The title is also a play on these contrasts. Also, in most of McQueen’s collections there were these dichotomies, whether it was to do with beauty and terror, lightness and darkness or life and death. McQueen merged those two identities and that is where the title comes from. He looked everywhere for his inspirations and in that sense he was a bricoleur but he was also a wonderful artist who had a great sense of virtuosity and incredible conceptual complexity, which was shown through his runway presentations. I thought both identities tally with McQueen. Originally the idea came from a book called The Savage Mind by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which he offers this kind of treatise on two different types of people: ‘the bricoleur’ who is a jack-of-all-trades and ‘the engineer’ who is an artist. The title of the exhibition, Savage Beauty, is central to your focus of McQueen’s designs, how did it come about? Showcasing 100 examples of his work from his first runway presentation, Nihilism (1994), to his work at Givenchy and finally the last collection he worked on before his death in February 2010.ĪnOther spoke with Andrew Bolton about Alexander McQueen and his closest collaborators. Unlike a traditional retrospective, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will examine the complex themes within McQueen’s 19-year career.

In many ways it reflects McQueen’s unique concept of fashion, unconventional ideals of beauty and most importantly it highlights his love of romanticism. It read, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind” and was taken from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream. Andrew Bolton, curator of Savage Beauty, began his exploration of McQueen’s work by looking at a tattoo on the designer’s upper right arm.

Alexander McQueen by Andrew Bolton