of his favorite models, appeared in a form-fitting coat made of thousands of gold-painted duck feathers, worn over a full white skirt embroidered with gold threads. It was the final look of what would be Mr. McQueen’s final show.

So, by all accounts, it was an emotional moment when Ms. Kasina wore that outfit once again, in December, at a photo shoot in the London studio of Solve Sundsbo. Mr. Sundsbo, a photographer known for a style of digitally manipulated imagery that could be described as a modern mannerism, had been asked to document the designs that will be in the McQueen retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an accompanying catalog, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” ($45).

It was a rare opportunity for the museum to photograph the clothes it will exhibit on a live model because most of the collection belongs to the McQueen archives, rather than the Met’s Costume Institute, which prohibits a garment from ever being worn after its acquisition.

But you would hardly recognize Ms. Kasina in the images that appear in the finished book, which show the same pieces, seemingly photographed on a mannequin. At first glance, they look as if they had been composed in the traditional academic style of previous exhibition catalogs, one that suggests historically important clothing exists in an environment of perpetual sterility.

It is only when you recognize that the mannequin actually is Ms. Kasina, transformed through a combination of makeup, lighting and Photoshop, that the beauty of Mr. Sundsbo’s approach and its relevance to the work of Mr. McQueen begin to become apparent. “You are not certain whether it is real or fake,” said Andrew Bolton, the curator of the McQueen exhibition, which opens on May 4.

The rather difficult objective of the catalog was to illustrate a departed designer’s life in a way that was both editorially interesting (in the interest of the exhibition’s chief sponsor, the Alexander McQueen company) and academically sound (in the interest of the Costume Institute’s reputation). It is intended to be a reference book upon which future explorations of Mr. McQueen’s importance may be weighed, so it was important that its imagery convey the authority of the museum, not a fashion magazine.
At the same time, Mr. Bolton was intrigued by Mr. Sundsbo’s proposal to make models look like mannequins because it spoke to the blurring of boundaries — between good and evil, angels and demons, nature and technology, permanence and decay — that was a consistent theme of the McQueen collections. “The beauty of McQueen is that simultaneous feeling of awe and wonder mixed with fear and terror,” he said.

To create the images, Mr. Sundsbo photographed the collection on four models, including Ms. Kasina. Their bodies were coated with an alabaster acrylic paint, a new product from MAC cosmetics that, once dried, would not rub off on the clothes. Strings were tied around their wrists, waists and necks to suggest the joints where a mannequin’s parts would be assembled, details that were later emphasized with digital retouching during a laborious process that lasted more than two months.
In the final images, the models’ heads were replaced with featureless dummy heads or, in some cases, their heads were chopped off. The only evidence of their humanity is seen in the spaces where the paint, during the long shoots, began to chip off, a detail that Mr. Sundsbo found particularly appealing.

“The human started to break through,” Mr. Sundsbo said. “She is both artificial and flesh and blood.”

nytimes.com