SAVAGE BEAUTY

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One of the highlights of my New York trip with Spidey: visiting Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (an exhibit of almost a hundred of McQueens collections which will go on until July 31, 2011).

* photos from the internet

Leaving the steps of the museum, I was filled with all sorts of emotions. They had virtually captured a bit of the essence of every McQueen show. I have loved him not so much as his creations but as what those provoke inside me. Everyone can put together things and call it a creation or art. But what separates a genius or a great artist from everyone else is something greater than what is seen or heard: it is what happens when you’re not looking at it anymore, what has stuck in you when you go home or walk in the park, what it stirs in your head, what it breaks in your heart, how it drives you in certain kind of high or madness. And he does that to me… Or is it because I am mad like him?

“Despite the commercial aspirations of the show — “Savage Beauty” was funded almost entirely by the label whose clothing it features — it is nevertheless difficult to look at a single one of the designs without being mesmerized, intrigued, or provoked into some response, oftentimes confusion. No designer has better embodied Yves Saint Laurent‘s incisive dictum that while fashion is not exactly art, it requires the creativity of an artist in order to exist. McQueen’s originality and genius derived from the fact that his tremendous talent as a designer was matched by his capacity as an artist. “

This is my favorite. (Spring/Summer 2001) There was this huge 2-way mirror box. The audience was reflected on the mirror. There were these beautiful models walking around in the room. Then a conventionally ugly woman was revealed. It was trying to say that beauty comes not from the outside but from within. Since it was shown as a loop, as soon as the woman was revealed, it went back to a mirror reflecting us. I saw myself… as if trying to ask, Now where is that beauty within you?

Alexander McQueen:
“I am a romantic schizophrenic.”
“I oscillate between life & death, happiness & sadness, good & evil.”
“I want to empower women. I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.”
“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.”

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