Fashion or Art?

I was feeling lost today and decided to take yet another tour at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sadly, virtually.

The second floor is dedicated to the brilliant Alexander McQueen and to his most outstanding collections.

I find his outrageous and boundaries breaking work comforting. His stories are breathtaking as are his pieces. The nature, the victorian-gothic feel, the darkness and the light, the flow and the structural shapes, the perverssity, the line between beautiful and the ugly, life and death, etc. I can understand his source of inspiration. He makes you feel that anything is possible and that beauty can be found in unusual places. Wandering in his controversial fairy tale, he makes me feel me and ok with myself.

"Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" 

 

The one piece I admire the most from his works is the white cotton dress that was spray-painted on stage by two robots and worn by the model Shalom Harlow.

Shalom described the experience: "I walked right up to it and stood on top of this circular platform. And as soon as I gained my footing, the circular platform started a slow, steady rotation. And it was almost like the mechanical robots were stretching and moving their parts after an extended period of slumber. And as they sort of gained consciousness, they recognized that there was another presence amongst them, and that was myself.

And at some point, the curiosity switched, and it became slightly more aggressive and frenetic and engaged on their part. And an agenda became solidified somehow. And my relationship with them shifted at that moment because I started to lose control over my own experience, and they were taking over. So they began to spray and paint and create this futuristic design on this very simple dress.

And when they were finished, they sort of receded and I walked, almost staggered, up to the audience and splayed myself in front of them with complete abandon and surrender.

It almost became this like aggressive sexual experience in some way. And I think that this moment really encapsulates, in a way, how Alexander related to—at least at this particular moment—related to creation. Is that all of creation? Is that the act of a human being being created, the sexual act? Is it the act of, you know, the Big Bang, if you will, that violence and that chaos and that surrender that takes place?

Alexander and I didn’t have any conversation directly related to this particular piece and to creating this moment within his show. I like to think that he wanted to interfere as little as possible and allow me to have the most genuine, spontaneous experience as possible."

In McQueen’s Words:"[The finale of this collection] was inspired by an installation by artist Rebecca Horn of two shotguns firing blood-red paint at each other. It was really carefully choreographed. It took a week to program the robots."

Be sure to klick here to see the selected objects from his collections with additional comments.