Displaying items by tag: alexander mcqueen: savage beauty

Harold Koda, who has been curator in charge of The Costume Institute since 2000, is retiring, announced The Metropolitan Museum of Art late on September 8.

The announcement comes off the back of the Met’s successful run of China: Through the Looking Glass, which attracted 815,992 visitors between May 7 and September 7, officially pipping Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (2011) to the title of The Costume Institute’s most popular exhibition.

More than 480,000 people visited Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&A, making it the most visited paid-for exhibition at the Museum ever. The exhibition was the only major UK retrospective of the work of the visionary fashion designer Lee Alexander McQueen, widely celebrated as one of the most innovative designers of his generation. 

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty was originally presented at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2010. The exhibition has been open at the V&A since March 14, operating for more than 1,000 hours for public opening and private events.

Part of Alexander McQueen’s genius and enduring influence on fashion was his constant pushing of boundaries, both through construction of clothes, and the usage of unconventional materials in making them. His fascination with birds, which began in his boyhood, extended into his professional oeuvre, manifested in ethereal and fantastical couture collections that subverted ideas of weight, structure, and conventional beauty. Yet his mastery at tailoring was equally evident in even the most unadorned of garments, with jackets cut severely to emphasize various parts of the body, and extremely low-cut trousers aptly named “bumsters.”

The V&A has experienced record breaking advance ticket sales for the upcoming "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" exhibition. 30,000 advance tickets have been sold and pre-bookable tickets for the first five weekends of the exhibition are completely sold out. This breaks the museum's records for most ever advance sales with the figure likely to rise with another 2 months to go before the exhibition opens.

The exhibition has been extended by 2 weeks and will now finish on August 2, 2015, and early morning and late evening slots have also been added to help satisfy demand.

Tate Britain is presenting a photography exhibition the result of which is an unique collaboration between the artist Nick Waplington and the acclaimed fashion designer Alexander McQueen. This well timed exhibition will reveal McQueen’s working practice through a selection of over 130 large and small scale photographs, including images never seen before. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the Victoria and Albert Museum’s "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" fashion exhibition.

Waplington photographed McQueen’s idiosyncratic creative journey as he prepared and presented his final Autumn/Winter collection, The Horn of Plenty, in 2009.