The McQueen

OK. Even I went to see THE exhibit of the summer, "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty" at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute last week.  Happily, I know many others who regularly partake of the bounty of culture that is offered in New York City, so I was able to borrow a MET Member card to gain entry and skip the three-hour line to enter the galleries.  A three-hour line?  What could be so intriguing that grown people in New York City would subject themselves to that kind of queue with no tangible reward (i.e., a free concert, cash or a lease to a rent controlled apartment) at the end of it?  Was it coincidence that I was behind a flock of teenage girls on the crosstown bus buzzing about "meeting-up at midnight for the McQueen"? The McQueen.

I had to know.

 

Sailing past a large, bizarrely dressed and mostly orderly horde to swan in to a happening scene is a feeling that I have not experienced since my club days, but that, apparently, I still shamelessly enjoy. The show itself was almost secondary to the adrenaline rush of moving to the head of a three-hour line simply by waving a card at a smiling guard in MET security uniform! 

Of course, once one had arrived, it was into a series of galleries not unlike any nightclub -- dark, sweaty, solidly-packed -- with a soundtrack of moaning and indecipherable conversation. 

No wonder the guard was smiling.  

Surely he was thinking what McQueen was quoted as saying: "People don't want to see clothes," ... "They want to see something that fuels the imagination." Or at least dinner or cocktail party conversation.  Indeed, the themed, narrative collections and "looks" were stunning, truly showstoppers. Literary leitmotifs? Poe, Dante, Plato, Darwin and more.  The workmanship of haute couture - evident and awesome. (Just how many seamstresses were needed to realize that fitted feathered frock called "The Horn of Plenty"?!) The silhouettes created -- sinuous, bulbous, cloven-hoofed -- led one to question whether McQueen's true medium was fashion, fiction or cinema.  

Clearly, abundant evidence of an epic and resonant talent (a minute example would be the "bumsters" which translated to low-riders for the masses, or the prevalence of skull prints on hats and scarves for several winters) tragically cut short.  Dramatic, Artistic, Dark.  Is the tragedy part of the allure of this show?  

I have no conclusions as yet, but I try to connect the dots between "Savage Beauty," dystopian YA literature, urban pop culture trends + phenomena, fame, consumerism, suicide, worldwide recession, punk/rock 'n roll/queer style, Anglophilia and queuing-up.